On Monday Mar 21st at 1300 EST, we will ran a TADSummit Revisited with Luis Quina Borges, founder CEO, Apidaze. The market for Telecom APIs and WebRTC is in its early infancy. The challenge we face is not competition, rather education of the market. You can view the Q&A session live or recorded in the video at the end of this weblog, or just click here. Here are the previous TADSummit Revisited sessions.

Luis took the whole market situation and boiled it down to its essence, its still early days and we have much education ahead of us. Luis is selling services to enterprises everyday, he’s in the firing line, and experiences the reality of selling WebRTC and Telecom API services. So his presentation is important for everyone to take note.

Luis showed the importance of going beyond the API, with ottspott and Widget4Call which make it so easy anyone can add a local number for their Slack team or a click to call button to a website. Though focused on very specific solutions, these steps are critical to the business success of telecom apps. We’ve seen in Sri Lanka with Dialog’s IdeaMart, such scripts and web-forms can drive the bulk of innovation. And as we’ve learned over the many decades in opening telecom capabilities to developers – you can never be too simple.

Given Luis’s experience in building a telecom focused API and SaaS business, his guidance is important for everyone in the telecoms industry. His frank review of the status of WebRTC in click to call shows how far we have to go towards the vision peddled by non-practitioners.

Questions Received so far:

1. Why did you create ottspott? What are the use cases for ottspott?
2. What is the business model for ottspott?
3. How widely deployed is widget4call? What are the popular use cases?
4. How much of your SaaS business is direct versus channel?
5. Do you find customers adopt widget4call and then move to an API as they want more customization / integration with their CRM / enterprise applications?
6. How does your business split between package applications like ottspott / widget4call and your API? Or between customers using scripts / services and hacking on the API?
7. As more businesses embed communications do you think the growth will be in APIs or simplifying the creation of telecom apps so its like creating a web page?
8. What can we do as an industry to accelerate education? It seems we’re still too geeky – talking about technologies and standards progress than use cases and operational issues?
9. Given the level of customization required to embed communications within a business, will enterprise adoption be the traditional slow-paced adoption, or can we make it somehow viral – more like consumer adoption?
10. How will innovative companies like Apidaze survive as larger companies like Cisco move into your space?
11. Are there specific enterprise verticals that you see as being more accepting of your offer? If there is no clear early adopter vertical, how do you select the customers to chase for business?

TADSummit 2015 Presentation and Slides:

TADSummit Revisited Q&A Session