Event Review

TADSummit 2018 Keynotes

IMG_20181113_102313TADSummit is the sister event to TADHack. While TADHack focused on making the world aware of the power of programmable telecoms, through solving problems in people’s lives. TADSummit focused on the business and technology aspects of programmable telecoms. This weblog reviews the TADSummit 2018 Keynotes provided by some of the sponsors: TeleSign, tyntec, Wazo, Cequens, and VoIP Innovations / Apidaze.

The main sessions of the event are:

In my welcome address, shown below, I reviewed the 6 years of TADSummit; TADHack was born from the first TADSummit in 2013. I showed across the TADS sponsors over the years the number of mergers, acquisitions and investments. It’s a very busy market. We’ve always recorded the presentations for later viewing, and since 2014 we’ve live streamed, some of the individual videos have had 21k minutes of viewing, that’s 15 days of solid viewing!

I wrapped up the welcome with a quick review of TADSummit’s differentiators:

  • Its the people: practitioners
  • By innovators | for innovators
  • Open, frank, no BS
  • Technology and business
  • 6 years of continuous thought leadership from market makers
  • Sometimes contrarian: highlighting future trends before they are trendy or apparent (web3 over 3 years ago), or when they are considered passé (fax today)
  • Mixed with a good dose of demos

Then we moved onto the Keynotes. I’m proud Stacy Stubblefield, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at TeleSign, was prepared to give the opening keynote. For many at TADSummit this was their first time to meet with Stacy and the Telesign team. There was great interest in what Telesign and BICS together had to offer the industry through the event.

The Telesign’s origin story began in 2005, before the term CPaaS was coined. Stacy mentioned a few of the other early telecom API companies like Voxeo and when she saw through a ‘raise of hand’ the number of people in the audience who knew the company, she realized this was a group of peers on the same journey 🙂 TADSummit is the programmable telecoms brain-trust.

A key point made in Stacy’s keynote, which was common to both Telesign’s past and future, is focusing on solving your customers’ problems using whatever resources you can bring to bear. Telesign did not set out to be a CPaaS, they focused on helping the web brands solve a critical customer experience issue. And today are continuing to do that, and to an ever growing customer base.

Marco, VP CPaaS & ICMS at tyntec, gave an insightful presentation on Hybrid Authentication in Decentralized Banking. Identity and authentication was a theme through the conference, popping up in the Web3 session as a critical issue facing Web3.

Marco reviewed the prototype they’d assembled with Datarella for hybrid authentication; gave a recorded demo; and much to the audience’s satisfaction a frank summary of the issues remaining around 2FA smart contracts for blockchain banking. Such presentations need to happen much more often where the full picture is shared with the audience, rather than today’s ‘everything is awesome’ presentations.

Wazo have made impressive progress over the past year, I was excited to hear their presentation. Because of travel schedules Sylvain and Jérôme kicked off Day 2, but I review them in the keynote’s session weblog. The open source project Xivo that became Wazo began in 2005, the same year Telesign was founded. Their philosophy is aligned to TADS, in making telecoms programmable, with an open hybrid communications platform across CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, and more.

One aspect highlighted by Sylvain was telecom infrastructure as code, he shared a couple of examples on how an enterprise’s communications platforms have become almost a script. Unfortunately they could not name the new large customer, but did share some of the KPI that indicated a large national scale of deployment.

Karim from Cequens has attended TADSummit for several years, and found it invaluable in setting out his company’s programmable telecoms strategy. I was really pleased when they were able to sponsor. It’s a great example of what we aim to do in helping companies grow, and contribute into the TADS community. They shared in the run-up to TADSummit some great weblogs:

The Cequens story is an example of the importance of localization. I’ve made this point many times that businesses want someone local, or at least in-country, to support them. As they are running their business on those solutions. As a regional CPaaS / enterprise communications solutions provider, Karim provided some excellent use case reviews. Helping the audience understand the importance of local market factors.

We wrapped up the keynote session with an update from David Walsh, CEO of VoIP Innovations / Apidaze. Last year they announced the acquisition of Apidaze at TADSummit, and this year we got to see the growth in their business and the realization of their CPaaS strategy as a result of that acquisition.

A key point in David’s presentation is the evolution of CPaaS from APIs, to functions (composite APIs and enablers) through to solutions. This will create a new enterprise solutions category worth in excess of $100B, and where marketplaces or in the case of VoIP Innovations their Showroom, will help their channels and enterprise customers easily integrate and deploy those solutions.

Evin, CTO VoIP Innovations, then gave an excellent demo of their Showroom showing just how easy solution deployment and integration has become. Its just a script! It was a great way to wrap-up the keynote session.