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This has been an intense Truth in Telecom 3 part series with The Vis.

We jump onto the ‘pay to play’ awards, pointless, yet it occupies time to make industry bodies appear to do something. I’ve never done them for TADSummit. It’s a bit like the industry landscapes from analysts that always seem to have companies with large marketing budgets in strange positions.

In programmable telecoms, the country of operation, type of enterprise, integration requirements, privacy regulations, and more, have a much more significant impact on the most appropriate vendor. In my experience the most appropriate vendor depends on you, not someone else’s opinion.

But the industry does come together – all the founders still involved with their companies are only a call away from each other. So if a cheat enters the scene, they mostly know. We do not need an organization to provide that service.

However, it’s hard to tell the truth as a listed company you simply can not be fully truthful like The Vis. If you plan on being listed, the same constraints applies. I argue the role of analysts is to be truthful, but again they are not. Vendors select analysts based on how credible their lies will be believed. I’ve been asked to lie and explained my view and recommendations for the client. And all they wanted is a lie.

Just look at the awful analysis on Network APIs for 5G. 5G is only available 10-15% of the time in developed countries, granted TMO in the US does a good job at 65%. But still that is not enough for a developer to build a service. And the QoS (Quality of Service) is not end to end; we’ve been here before with cable QoS.

We then moved onto spam, Johnny has a hardline view on the Twilio ponzi scheme, with the loss of $60B in shareholder value. As a baseline, we can agree spamming grandma is wrong. Bird made a decision to stop auto-onboarding as it opens the door to spam, yet is raises revenue. That hurt Bird’s business, though they have a nice 33:33:33 split in revenue across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. From my perspective spamming Grandma and having her lose her life savings is the reality of letting spam in and should the blocked wherever possible.

While Johnny and The Vis disagree on whether it was a Ponzi scheme; they agree that the SaaS story was a lie, especially after the minority investment in Syniverse and acquisition of Zipwhip. They’d become an aggregator, the SaaS story was depreciated.

On potential buyers of tyntec, an aggregator missing a mobile core is likely most addressable. On patents, quoting The Vis, ‘patents are for the weak.’ The only time I created them was at BT, it was my job, and with my start-up to show value creation for the investors. The patent discussion encouraged Johnny to go off on his rant about Pharaoh Thorsten, buried with all his patents.

We’re getting towards the end of the podcast and start playing fantasy M&A league. One idea is the industry consolidates around MEF, that is Dario and Robert Gerstmann. Another is Twilio, Sinch and Infobip merge. Twilio does have a little cash left in the bank; but it’s been offered Infobip before and rejected them. While Sinch and Twilio can make sense; but in M&A, never say never.

We moved onto the importance of email, how Sparkpost, the largest email center with 40% of the B2B email market, brings in large enterprise accounts. Sendgrid is Twilio and Mailgun is Sinch. What I found revealing from The Vis is their move into CRM applies to email, SMS, and other messaging channels. This is a sweet way to scale up their applications fast.

The Vis makes an important point in enterprise sales, having the best platform does not matter as much as people think. Where The Vis sees Bird competing is not with SFDC (Sales Force Dot Com), big accounts and integrations, rather the more general B2B SaaS, where they deliver a package of CRM, chatbot, workflows (across most messaging), customer data platform, etc. And complement / compete depending on the customers needs.

That leads to an interesting discussion on partners like Cisco and Oracle, how an M&A is unlikely as it would already have happened. Hence the focus on an IPO when the customer value is solid for long term value. We finish on a fun note, as Johnny asks The Vis to act as his representative at the MEF, as Robert Gerstmann will not let him in. However, I think the same is true for Bird. A fun ending to an intense 90 minutes.