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TADSummit 2023 Agenda, 19/20 Oct, Paris

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Welcome!

TADSummit is the thought-leadership event in programmable communications for ten years. It runs on the 19th and 20th of October in Paris, France. We’ll be at Capgemini’s 5G Labs, Quai du Président Roosevelt 92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux.

The audience includes CxOs from many of the programmable communication companies, open source leaders, and telecom operators. It’s a strategic and technology event. Many of TADSummit’s sponsors go on to be acquired.

Some parts of programmable communications are mature and consolidating, while others are exploding, e.g conversation intelligence and the services / integrations that solve business problems.

Many gaps remain, conversations are trapped in silos, hence the emergence of vCon, an open standard for sharing conversation data. Innovators in IoT are rewriting the rules in network programmability.

TADSummit remains the only place to get a no-BS (it’s in our policies) understanding of what’s working across technology, services, and go to market; and where things are going in programmable communications.

Themes

  • Programmable Communications Evolution, bundling, rise of the telco channel, enterprise account management, industry workflows. Who’s doing what, and what are the best practices?
  • What are the winning apps and integrations in UCaaS / CCaaS sold through Telco partnerships?
  • Conversation intelligence and vCons, an Open Standard for Conversation Data.
  • Chat Commerce, what are the top use cases and in which markets?
  • Security, Identity Authentication, and Fraud Management. This continues to impact most industries across the customer lifecycle to improve security, compliance, and customer experience.
  • Re-writing the rules in IoT programmability.
  • Adapting to the post-pandemic world. A frank review of UCaaS/CCaaS convergence realities, impact of industry consolidation, and what are the emerging features and capabilities across programmable communications.
  • Open source, this is the foundation technology of programmable communications. Work here fundamentally rewrites the rules of our industry.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) Version of Agenda

Full Agenda

WELCOME

Welcome to the Capgemini 5G Lab.

Patrice Crutel, Technology & Platform strategy Director at Capgemini Invent

  • Patrice will welcome us to Paris, and Capgemini’s 5G Lab.
  • We’ve missed Patrice through the Pandemic, it will be nice to be back together.

Worlds Collide.

Alan Quayle, Independent.

  • The carriers try again with standardised network APIs.
  • Open source automates carrier wholesale, focusing on in-country wins.
  • Open source telecom software and open source AI innovate faster than anything else. Google said it, “Directly competing with open source is a losing proposition.”
  • With IoT one door closes another opens, consolidation and innovation.
  • Plus a quick review of the past year in programmable telecoms.

KEYNOTES

Grooving on using vCons to feed data engineering pipelines, machine learning, and analysis.

Thomas Howe, CTO STROLID.

  • vCons are the food for your open source AI bots. Learn how vCon is being applied.

Beyond the IoT – programmable connectivity for the digital enterprise

Mike Bromwich, CEO / Co-Founder Stacuity & Tim Dowling, Co-Founder Stacuity

  • The IoT label is increasingly meaningless in an enterprise context.
  • Labelling initiatives as “IoT” symbolically separates them from an enterprise’s general IT.
  • With traditional approaches to managing mobile connectivity, this is appropriate because the enterprise can only control the IoT services at arm’s length.
  • However, in the emerging era of programmable/software-defined mobile networking, the enterprise can now assume full control and manage its connected devices like any other IT asset.
  • Following the success model of WiFi in the enterprise, its managed like any other wired asset. Stacuity enables this model to be extended across programmable mobile networks.

How the open source project Jambonz is disrupting CPaaS. Plus – these are the mistakes I’ve made.

Dave Horton, Creator of open source projects Drachtio.org and Jambonz.org

  • Jambonz is an open source CPaaS.
  • With Jambonz you no longer need to use Twilio, Sinch, Telnyx, etc.
  • Jambonz and it’s community are disrupting a $100B market!
  • Open source is hard, I’ve made loads of stupid mistakes.
  • I’ll share some funny, painful, and down right stupid mistakes. The learning is invaluable, perhaps worth $100B!

How TelecomsXChange is Transforming the CSP’s Wholesale Business.

Ameed Jamous, Founder and CEO TelecomsXChange (TCXC).

