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Johnny’s got another buyer for Tyntec, let’s see this time 😉 He then jumped onto how Tata Communications had their underwear pulled over their collective heads in the Kaleyra deal. Without contracts from the carriers there is no TCR (The Campaign Registry) business, and to get those contracts today requires collusion. Compound that with the VON Coalition proposal to the FCC. It’s unclear who would buy the TCR in its current state, well Johnny has raised his offer from $1 to $3. But I’m not sure how he’s going to make money on that deal.

We focused on the highly unusual proposal from the VON Coalition to the FCC. The dominant programmable communications companies as well as members of the Trillion Dollar club, e.g. Microsoft and Google. They do not do such public things like this lightly. TCR is clearly negatively impacting their business. and customers.

The purpose of the FCC meeting was to discuss VON’s core proposal that the FCC require and oversee a process whereby a neutral, third-party entity is selected to vet application-to-person (“A2P”) traffic on a technology-neutral basis, with policies applied equally to all traffic regardless of whether the traffic in question is initiated via a Unified Communications as a Service (“UCaaS”) platform or directly on a mobile network operator (“MNO”) network.

The VON representatives are suggesting that the Industry Traceback Group (“ITG”) could serve as a model for a neutral registration entity, not because VON is proposing traceback of text messages, but because the FCC played a similar role in selecting and ensuring the accountability of the industry-led ITG. See diagram below.

The work of TADSummit over the past year has clearly impacted the willingness of the ecosystem to engage in open discussion. For example, the Messaging Monopolies and Telecom Triopolies posts, highlight it’s not just UCaaS providers, CSPs (Campaign Service Providers), brands, CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), enterprises are all impacted across many workflows.. Whether the FCC acts is not yet clear. However, our body of work shows the broad negative impact TCR is having on consumers and businesses. So we took a little victory lap; change maybe coming by the end of the year, well we can hope.

Last week was big for SignalWire with the Deutsche Telecom Global Carrier announcement of their first customer of their Digital Services, VirtualQ, who were Germany’s biggest Twilio customer, one of the biggest in Europe. Twilio should be worried, a carrier has got its act together in programmable telecoms, finally.

Points I’d like to highlight on why Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier approach to programmable telecoms is worth watching:

• Their announcement was squarely service and customer focused. No rambling about standard APIs, or capability exposure (such a OneAPI term), or mentioning industry bodies that are irrelevant to most customers. Rather they won VirtualIQ as a customer.
• They won against Twilio, VirtualIQ is Twilio’s biggest customer in Germany, and likely one of its biggest in Europe. This is big, they are competitive.
• They have a defensible moat – platform runs in DT, in-country. See Unifonic TADSummit podcast on why that matters.

DT has 2 approaches as they are covering their options. One is a repeat of OneAPI from one decade ago, and one uses the learning over the past decade in programmable communications with SignalWire.

We discussed the AT&T bribery in Illinois on the carrier of last resort regulations.

Infobip seems to be fluffing itself up for an IPO. Johnny’s view is JP Morgan will make it happen. I’m a little more concerned on how they will achieve above average growth. The IPO will happen, that’s without a doubt, but with CPast messaging positioning?

Some highlights. Ken Heron has joined Strolid as CMO, yeah! Suraj Shivakumar (winner from TADHack Open), will be an intern over the summer adding vCon to jambonz. We had an insightful Podcast on Industry4.0 and the importance of programmable communications to that vertical, especially vCon. You can read more in the CXTech Week 20 newsletter.

We finish on Twilio’s struggles in releasing GAAP (Generally Agreed Accounting Principals) results. Johnny ended with “Non-GAAP = Not Real”.