07:45-08:45

Breakfast

09:00-09:15

Welcome Day 1, Alan Quayle

Whether you’re a developer, CIO, technology provider, or telco; it’s an exciting time in telecoms (communications if you prefer). Technologies once hidden in the ivory towers of telcos and their suppliers are now freely available to be programmed into applications, services and business processes. By programmed, I not only mean through APIs, but through easy to use web forms.

Programmable telecoms / communications connect people, things and services together in ways we’ve never imagined possible. TADSummit is going to help you understand in an open and independent way the opportunities for your business in this exciting shift.

09:15-09:40

TADSummit Keynote: Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, TeleSign

Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms

TeleSign is a leader in identity and verification solutions, in addition to being a leading global CPaaS provider. TeleSign was acquired by BICS in 2017, BICS is the world’s largest global inter-carrier operator. Together they are revolutionizing programmable communications. Not only through the wholesale price points and vast knowledge base about phone numbers. Also mashing up communication services with insights and ratings, transforming how businesses communicate with their customers.

09:40-10:05

TADSummit Keynote: Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO hSenid Mobile

Introduction to Enterprise CPaaS (eCPaaS)

Enterprise CPaaS (eCPaaS) is an important development in CPaaS.
CPaaS platforms are maturing, the use of templates/wizards under a self-service model with IT governance brings a highly successful CPaaS operational model directly into the enterprise.
Review the hSenid Mobile story to explain how we’ve come to offer eCPaaS, and describe the core eCPaaS engine and value proposition.
Explain our eCPaaS go to market focus on the Banking industry, then expanding into Insurance, and beyond.

10:05-10:30

TADSummit Thought-Leadership Panel Discussion: The Status and Future of Programmable Telecoms

Panelists
Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, TeleSign
Frank Geck, Director of Customer Success, Mio
Shai Berger, Founder and CEO Fonolo
Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO hSenid Mobile
Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications

Questions:
Has the industry lost its way? Given the jabber on APIs, AI, digital, transformation, video in the new voice, AR/VR, false messaging battles, blockchain, contextual comms, cloud comms, XaaS, etc.
What are the greatest challenges facing programmable telecoms wrt enterprise adoption?
What’s your prognosis for the spate of CPaaS acquisitions over the past few years?
Will UCaaS ever achieve its dream of becoming THE enterprise communications platform?
How will customer communications evolve? Currently it looks like lots of neat ideas, and a big integration headache.
Omnichannel is dead! The goal is not to be everywhere, nor is it to be seamless or unified. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. How can the programmable telecoms deliver harmonized customer experiences. For example, a flight delay notification results in a push message so my airline’s app can fire up with other flight options, while an on-time notification is sent by SMS, and all the bloody email notifications stop!

10:30-11:00

Coffee Break and EXPO

11:00-12:00

Conference Keynote, Eric Burger, CTO FCC

How to Make a Difference: Communication Protocols and Regulatory Protocols

Eric has had the privilege to have a classic R&D career that has included key positions with technology leaders, including MCI, BEA Systems, Neustar, Brooktrout, Centigram, and Cable & Wireless. His career track has gone from being a Research Engineer and Member of the Technical Staff, Program Manager, Engineering Director, VP Engineering, SVP and Chief Technology Officer, as well as General Manager and Center Director. He is currently on loan from Georgetown University to the Federal government as the Chief Technology Officer of the FCC.

Engineers spend a lot of thought coming up with neat and cool protocols to do interesting stuff. Lawyers spend a lot of thought about constructing rules to ensure markets do the right thing. Both communities (usually) have their hearts in the right places. However, misunderstandings abound. This talk will give insights into the priorities and realities of the regulators, and how engineers, and by this I mean YOU, can constructively contribute to making the world a better place. There will be some specific case studies, such as how regulations can address issues such as illegal robocalling (from annoyance to destroying people’s financial lives) and public safety (from improving outcomes to literally saving lives).

12:00-13:00

Lunch and EXPO

13:00-14:30

Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communication, led by Shai Berger, Founder and CEO Fonolo

This session follows on from the session we ran in Nov, http://blog.tadsummit.com/2018/11/18/tadsummit-2018-customer-interactions-session/.

