Future of Programmable Telecoms at Restconn 2017

Most predictions are wrong, and the biggest misses come from experts.

1876: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." — William Preece, British Post Office.

1876: "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication." — William Orton, President of Western Union.

1889: “Fooling around with alternating current (AC) is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.” — Thomas Edison

1961: "There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States." — T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner.

2005: "There's just not that many videos I want to watch." — Steve Chen, CTO and co-founder of YouTube expressing concerns about his company’s long term viability.

2006: "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'" — David Pogue, The New York Times.

2007: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.” — Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

Warning signs:Opinion, lack of NUMBERS/EVIDENCE

Long term predictionsFuturology (AKA Corporate Astrology)

Comes from GSMA, TMF, large vendor, The Donald…

What you’re going to hear about today:Near term (2-3 years)

Numbers/Evidence based

N.B. and some of it will still be wrong as generally the market changes slower than we think, and

technologies can change faster. Sometimes the reverse is true. And people sometimes just act like lemmings.

Telecoms is now Democratized

Telecoms is now Democratized

Telecoms is now Democratized

Telecoms is now Democratized

More Examples: Improving Business Operations

•  Aeris – Global M2M/IoT MVNO using open source telecom app server and APIs for

enterprise use cases

•  Banque Casino – Global bank using click to call to increase customer engagement

•  Criteo – global marketing company using telecom APIs / platforms to improve

internal communications

•  Delivery.com – online food ordering, using telecom APIs in process with local stores

•  Evaneos – online custom travel planning using WebRTC to improve communications

and lower costs

•  HireIQ – call center recruitment using telecom APIs to improve multi-lingual hiring

and retention

•  Home Depot – online trade-person portal for home owners – improve call center

operations

•  Hulu – IP video service, deliver unique call center experience on telecom APIs

•  Intuit – one of the first 2FA services using APIs giving an 18 month lead in SMB

payroll services

More Examples: Improving Business Operations

•  Jamko Force Networks – SIP trucking that enables small businesses to offer

hosted voice services

•  Liveperson – Adding contextual based calling to better route customer

communications

•  Pinig – Amazon Mayday like service upgrade to their easy to use tablets

•  Protivit – Using telecom APIs for corporate compliance

•  Questar – Using telecom APIs for sales receipt feedback

•  UK City Transfers – using telecom APIs for local phone numbers and connecting

travellers and local car services

•  USA Contact Point - SIP trucking to support a call center’s specific needs

•  Viber – SMS support for two factor authentication

•  Zanox – Voice API (cloud voice services) to support call tracking for advertising

More Examples: Made Possible…..•  BetterVoice – re-inventing business class phone system using open source and

telecom APIs

•  BlueLight – enhanced security and emergency calling using telecom APIs

•  Burner – using telecom APIs to make money out of all the unused phone numbers

•  Extrogene / OfferHut – business focused on creating telecom API enabled services

•  Fone.do – moving the SMB phone system into the browwer using open source and

telecom APIs

•  KISST – SMS based CRM using telecom APIs

•  Mercury Flight – broadcast messaging using telecom APIs

•  Mobisec - business focused on creating telecom API enabled services

•  RogerVoice – enabling deaf people to use the phone with VoIP redirect and speech

to text

•  Speak2Leads – lead response management using telecom APIs

•  Textizen – citizen engagement using SMS

•  TimeForge – employee scheduling using telecom APIs

Delivery.com.

Description: Delivery.com provides a simple online service: see who delivers in your neighborhood. Across food, alcohol, groceries and laundry. They are based in the US with 150 employees and revenues $50M-$100M.

Application: A customer places their order online at delivery.com. The order is faxed to the merchant, and then the merchant is auto-dialed to confirm the order is OK and that it will be ready or delivered on time using the confirmation code on the fax, and hence the credit card payment can be made.

Awareness: We’d seen vendors like Voxeo and the recently funded Twilio talking about Telecom APIs. We needed a network partner with 24 by 7 up-time, that had control over their infrastructure. We also talked with their larger customers.

Impact: Moving to a telecom API removed a major headache in our growth. We can scale instantaneously, from 50 to 100 calls per minute. Our operating costs are about 50% lower, but the big gain is in management focus, its focused on core operations not telecoms.

Why: They had 8 voice servers with primary rate PSTN network connections. They used Asterisk and Dialogic cards. It required significant support, when problems arose they were dependent on either the Asterisk community or themselves to solve problems. When a line card failed it took time (weeks) to replace. Their business had reached a size that every minute of lost service resulted in hundreds if not thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

Plans: Many of these stores are not online, but SMS is amazingly powerful. We can confirm orders not by the fixed phone line in the store, but by SMS to the store owner’s mobile phone. We maintain a ‘connection’ between the customer and the merchant. Say an order is going to be delayed by 10 minutes, the merchant lets us know by SMS and we let the customer know.”

