Connecting the Dots, Rethinking Telecoms, Vish Nandlall, CTO, IoT Industrialist, & Big Data Strategist. The rapid growth in data combined with slower growth in service revenues is straining the incumbent Telecom industry. The key challenge facing mobile service providers is the ability to recover network investments fast enough to redeploy them for capacity upgrades. Also know as the Red Queen Race, the need to run to stay in the same (financial) position. Digital Transformation, though sounding nice, is not delivering the results; like every ‘boil the ocean’ project of the past. NFV/SDN is similarly failing because the operational model is not changing, its simply virtualizing the box and wires thinking of the past. Change the business model is the only proven option: throughout TADSummit the signposts for change are there: from the thought-leading Dangerous Demo to the many practical case studies like Philippe Vaysacc from Groupama. This keynote will connect the dots of TADSummit into how we must think about Telecoms over the next 10 years.

Even though Vish was not able to make the event in-person his presentation echoed many of the themes through-out TADSummit: the rise of network apps; the need for continuous adaptation (not business transformation); and the importance of people, processes and technology.

A report from the kitchen; running a mobile core in the cloud, samples served. Werner Eriksen, VP Communication Services, Telenor Digital. The Software Telco we have built has now had some time to mature, and we will share some of the experiences, and also demonstrate some of the things we can do with this setup. The demos Werner gave in the Dangerous Demo all worked, clearly the focus on ‘9s’ is paying off. 2017 is going to be where the rubber hits the road in converting the technology and service leadership into revenues.

Real Time Communication APIs workshop: agent bot. Elyran Kogan, Technical Leader, Liveperson. If someone wants to use the LivePerson APIs in order to integrate other product to the LivePerson platform, then this is the session. We’ll do an APIs workshop step by step how to build agent bot. After Elyran’s excellent Dangerous Demo, it was great to delve into the technology making the bots happen.

Closing Keynote An interview with Alan Masarek, CEO Vonage (remote), and Thomas Soulez, VP Product Management Nexmo, a Vonage Company (in-person). The Future of the Enterprise with Telecom APIs. Vonage, the VoIP company, made a visionary move in May 2016 and bought Nexmo for $230M. Soon after Twilio went IPO and jumped 90% on the first day of trading. These are just the latest in a long line of Telecom API investments and acquisitions. The founding TADS sponsors continue to be bought, Tropo was bought by Cisco in 2015, and Solaiemes was bought by Xura (Comverse) in 2014. Other deals include Avaya buying TelAPI, Acision buying Crocodile RCS, the list goes on. The democratization of Telecoms is having a clear and present impact on the enterprise. Telecom services are now programmable, enabling communications to be embedded into business processes, whether it be customer processes, internal operations, or vendor processes.

Vonage with Nexmo enables businesses to operate faster and more effectively through the integration of unified communications into their IT systems. The benefits of this session include: Understand the enterprises’ business benefits in making their telecom services programmable and easy to integrate, through clear and quantified use cases A vision for the future of enterprise communications thanks to Telecom APIs, a revolution being created in the $2.2T telecoms industry Financial analysts can identify new near term and medium term revenues, and understand the larger industry-wide impact created through Vonage and Nexmo. A chance to question the CEO of Vonage, a large corporation defining the future of telecom app development.

Vonage is building its enterprise business. Nexmo and Vonage both deliver telecom services as PaaS (Telecom APIs) or SaaS (UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service). Increasingly enterprises are using Telecom APIs to improve business processes and customer experiences, TADSummit clearly shows that with many use cases. The UCaaS / CPaaS distinction is somewhat artificial, a feature of the past, where UCaaS focused more on internal use cases whereas CPaaS on B2C use cases. By combining both Vonage makes it easier to integrate employee and consumers communications.

Nexmo accelerates Vonage’s services offer in UCaaS, the integration of UCaaS into the enterprise, and the globalization of Vonage’s offer. To demonstrate the service’s acceleration, Sam Machin gave a great Dangerous Demo of how the SIP/websockets gateway they announced with IBM Watson enables the services and capabilities in the AI world onto calls, see video below. This is a theme Cisco/Tropo also highlighted with Ringplus+. Telecoms is far from a tired-old legacy business, the convergence of telecoms and the web is creating lots of new businesses, impacting people’s lives and country’s economies around the world.