  • Success Story: How Telin (international arm of Telkom Indonesia) leveraged TCXC PaaS to streamline their wholesale business operations and built a carrier community along the way.
  • TCXC platform overview, technology stack, and unique value proposition.
  • A deep dive into some of the platform’s most innovative features, such as openness, programmable wholesale, Transparency by design, Unified AAA, CYOC & Market Place.
  • Enhancing CPaaS Growth
  • A sneak peek into the company’s future roadmap, including new partnerships and product enhancements.
  • Call to action: We’re partnering with CSPs looking to unify and digitize your wholesale business, reach out to learn how TelecomsXChange can help you achieve this goal in just days.

The Symbiosis of Open Source and Industry or how they do self-support one each other – study case of OpenSIPS and SIPhub

Bogdan-Andrei Iancu. Founder and Developer at OpenSIPS Project.

Open Source is about sharing, cooperation, and communities. It’s a group of smart motivated people unconstrained by the shackles of corporate processes and middle managers to build cool stuff that changes the world.

Nevertheless, running large Open Source projects is a resource consuming activity, both in costs and manpower.

How does this fit into the idealistic concept of Free Software? How does an Open Source project secures resources to sustain itself? And how can the broader Industry benefit of the the software created by such important projects?

The answers are to be found in the duality of the projects, which are tightly and cross connected with the Industry into a “supporter” versus “resources” continuous exchange. We’ll explore this framework to better understand how we can create a more vibrant and sustainable open source ecosystem.

Elevating CX Using Modern CPaaS / Programmable Communications

Karim Zaki, CPO \ CTO, Unifonic

Why is the CPaaS / Programmable Communications market evolving rapidly?

Most organizations benefit from adopting programmable communication enabled services. From small businesses adding a chatbot, to platform companies delivering a full suite of services to their customers.

There is a journey from CPaaS to SaaS: mastering CPaaS, empowering engagement, solution driven, and industry-vertical focus

Review of the Unifonic Portfolio: Evolving CPaaS with personalization & intelligence to programmable communications

Understanding the Middle East market and its rapidly elevating needs

Success cases from the Middle-East: marketing automation; elevating CX using AI; and compliance with local regulations.

MASTERCLASSES

A2P Messaging Masterclass

Giovanni (Johnny) Tarone, TADSummit Evangelist, and Former CEO Iris Wireless, one of three inter-carrier (ICV) messaging hubs in the USA

Previously, CEO of Iris Wireless, one of three inter-carrier (ICV) messaging hubs, including SAP and Syniverse, when it successfully prosecuted one of the rare “refusal to deal” attempts to monopolize cases in “Iris Wireless v. Syniverse.” Iris Wireless LLC v. Syniverse Tech., 49 F.Supp.3d 1022 (M.D. Fla. 2014).

Johnny brings an unprecedented depth and breadth of knowledge and experience across the complete history of North American A2P messaging. This session will be an interactive Q&A session where Johnny will reveal shocking stories, the location of skeletons in some companies’ closets, and help you understand the complexity and peculiarities of the North American A2P messaging market.

Questions:

  • What were your most important and hardest lessons learned from Iris Wireless?
  • What was the case you won against Syniverse?
  • Why do carriers need aggregators?
  • What’s the difference between tier 1 and tier 2 direct carrier aggregators (DCAs)?
  • Why do TMO, AT&T, Verizon, and Syniverse interconnect at no charge, while everyone else has to pay?
  • What’s the the campaign registry all about?
  • What are your recommendations for any business in programmable communications in managing costs of PSTN services (voice and SMS)?

CPaaS M&A Fantasy League

Everyone in the Room

I really wanted to call it the Programmable Telecoms M&A Fantasy League, but we need a term investors / analysts / Telcos will recognize. Maybe Programmable Telecoms will get there one day <sign, unlikely>.

CPaaS is a misleading category with a dumbaaS acronym. Two businesses can claim to be CPaaS yet be quite different. RingCentral is not a CPaaS, its Enterprise Comms/Collab with some APIs like any web-based service provider, having APIs is like having a website, its expected. Sinch is 95% an SMS aggregator. Zoom is Collab/Comms. Twilio (seems to call itself a CPaaS these days) invested $750M in Syniverse (SMS aggregation and intercarrier stuff, e.g. SMS and IPX). Yet the two get called CPaaS.