13:00-13:20

Simply adding SMS to your CRM won’t solve your customer interaction problems. Part 2, quantified case studies.

Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications

Reviewing why history makes us look at customer interactions all wrong. Highlighting how perverse an IVR is for many tasks. The importance of focus on the entirety of the customer’s device NOT a particular technology or ‘channel’. Mashing up voice, messaging, camera and browser to deliver authentication, document delivery, cheap augmented reality, and secure chat. Lots and lots of quantified case studies.

13:20-13:40

The Race to Control the Customer Service Messaging Channel, Shai Berger, Founder and CEO Fonolo

When it comes to text-based communication for customer service, a battle is heating up between the big messaging platforms. I’m referring here to Messenger and WhatsApp (both from Facebook), Apple’s Business Chat and Google’s offering called (for now) Google My Business Chat.

Each of those three control a channel (or channels) of communication used by a significant portion of the population. Apple though iMessage on Macs, iPhones and iPads; Google through Android; Facebook through its social networks. (Internationally the dynamic is different, but in North America, they are the only ones with power to change the game.)

Each has the same goal: to dominate business-to-consumer communication, but since they are coming at it from different directions, they can’t use the same strategy.

This presentation will look at how Facebook, Apple and Google are competing with each other; the ecosystem of vendors around them; and how proprietary messaging platforms compare with other text-based channels.

13:40-14:00

Experiences from Incorporating Sign Language in Customer Interactions

Alberto Gonzalez, Senior Engineer, WebRTC.ventures / AgilityFeat, TADHack Global Participant; and

Arin Sime, Founder/CEO WebRTC.ventures, AgilityFeat, and UniWellness Care.

The diversity of customer interactions has never been greater. Customer experiences that once required dedicated devices, and hence remained niche, can now run on almost any phone or laptop. Some of you may remember the first hack to incorporate sign language in customer service interactions from TADHack Global in 2015. Four years later, adding sign language to customer interactions is becoming mainstream. We’ll share our experiences from incorporating sign language in customer experiences. Programmable telecoms is not only enabling many new and better customer experiences, its making customer interactions ever more inclusive.

14:00-14:30

Panel Discussion: Platform Evolution in Customer Service Communication

Chair: Shai Berger, Founder and CEO Fonolo
Tony Jamous, previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor
Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications
Alberto Gonzalez, Senior Engineer, WebRTC.ventures / AgilityFeat, TADHack Global Participant
Arin Sime, Founder/CEO WebRTC.ventures, AgilityFeat, and UniWellness Care
Dinesh Saparamadu, CEO hSenid Mobile

Are we ending up with a General Motors problem? Is differentiation becoming difficult given the common underlying platform (e.g. Twilio Flex and Amazon).
Are the connectivity issues solved yet, e.g. Facebook and Whatsapp? Or will voice and SMS remain the dominant channels for the next X years?
Is AI delivering in Customer Service? Or is it still marketing fluff for RFP tick-sheets?
Where are we seeing real chatbots success?
We’ve heard earlier on the role identity and authentication can play in customer service. What’s your view?

14:30-15:00

Coffee Break and EXPO

15:00-16:00

Conference Keynote: Meet the TADHack Global Winners & TADHack Global Review

This is an opportunity to meet some of the TADHack Global winners from the weekend (12-13 October). It’s a great opportunity to see the power of what programmable communications for people outside the industry. And chat with the winners to share their excitement on the future of communications we’re creating together.
The hacks show the power of programmable telecoms / communications as the teams can “stand on the shoulders of giants. Mashing up programmable telecoms with many other services available over the web. The hacks created show how CPaaS, UCaaS, and CCaaS platforms can solve problems across all aspects of people’s lives, not just in business.
TADHack Global helps people learn about the latest Internet, IT, and Telecoms technologies; and use those technologies to solve problems that matter. It brings in diverse fresh talent into the industry. The numbers below show the massive impact of TADHack across our industry.
Our hacks have included programmable telecoms (voice, video, messaging), internet of things, cloud computing, robotics, machine learning, speech and face recognition, mobile payments, enterprise communications, decentralized web, blockchain, encryption, open source, and many other technologies. The root of what we do is programmable telecoms / communications.
Quantifying the massive impact of TADHack by the time of the event:

