We have much planned for TADSummit 2019. First off, we’re expanding from 1 event to 3 events. As I describe the agendas you’ll see the benefits of taking this regionalized approach.
The confirmed dates are:
- TADSummit Asia, Kuala Lumpur, 28-29 May
- TADSummit Americas, Chicago, 15/16 Oct in parallel with the IIT RTC Conference
- TADSummit EMEA, London, 19-20 November
If you want to get involved with any of these events as a sponsor and / or presenter, please contact us.
Since the State of the Union session at TADSummit in November 2018, we’ve been busy working on trying to find a better handle for the Programmable Telecoms category as discussed in these weblogs: What’s in a Name? Finding a better handle for Programmable Telecoms; and What’s in a name? Part 2.
The result was the selection of CXTech: C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because we’re enablers. We have a CXTech weekly newsletter, you can to receive by email by signing up here. Here are Week 9 and Week 8 newsletters.
Now back to why we’re running 3 events. Ever since we ran the first TADSummit in Bangkok in 2013, we’ve had many requests to run events in both Asia and Americas. So we’re bringing a stronger regional focus to TADSummit. CXTech (programmable telecoms or programmable communications) is increasingly regionalized, regardless of what the cloud-bigots claim. The world is complex, local bundling and local delivery matters. Japan, China, Malaysia, South Africa, UK, America, and Colombia are all very different markets, with different needs, and different delivery models. To claim open APIs (see the Great API Con on why you should avoid using this term) or a US-focused cloud service is the answer is BS. In the TADSummit policy statement we’ve made clear, no BS.
For TADSummit to remain relevant, to help grow the CXTech segment for everyone involved, we must get deeper into the specifics of regional markets, to the country level in some cases.
We’ve also made explicit our policy on diversity, openness, leadership and active participation. We’ve quadrupled the number of female speakers for TADSummit Asia 2019 compared to TADSummit 2018. We’re heading in the right direction, but with much more work to do.
TADSummit Asia, KL, 28-29 May
TADSummit Asia covers 2 days:
Tuesday 28th May: TADSummit Asia Conference
Wednesday 29th May: Programmable Telecoms Masterclass
I’m excited Roshni Hewamallika, Core Business at hSenid Mobile Solutions is able to keynote on “Next generation CPaaS, enabling Telco Marketplaces.” Sharing the successes hSenid Mobile have built around Asia, where the audience will be highly engaged in understanding their success. In Europe, when we shared their successes, it never truly hit home. hSenid supported TADSummit for several years, but it’s hard to justify as we weren’t driving sales. With TADSummit Asia this will be different. Reproducing their success is a hot topic for many telcos in Asia. This is a simple example of why we needed to regionalize TADSummit.
Another example of the importance of regionalization is a discussion on “Talent Development in Programmable Telecoms” by Vivian Koh, Orbitage and the Communications Convergence Professional Society (CCPS).
In putting the agenda together I’ve discussed with many enterprises their plans in UC, UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, conversational interfaces / chat bots, etc. The results of those conversations are stimulating. 2019 is the year of the conversational interface PoC (Proof of Concept). Interestingly, the focus is not so much on customer communications, rather employee communications. Part of the reason is because chatbots can permeate the silos, enabling end-to-end workflows without the headache of silo integration.
We’re also lucking to have a session from Pamela Clark-Dickson, Practice Leader, Communications and Social, Consumer and Entertainment Services at Ovum on “The state of RCS (Rich Communications Service) in Asia, and Its Future Prospects.” And “SMEs Drive Market Growth and Competition” from Hwee-Xian Tan, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Services, SoHo and SME Research at Ovum.
We have lots of case studies including: “Transitioning to Employee Conversational Interfaces” by Prem A., Head of Automation, IT Operations, Cognizant. And “Omni-channel customer engagement platform for Telco’s Marketing” by Sandarenu Madan Arachchige, Software Architect, hSenid Mobile.
And we still have lots to pack into the agenda.
On the second day of TADSummit Asia we have a Programmable Telecoms Masterclass, looking both globally and locally at CXTech. You can review the agenda here. The aim of this Masterclass is to provide an open, independent, and industry-wide review of the impact of programmable telecoms on business.
We will cover CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service), UCaaS (Unified Communications Platform as a Service, AKA virtual or cloud PBX), CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), open source telecom software, authentication and customer experience, omni-channel customer communications, WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) and much more reviewing the players and many use cases from around the world, to help enterprises and service providers make informed decisions.