I’ve noticed a fair bit of confusion and misunderstand about the different companies in this market. We need to help the industry get a better understanding for the different businesses in programmable telecoms, see the power of some roll-ups, and who knows perhaps even predict some transactions.

We’re going to use the brains in the room to help refine the fantasy league and vote on the likelihood of some possible transactions.

TELCOS and PROGRAMMABLE COMMUNICATIONS

2FA is (almost) dead, what’s next?

Guillaume Bourcy, Founder Oofty.

  • Mobile identity in a nutshell
  • Are biometrics as good as we think?
  • Can wholesale SMS and voice survive the new generation of identity solutions?

PaaS, the fastest growth and innovation catalyst for wholesale Telcos?

Guillaume Bourcy, Co-Founder CIO Enabld.

  • What’s PaaS? How it will help to automate more wholesale activities
  • Can it improve and accelerate innovation for wholesalers?
  • How do you choose the right PaaS for your business

Review of the Capgemini 5G Lab, Use Cases, and Partner Opportunities.

Patrice Crutel, Technology & Platform strategy Director at Capgemini Invent

  • Service Network Innovation / Evolution: 4G/5G, VoLTE/VoWIFI, IoT, PMR, Multimedia & NFV at MNO and Entreprises in Utilities, Energy, Transportation.
  • Autonomous Intelligent Vehicle (AIV) for intralogistics
  • Smart Connected Mining: Remote control and operations
  • Real-time Medical Tele-transmission: AI Augmented Remote Consultation
  • Live Streaming in immersive field operations

Gain a Competitive Advantage through Managing Telephone Number Reputation

Gerry Christensen, Head of Caller ID Reputation® Partnerships and Expert in Communications Identity and Trust

  • Understand the role of business identity in communications
  • Recognize the importance of managing telephone number reputation
  • Learn how business identity relates to telephone number reputation management
  • Learn about tools and techniques for identifying telephone number reputation
  • Understand how reputation visibility leads to communications optimization

PANELS

PANEL SESSION: Is Twilio the Canary in the CPaaS Coal Mine?

Twilio’s stock price has dropped from $400 to $40 over the past 2 years. Have we moved passed peak CPaaS? Twilio sold its IoT business to Kore. Segment took a while for its customers to appreciate the value, it’s delivering. The post-pandemic wind down took longer than expected, but budgets are getting tighter.

50% of Twilio’s revenue is linked to SMS, and carriers are raising prices. Flex is growing, however the customer comms market is noisy, so many bots and inflated expectations. Enterprise comms market is realizing its a platform play, which is Twilio’s core.. Q2 guidance was below expectations.

Twilio is the leader in silent authentication thanks to the Boku acquisition. Identity and fraud management is potentially massive, Twilio has a solid position. Between IAM (Okta) and the global aggregators (Experian) there could be room. But it’s another noisy market. FLEX has potential, they just need for find the mass-enterprise recipe, embedding Twilio into enterprises.

Has CPaaS reached an inflection point?

PANEL SESSION: “The CAMARA Chronicles.” Is History being Repeated?

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

  • Chair: Patrice Crutel, Technology & Platform strategy Director at Capgemini Invent
  • Panelists:
    • Ameed Jamous, Founder and CEO TelecomsXChange (TCXC).
    • Alan Quayle, Independent
    • Stuart Mitchell, Global Product & Business Development, Rich Messaging, Sinch
    • Dan Jenkins, Founder at Nimble Ape Ltd, Director at CommCon Events Ltd, Director at Everycast Labs Ltd
    • Karel Bourgois, Founder Voxist and President Le Voice Lab.

The focus on standards helps make the claim that all carriers within a country can implement the same standard. However, voice, SMS/MMS/RCS, 2FA, PhoneID, silent verification, etc. all use standards, yet aggregators are required (e.g. Sinch, Telesign, Tru.ID etc.) to abstract the commercial, process, and technology differences.

I discuss the broader history of “Why has service innovation in programmable communications been difficult for carriers?” in this article https://alanquayle.com/2023/05/service-innovation-in-programmable-communications/.