• 6 TADHack Global event, 9 TADHack-mini
• 44+ countries including: Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Zambia.
• 100+ cities
• 13,000+ Registrations
• 1100+ pitches
• $250k+ distributed in prize money
• $100k in additional goodies and vouchers
• 90 sponsors
• 160+ partners including 16 Universities
• 800+ YouTube videos with >200k minutes of viewing, some videos have been viewed over 5000 times.
• 1.2 million tweet impressions
• 11 companies founded
• 51+ people we know we’ve helped with their job search, plus 100s more add TADHack to their resume and LinkedIn profile.
• 20 services launched into communities
• People from ages 14 to 85 have taken part in TADHack!

16:00-16:45

Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms Session

Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, TeleSign

Session is divided into 3 parts, based on use cases:

• Registration fraud. Identifying fake users, preventing bulk account creation, etc.
• ATO (Account TakeOver). Preventing ATO fraud through phone hijacking attacks like SIM Swap, Porting attacks, call forwarding, etc.
• IRSF (International Revenue Sharing Fraud) attacks on enterprises. Registration to SIP trunking.

16:45-17:30

Panel discussion on Identity, Verification and Fraud Management

Panelists
Pierre Demarche, VP Product and Marketing, TeleSign
Simon Woodhead, CEO at Simwood Group PLC
Todd Carothers, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at CounterPath
Thomas Howe, CTO Ten Digit Communications

This panel provides a broader discussion across additional fraud management cases, particularly the VoIP use cases. For example Simwood provides real-time VoIP fraud management, with a similar black-list database to that described by TeleSign, as well as guidance on how to use calling patterns to trigger exceptions, and threat analysis. While Simwood is providing the tools for their customers to limit VoIP fraud on their network in real time, TeleSign provides information to help companies better manage customer interactions in real time. Its similar yet different, hence enables us to have a nice compare, contrast, and possibly mash-up panel discussion to wrap up this session. Particularly when we examine customer communications across voice, messaging and online.

Suggested questions include:
To the panelists who have not presented, what services do you provide for identity, verification and fraud management?
As businesses integrate more workflows with programmable telecoms, including PBX/UC, what do you see as emerging battle-fronts in fraud?
Do your solutions have a role in limiting robocalling?
As mobile phones become SIP end-points for corporate networks, with auto-provisioning, are there new hybrid fraud management risks being created like proxy user authentication?
Within the VoIP world many quite simple processes have been created for managing fraud, e.g. prepay, near real time billing, know your traffic patterns. Does this learning apply to the web world?

17:30+

Reception and Close of Day 1

07:45-08:45

Breakfast

08:50-09:00

Welcome Day 2, Alan Quayle.

We’ll review the discussions and insights generated during Day 1 across the Future of Communications, the opportunities created from the convergence of Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms. The role of the large cloud providers in potentially consolidating the whole telecoms industry. The exciting innovations being created through TADHack, we really have just started to scratch the surface of programmable telecoms. And wrapping up the day one review with insights from a deep dive into fraud in telecoms, identity fraud on the web, and the convergence of Identity, Authentication, and Programmable Telecoms

Then we’ll dive into Day 2 where the focus moves to numbers, with lots of case studies from the end users of programmable telecoms quantifying the impact on their business; as well as an independent review of the market. Wrapping up with a closing keynote from a FinTech implementor of programmable telecoms. And for the hardy we’ll do a wrap-up review to gather people’s feedback.

09:00-10:30

Case Studies in CPaaS

09:00-09:20

“I’ve Been Everywhere” in CPaaS

Harold Vance, Global Director Customer Success at VoIP Innovations
There’s a song by Australian country singer Geoff Mack titled “I’ve Been Everywhere”. When it comes to CPaaS, Harold really has been almost everywhere. He brings unmatched coal-face experience in helping developers, start-ups, small and large established enterprises use CPaaS. Harold will share his insights on what works, what does not, what’s still missing, through lots of case studies from the past decade.