Evanos

Description: Evaneos is a custom travel agency, founded in 2009, employing roughly 100 people, with revenues of about $20-50M.

Application: Customers can review available vacations / destinations, then customize and discuss the itinerary with the local agent. Monitoring the quality of these connections was critical using the trial phase. We found they were rated better than traditional PSTN calls.

Awareness: We met Apidaze at a developer event in Paris, and from that meeting we were able to trial and build out our agent communications using WebRTC to avoid international call charges and more importantly improve the quality of the calls with local agents around the world

Impact: Apart from the cost savings from all the international calls, it’s the improvement in sales from the higher quality voice. People communicating drive our business, and making that experience as good as possible has a significant (>10%) impact sales.

Why: English tends to be the language used on the calls, and often both parties are using English as a second language. The quality of that call is essential to a successful deal. International PSTN calls are often expensive as well as low quality. Using WebRTC from Apidaze has transformed our business in lowering cost of operations and improving sales.

Plans: We are expanding the using of Apidaze communication services and features across all our communications (both internal and external).

HireIQ

Description: HireIQ’s SaaS-based on demand interviewing and assessment solutions improve hiring efficiency, lower attrition, and improve workforce performance. Founded in 2009, based in the US, employs about 20 people, revenues of $5-10M.

Application: We automates the initial interviews. The potential recruit simply clicks on a link or makes a call to answer some prerecorded standard questions whenever and wherever is convenient for them. The answers are recorded and sent to the recruiter for review. This is all provided by Tropo.

Awareness: Our CTO had worked with Tropo in the past and was confident on their ability to deliver a reliable platform with first class support. Telecom APIs make it so easy to automate many tasks in business. We avoid the costs of running a call center, dealing with carriers, and other operational distractions. We’re at about 15 to 20% of the cost of running it ourselves.

Impact: We reduce hiring effort by 80%, hiring time by 40%, retention by 60-100% and agent performance by 35-60%. This is saving our customers between $100k to well over $1M per year. Some of out customers employ over 35k agents. Simply through automating the front-end recruitment process.

Why: We need a trusted partner to run our business on. I can not stress this more highly. Trust and reliability of your API provider are mission critical. If their service fails we are loosing revenue, our business credibility is impacted. Problems do happen, and this is where immediate open communications are critical to help us manage situations.

Plans: Our focus remains on greater automation and accuracy of candidate selection, through further tests and assessments. This focus would not be possible without all the backend technology being outsourced thanks to telecom APIs.

Home Depot

Description: Redbeacon (owned by Home Depot) connects qualified pros with homeowners who are looking for a pro to help with their home-service projects. Since the acquisition in 2012 no details are publicly available, team is estimated at 50 people with $50 M in revenues.

Application: The IVR is the crux of our business, we have vetted professionals, we gather the home owner project details, then informing the professionals, and then connect the selected professional and home owner. Our process is tightly bound to our systems and IVR, no off the shelf commercial system could deliver.

Awareness: Became aware of Telecom APIs through efforts of Twilio, Tropo, Plivo and Programmable Web. The problem we faced was scaling our CRM to serve Home Depots 2200 stores in 2 months, on a limited budget. We were now a P&L center within a big corporation, cash was as tight as being a start-up.

Impact: Cloud communications is the only cost option. It avoids scaling risks, it converts a multiple million dollar investment into about $50k per month. We can customize and refine, we have control. All the traditional IVR solutions resulted in expensive platform and SI lock-in.

Why: ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) centers come in at $1k-$2k per agent. CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) can cost $2k to $5k per seat. IVR can cost up to $1M. And adding simple features like quality monitoring or voice recording were $500 per seat. Using Twilio meant we could meet the goal with minimal upfront and month fee of about $50k per month (almost same opex as other options).

Plans: Would not share plans as confidential

What is the Programmable Telecoms adoption Curve?

Defining Programmable Telecoms•  Calling, sending text messages (SMS and IM), sending audio and video

messages, video calling/streaming, faxing (yep, fax still exists), secure

communications (encrypted), decentralized communications (decentralized

web), identity, mobile payments, and much much more is possible through

easy to use APIs, SDKs, and GUIs (RVD).

•  It can be:o  cloud, on premise, or hybrid, or virtualized, or just running on your laptop

o  open or closed source, or a mixture

o  purely IP based, or purely PSTN based, or a mixture

o  private, public, regional, country-wide or global

•  It covers acronyms like A2P, cPaaS, UCaaS, WebRTC, SIP, SS7, RCS, PSTN, IP-

RTC, etc.