Network equipment vendors are the right partners for network innovation with carriers, however, after several decades its clear for programmable communications, they are not the right partners. They walked away from their standardized Parlay gateways while Twilio, Syniverse, Vonage, MITTO, RingCentral, Telesign etc. built the programmable communications / aggregation business.

PANEL SESSION: AI and Video applications

Chair: Arin Sime, Founder/CEO WebRTC.ventures

Panelists:

The panel will review the different ways that AI is being used in audio and video conversations.

We’ll cover audio transcriptions, processing and keyword identification, conversation summaries, sentiment analysis, etc.

On the video side we’ll discuss object detection and sentiment analysis.

The panel will also review innovative ways AI is being combined with voice and video conversations using conversational AI chatbots and the transitions between those bots and human agents.

ENTERPRISES and PROGRAMMABLE COMMUNICATIONS

From Communications to Conversations – What’s Changed And How It Might Matter.

Paul Sweeney, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-Founder, Webio.

  • Conversational AI (CAI) Today: LLM’s + NLU + Workflows = Stateful Conversations
  • CAI Evolving
  • CPaaS to CXPaaS may be driven by Conversational AI (CAI)
  • Voice Interaction – Cui Bono?
  • Personal Assistant Will Be The Future
  • Conversational Experiences are all about the data
  • So What?
    • CPaaS and CCTR (Contact Center) need to figure out what part of this future service infrastructure they own, provide, or maintain
    • Just like Slack got clobbered by Teams, there is a good chance every CPaaS gets clobbered by ChatGPT
    • The Data / API availability on the Enterprise side is still “not in great shape” for many legacy companies.

How a legacy 80s technology is delivering ChatGPT to developing countries – AI over USSD.

Ken Herron, Chief Growth Officer, UIB & Celeo Arias, CEO & Founder PAiC.

The 1980s gave us Madonna, breakdancing, and USSD. 

With over a billion daily active users, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, or USSD, is fast, simple, secure, compatible (with any mobile phone), and cheap! Moreover, USSD allows users to access any chatbot – including OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI platform – on any channel, in any language, without a smartphone, mobile app, or internet.

Ken Herron and Celeo Arias will explain how the technology works, review its capabilities and limitations, and show you how your business and clients can begin using it right now. This TADSummit session includes a live demo. Join us to learn how you can deliver AI over USSD.

Smartnumbers perspective: Tackling Contact Centre fraud

Abhinav Anand, Chief Product Officer at Smartnumbers.

  • Trends and what we are seeing
  • The makeup of fraud in the Contact Centre
  • Trusting the CLI
  • Looking into the future

Build vs Buy, a never-ending dilemma in Cloud Communications?

Pierre-Baptiste Béchu, Co-founder & VP of Communications Platform at Aircall

  • Developing a business requires focus, especially at the beginning
  • Hidden costs are everywhere and could be easily forgotten
  • Barriers to entry or strategic positioning are also important criteria
  • Technology stacks are often complex and highly coupled

RCS is here, so why is it not taking off?

Stuart Mitchell, Global Product & Business Development, Rich Messaging, Sinch

  • Yes, there’s a vocal anti-RCS camp, but let’s examine what’s happening on the ground at the moment and quash some antiquated preconceptions
  • More than 100 Carriers have implemented RCS and are offering APIs so why is it still so complicated for aggregators?
  • Not all global aggregators are interested in RCS, why is that?
  • Most enterprises are also holding back wrt RCS, what’s going on? We’ll review the current situation and understand the enterprise (buyer) situation.
  • In keeping with TADSummit’s policy, we’ll provide an open and honest review of the current market situation wrt RCS adoption.

Passkeys, FIDO2, WebAuthn… What does it all mean?

Dan Jenkins, Founder at Nimble Ape Ltd, Director at CommCon Events Ltd, Director at Everycast Labs Ltd

  • Protecting your online identities has become a huge pain in the rear.
  • 2FA in the forms of SMS, TOTP, Password Managers, FIDO, U2F and now Passkeys – it’s just too much.
  • Unless you’re a ‘geek’ how can you hope to protect your online identities in the best way possible?
  • Passkeys are here to help answer that question. This session takes a look at Passkeys, how they work and whether you should all throw away your security keys in favour of them.

LLMs on the telephone: useful tool, or hallucinating danger to humanity?