09:20-09:40

Zip911. Create your own emergency network and send automatic, real-time alerts during an emergency.

Chris Brown, Chairman and CEO Zip911
Established in 2018, Zip911 is a Denver-based 911 provider headed by Chairman and CEO, Christopher Brown. Since serving as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies starting at age 16, Brown has been an innovator in the telecommunications industry for 22 years. Zip911 launched the ground-breaking, real-time alert service, alertTree, in January 2019 and introduced their carrier partner program later in the year. Chris will share is extensive experience in building companies on CPaaS, its going to be an insightful and entertaining session.

09:40-10:00

Experiences with Private (NOT PUBLIC) cloud implementations of CPaaS

Terry Hsiao, Entrepreneur, Advisor, Investor, and Head of Strategy at Kaleyra

Exploration of private cloud CPaaS use cases around the world. Understanding the benefits and issues of private cloud CPaaS implementations. Discussion of criteria for selecting the best implementation option.

10:00-10:30

Panel Discussion: Closing the Gap with Twilio, What CPaaS Providers Need To Do

Chair: Alan Quayle
Tony Jamous, previously President at Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, currently investor and advisor
Terry Hsiao, Entrepreneur, Advisor, Investor, and Head of Strategy at Kaleyra
Chris Brown, Chairman and CEO Zip911
Harold Vance, Global Director Customer Success at VoIP Innovations
Frank Geck, Director of Customer Success, Mio

Should we just give up trying to catch up with Twilio, let them dominate and overcharge?
Where should be begin in closing the gap? / Where to focus given the diversity of developer needs?
What are the biggest barriers in your experience in using CPaaS?
What are the must-have things missing from most CPaaS offers in your experience?
Will CPaaS be swallowed up by Google, Amazon and perhaps even Microsoft?

10:30-11:00

Coffee Break and EXPO

11:00-12:00

Conference Keynote: Henning Schulzrinne Professor at Columbia University, ex-CTO of the FCC

Networking research — A reflection in the middle years

Networking is no longer a new area of computer science and engineering – it has matured as a discipline and the major infrastructure it supports, the Internet, is long past being primarily a research artifact.

I believe that we should consider ourselves as the civil engineers of the Internet, primarily helping to understand and improve a vast and critical infrastructure. This implies that implementing changes takes decades, not conference cycles, and that implementation is largely driven by compatibility with existing infrastructure and considerations of cost effectiveness, where resources that research focuses on, such as bandwidth and compute cycles, often play a much smaller role than limited organizational capacity for change.

Telecommunications carriers, in particular, have become akin to airlines, largely operating equipment designed by others, with emphasis on marketing, not innovation. Even more than in other engineering disciplines, standards matter, whether set by standards bodies or dominant players.

Given the multi-year time frames of standards and the limited willingness of national funding bodies to support standardization work, this makes research impact harder, as does the increasing complexity of cellular networks and barriers to entry that shut out most researchers from contributing to large parts of commercial mobile networks.

12:00-13:00

Lunch and EXPO

13:00-14:30

CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS Case Studies; by the Numbers

13:00-13:25

Success in Programmable Telecoms comes through Focus: Video Collaboration Case Study

Víctor Sánchez Belmar, Cofounder and CEO SyncRTC and Mashme Group
While studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Víctor Sánchez wanted an easy way to connect with friends and family around the world. However existing video communications solutions were either too expensive or required IT involvement and dedicated hardware.
As a result he founded a video conferencing solution called MashMeTV, which he launched commercially in April 2013. Built using an open source communication protocol called WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications), MashMeTV became so popular that more than 415,000 users from 71 countries were using the application by October 2013.
Victor will share the hard-earned experiences in moving from initial adoption success with a free service to a profitable service. Hint, it requires lots of focus

13:25-13:50

Case Studies in Enterprise Messaging Federation

Frank Geck, Director of Customer Success, Mio
Mio powers seamless communication between Slack, Microsoft Teams & Webex Teams.
Mio’s technology solves a common problem that exists within modern enterprises today: too many siloed messaging apps. Mio keeps teams in sync by enabling employees to chat directly or in groups, share files, edit messages, and more – all from their tool of choice.
We’ll introduce Mio, share some of our interesting case studies, and a vision of how federation with Mio will evolve?