•  The fundamental property is its telecoms-based and its programmable

•  Restcomm is at the heart of Programmable Telecoms

Rise of A2P from PSTN to IP

A2P (Application to Person)•  A2P is messaging between businesses (and their applications) and people, not

person to person (p2p) messaging. Common use cases include:•  Alerts and notifications: flight alerts via SMS/MMS, push notifications, email,

voice, IM (FB Messenger, LINE, Wechat).•  Two factor authentication (2FA): logging into your bank and then receiving

an SMS or voice call to the mobile or phone number on file for the account with a one time use code.

•  Messaging based CRM: 1 800 SMS responses to queries, “When do you open?”

•  Ecommerce: paying for services like taxis using an app on the messaging platform (didi on wechat).

•  IoT (Internet of Things): using messaging bots to aggregate home automation silos, using messaging for interacting with IoT devices directly.

•  Market Size•  Well-established and growing market, $27B (2016) globally to $47B (2021),

a CAGR of 12%.•  Much more than A2P SMS. It also includes push messaging, email, voice, IP

messaging, and RCS (Rich Communication Suite) and in time iMessage.•  Use cases are growing rapidly enabled by new technologies: telecoms is now

programmable, bots, IoT, & machine learning.

Facebook Messenger TODAY has better placement than SMS!

29

Global A2P Traffic Estimates (SMS billions)

Global A2P Revenue Estimates ($ billions)

Existing A2P Analysis is Broken30

Traffic range: 400B to 2,000B A2P SMS in 2015!Revenue range: $12B to $60B in 2015!Missed all the other A2P Technologies!

Most Telecom Analysts are CRAP – now just press with fancy title!

Complexity = Opportunity For Restcomm

Restcomm Opportunities

•  cPaaS / UCaaS - $20B

•  Next generation telecom service providers like MVNOs / vertical

focused SPs / FB & Google - $30B

•  Enterprises are doing it themselves, currently its early adopters,

but telecom is now like IT, some businesses own for competitive

advantage - $20B

•  Telcos must lower costs of infrastructure software to survive.

Ericsson / Oracle / Nokia / Huawei are incapable of changing their

cost basis. - $30B

•  Programmable Telecoms is BIG!

TRANSFORMATION

Programmable Telecoms

Programmable Telecoms

TRANSFORMATION

Programmable Telecoms: the most important change in our industry, and the most ignored change

•  Why is this the case?

o  Incumbents (GSMA, TMF, big vendors) dislike change they can not control. We’re

democratizing telecoms. We’re taking away their control!•  Always ask “where’s the money?” then ramble on about Transformation, NFV, OTT, 5G

etc..

o  For many non-telecoms people, ‘Telecom’ is a bit of a dirty word•  FCC, Pai, Big Telco are the dirty words!•  T-Mobile describes itself as uncarrier (unTelco)

o  We’ve made it too complex, and generally acted individually in raising market

awareness – we can not do it alone

•  So what should we do?

o  I think we need a logo for programmable telecoms (like 5G) – to help us all

promote the category

o  Working together can we help accelerate awareness of programmable telecoms,

a common theme through everyone’s marketing plans

Benefits of getting involved in TADHack

•  You’ll be part of the world’s largest hackathon over one weekend

o  Largest telecom-focused hackathon since 2014 (when we started)

•  Hiring: meet many local, world-class, motivated people

•  Brand awareness & thought leadership: supporting or running

locations

•  Business development: discover joint business opportunities

•  Learning: new technologies, problems faced in other industries /

communities

•  Make friends and have fun: TADHack is an intense experience

•  TADHack provides continuous collateral (all pitches are recorded)

and promotion for those who take part.

2016

2015

2014

TADSummit, 14-15 Nov, Lisbon•  TADSummit is The Programmable Telecoms global event

o  Telecoms is now programmable, almost every aspect of Telecoms can be an app, like the Web

o  Contextual communications, conversational CRM and BOTs, M2M and IoT, telecom APIs and WebRTC,

internal innovation in non-telecom industries, decentralized web, application-to-person comms,

network app stores, enterprise telecom apps, open source telecom, open networks…

o  Open, no BS, practice-based, business/strategy, world-first demos, thought-leadership, companies

involved keep being bought!

•  Themes include:

o  xVNO Service Success.

o  Decentralized Web / Decentralized Telecoms / Network App Store / Neutral Hosting.

o  Application to Person Service Showcase.

o  Programmable Telecoms in the Enterprise.

o  Network Services Built for the Cloud.

o  Innovation Showcase, led by DataArt.

o  Dangerous Demo, led by the inimitable James Body.

o  TADHack service successes.

o  Ecosystem Action on Programmable Telecoms.

•  More info is here: http://blog.tadsummit.com/2017/05/01/tadsummit-2017-planning/

Departing Thought

World’s first MVNO began 18 years ago in 1999.

Today virtualization has gone further. No longer need to own a network OR resell network services.

Its all just IP and you/customers define the services.