If you want to get involved as a sponsor or presenter, just contact us.
TADSummit Americas, Chicago, 15/16 Oct in parallel with the IIT RTC Conference
IIT RTC Labs (Prof Carol Davids, Warren Bent, and Tom Costello) are long-time friends of TADS, ever since they took part in the first TADHack Global in 2014.
TADSummit Americas will run in parallel with the the IIT RTC Conference. Think of it as a stream in their broader conference.
Registration is not yet open.
If you want to get involved as a sponsor or presenter, please contact us.
We have sessions planned on:
- Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communications, led by Shai Berger of Fonolo. This builds on the excellent presentation he gave at TADSummit last year, and the best thing is he’ll be in person not remotely presenting this time!
- CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS Convergence. Real or Imaginary?
- Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms
- Meet the TADHack Global winners
- I’m hoping a MONEH dangerous demonstration
- A can-not-miss keynote from Eric Burger (currently CTO at the FCC), and
- Lots more being discussed.
It’s going to be The CXTech event of The Americas!
TADSummit EMEA, London, 19-20 November
TADSummit EMEA will run on 19-20 Nov at IdeaLondon, an excellent location. We’ve run many TADHack events there, and we’re excited to finally be running a TADSummit there after all these years. Thank you IdeaLondon (Justine Clark) and UCL School of Management (Professor Alistair Moore and Niall Roche) for making this possible.
Registration is not yet open.
If you want to get involved as a sponsor or presenter, please contact us.
I would also like to thank VoIP Innovations and Wazo for being the initial sponsors. We’re currently working on an interesting agenda, again taking advantage of the regionalization to run sessions it would be challenging to have anywhere else. For example:
Session: The Emerging Programmable Telecoms Architecture: Threats and Opportunities
Through history there have been tens of open and closed source telecom app servers. IBM (WebSphere) and Sun (project SailFin in GlassFish) were a couple of popular ones over a decade ago. I remember one telecom vendor had three internal SIP application server projects running in parallel, with 2 examining the potential of open sourcing their code base.
Asterisk became one of the popular open source projects, with a number of projects forking from them such as Wazo and XiVO. FreeSWITCH evolved from the Asterisk community, but is a separate project to Asterisk, and proved attractive to some developers. The Janus WebRTC server is evolving SIP capabilities. Kamailio is a popular SIP AS, and is sometimes used in conjunction with FreeSWITCH. Asterisk has recently addressed a number of issues that limited its adoption by some developers. The list goes on of open source telecom app servers including FreePBX, Yate, Telestax, and more.
Open source projects are tough, without an active community and a good balance of investment versus return for everyone involved the future for any open source project can become uncertain. It’s also important to remember many of the applications of telecom app servers are mission critical, so the platforms need an established and trusted name (think perhaps 8+ years) before enterprise focused companies come on board.
This session will help the audience understand the different projects and where they make most sense today from a project-neutral perspective, simply reporting on how and why people are using different projects. This will be a controversial session, as application server projects try their best to be anything to anyone, when in practice many factors (people, process, technology, and business models) contribute to the use cases that make most sense to implement for each project.
We’ll then discuss how to mitigate the risks and evolution we’re seeing across the open source telecom app server landscape. With a focus on the emerging need of a mediation layer to manage between the web-centric services layer to the underlying telecom app server layer for high availability or utilizing multiple projects. Are we heading to a grand-unifying programmable telecoms architecture? Or an explosion in server projects and architectures?
For any business in the programmable telecoms space, this will be a can not miss session to understand how the projects are being utilized and how to mitigate emerging risks across the diversity of telecom app servers.
Session: Enterprise Innovation Leadership Working Group
We’re planning presentations and a panel session on helping industries innovate using programmable telecoms. Bringing leaders from other industries including healthcare, finance, insurance, social services, etc. To get the audience thinking differently about how they can bring their experience and expertise to help improve other industries.
We’ll have a good mix of enterprise leaders / CIOs across insurance, healthcare, banking, education, and government. With the objective of identifying how to solve Harry Potter Problems (unsolved critical business problems for which you need an innovator’s wand). AND going a step beyond in how do we execute (work direct, use an integrator, consortium, innovation program, etc.) so we can get to a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and deals fast.
We have lots more being planned and will publish the agenda for TADSummit EMEA soon.
If you want to get involved as a sponsor or presenter, please contact us.
TADSummit 2019 is the CXTech event!