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TADSummit Innovators

This is an amazing multi-decade review of Dave Horton‘s telecoms journey, through Open Development Systems, Pactolus that supported the prepaid calling card industry so he and Johnny have much in common, to where we are today with Drachtio and Jambonz, enabling CPaaS to run on free and open source software.

I have to mention with the Rugby world currently running, that Dave was on the US Rugby team for the 1987 World Cup. 

When Dave was consulting to companies he was helping them migrate off platforms like Twilio, and from that the idea of Jambonz was formed. Today Jambonz is used by many of the conversational AI platforms. At the TADSummit Special in March Dave did a great piece, Why conversational AI providers are moving to open source.

We then focused on where next for Dave, clearly the services business is growing nicely. In Dave’s presentation at the TADSummit Special we see there are interesting opportunities in radically improving voice chatbots, and disrupting the Contact Center consolidation through enabling the customer experience AI providers to directly compete with the legacy contact centers.

Johnny saw a massive opportunity for Jambonz to deliver on the voice aspirations of many of the SMS aggregators, who have been position as CPaaS, but remaining 95% SMS focused.

Truth in Telecoms

We had to start with Tim McLain’s impressive TADSummit Special, reviewing how to get your campaigns accepted by the TCR. We had some comments from viewers on that Podcast, which I reviewed, and some of those topics were also mentioned in the TCR Trilogy. We discuss some of the main options for what Tata is going to do with TCR.

We discuss Ericsson $3B write-down of Vonage, and the many issues around that. In fact, Jambonz could be a very cost effective option for a telco wanting to become a techco to make that move in programmable communications. As well as for the messaging aggregators to make the move to a voice with their existing development team.

There are many topics circling around the telecom space at the moment: If not TCR then what? – we’re hoping to get some ideas reviewed by the industry soon. Will iConectiv (Ericsson) lose management of LNP (Local Number Portability)? Who are the CTIA anyway? Will Ericsson need to write down Vonage further? Why isn’t Sinch copying Syniverse/Twilio on the fines? Are the Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawyers about to descend on SMS, like with robocalling? The old-boys network claimed the TCR was the best SMS spam solution, will anyone be held responsible? Many more questions than answers, but hopefully we’ll start seeing some answers emerge in the next couple of months.