Rob Pickering, Software: Real Time Communications and Machine Learning

  • Rob talks about Aplisay’s experience developing an open source LLM voice tool and the journey that has taken them on in evaluating practical use of the technology.
  • He will describe how it was built and then give his perspective on questions it is already starting to answer like:
    • What are the advantages of the LLM approach over existing dedicated conversational interface AI stacks?
    • Where can it go wrong, what are the dangers?
    • Do some applications initially make more sense than others?
    • What techniques could we use to harness the highly capable summarisation and instruction following of LLMs whilst containing their tendency to go spectacularly off-piste?

Artificial Intelligence in Telephony Systems and Solutions. Enhancing Communication Through AI.

Borja Sixto, cofounder (Associé gérant) Ulex Innovative Systems & Karel Bourgois, Founder Voxist and President Le Voice Lab.

  • What is Artificial Intelligence?
  • AI in Telephony (call centers, voice recognition, and virtual assistants)
  • Challenges and Concerns
  • Case Study, examples

OPEN SOURCE

RESULTS: Open Source Telecom Software Survey 2023.

Alan Quayle, Independent.

  • Topics covered in this year’s survey include:
  • Cyber Security Regulations
  • Using and Contributing to RTC Open Source Projects
  • Representation in RTC OSS Projects
  • Will the Enterprise desktop phone ever disappear?
  • Large Language Models
  • Voice CPaaS Evolution
  • Messaging (SMS/RCS/MMS/variants) CPaaS Evolution
  • IP Messaging CPaaS Evolution
  • Fraud and Identity CPaaS
  • CPaaS Dashboard
  • Where do you think open source projects can best help these parts of CPaaS?
  • WebRTC

Maintaining Communications Apps,

Arin Sime, Founder/CEO WebRTC.ventures

In the WebRTC space, there’s still a lot being built for the first time but we’ve also reached a point of maturity where more and more companies are trying to maintain and support applications in the long term.

We bring together many experiences running communications apps in production and talk about the best practices in maintenance, deployment, scaling, testing, etc.

Chrome extension to monitor WebRTC outbound flows, troubleshoot and learn

Philippe Sultan, Senior WebRTC Developer at Livestorm

  • Presentation of a simple Chrome extension that monitors published WebRTC streams
  • How working on live stats help understand how WebRTC works
  • A practical example of how live stats help troubleshoot audio/video issue

WebRTC broadcasting: standardization, challenges and opportunities

Lorenzo Miniero, Chairman Meetcho, Author of Janus WebRTC Server

  • Traditional broadcasting has been effective and reliable for a long time, but does suffer any time low latency is a requirement.
  • WebRTC can help bridge that gap and foster new applications, but it does come with a few challenges.
  • Lorenzo will introduce the standardization efforts, and will cover where we are by also looking at a few available implementations and what they could make possible.
  • AQ: Over 25 years ago I was studying ways ISDN/PSTN video telephony and IP based video broadcast could be combined. Back then we were in the stone age of video communications. Today is miraculous in comparison.

Intro to WebTrit and Call to Action to join the WebTrit Open Source Community

Andriy Zhylenko, CEO PortaOne and Advisor WebTrit

  • WebTrit is a new service and framework for building softphones and Real-Time-Communications into apps and websites.
  • WebTrit was started in the Ukraine in 2021 and throughout the last year and a half of war, the team built an exciting new initiative.
  • WebTrit provides its front end code on Open Source. The WebTrit clients communicate with a managed cloud platform, which is also built on Open Source.
  • The WebTrit cloud can then connect to the service provider or enterprise systems over a consistent SIP connection, while leveraging websockets and the Opus Codec for communication with the client over dynamic network conditions.
  • We invite developers to use and contribute to the WebTrit code. We will also explain the process we went through in developing this initiative and why we chose Flutter for the client framework.

WebRTC extravaganza

Romain Vailleux. Apizee DevRel & Partnership Manager

  • WebRTC is such a versatile technology that its use cases have exploded in recent years.
  • This session is akin to a safari through the WebRTC jungle, where Romain will guide you on a journey from the most common applications to the most exotic and unique use cases you can imagine.
  • Note: Rest assured, no “specimens” will be harmed or injured during this enlightening expedition.