13:50-14:10

By The Numbers: CPaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS Landscapes and Market Sizing

Alan Quayle, Independent
We’re entering a new phase in the democratization of telecoms. Communications is now programmable, its revolutionizing the $2.2T telecoms industry. Enterprises large and small, governments, local businesses, hospitals, dentists, web companies, garden centers are all using communications in new ways improve their operations and customers’ experiences. There are hundreds of companies around the world that are helping businesses use programmable telecoms.
The aim of this session 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 landscape and market sizes.

14:10-14:20

Open Source Telecom Project Survey Results and Analysis

Alan Quayle, Independent.
We ran a survey in May/June/July 2019 to gather people’s experiences and opinions on using Open Source Telecom Software Projects.

I’m often asked to comment on the different open source projects, typical implementation architectures, and answer the usual worries on availability, performance, and what-ifs. This is an attempt to provide something more authoritative than my opinions based on who I last talked to. My role here is simply as someone who has working in and promoted programmable telecoms (CXTech) for the past 2+ decades, to help us all be more successful.

Most of CXTech (potentially a $1.2T industry) runs on just a few open source telecom software projects, that are run by a few people, supported by a much larger community of supporters. It’s like the global food and beverage industry (a $5T market, only 4 times the size of CXTech) was supplied out of the kitchens of a few tens of homes! A contrived analogy to highlight the immense reach made possible by open source software. But it does highlight the global significance of open source telecom software, and the importance of this survey in helping us share experiences and opinions.

14:30-15:00

Coffee Break and EXPO

15:00-16:00

Conference Keynote: Robo-calling Mitigation – Implementing the STIR/SHAKEN Framework

Chris Wendt, Director of Technical R&D for IP Communications, Comcast

As we all are well aware, Illegitimate and Unwanted Robocalling practices are at a minimum an annoyance and all too often a path to defrauding US consumers based on phishing scams that prey on those that are most vulnerable to these types of attacks. There has been a massive response by regulatory and judicial parties like the FCC, FTC, and many state AG offices as well as the telephone provider and vendor industries to help solve this problem. This panel will discuss some of the various ways that the US telephone network is transforming to adapt to helping consumers control their telephone experience, identify bad actors in the telephone network and block them, and ultimately with the help of SHAKEN/STIR have trust calling identity with the goal that consumers can start to learn to pick up their phones and use the telephone network again.

16:00-17:30

State of the Art in Programmable Telecoms Session

Surprising application areas in Telcos’ Networks and Breaking down Enterprise Silos

16:00-16:30

End Point Evolution

Todd Carothers, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at CounterPath

Softphone Endpoint: From Product to API Driven Platform.
From SIP-based endpoints to WebRTC the mobile and web are pushing the limits and forcing solutions to adapt to customers’ workflow as opposed to the other way around.
This means vendors bending reality to make solutions mold to specific yet varying requirements.
However, the SIP community is becoming more silo’ed and locking customers into a single vendor solution.
How will this play out? Who will lead the charge? Who wins and who loses?

16:30-17:00

Testing your Network with Fax, yes Fax! And Other Strange Stories from the Bleeding Edge of Programmable Telecoms

Howard Avner, Director of API Product at Voyant
Did you know fax is an excellent way to test the performance of your voice network? Surprising but true. I’ll share many more interesting, and perhaps strange, applications of CPaaS.

17:00-17:30

TADSummit Closing Keynote: BYOSpectrum – Why private cellular is a game-changer

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis.

The telecoms industry loves to claim that 5G will disrupt and transform industries. What it hasn’t realised is that the first industry that will get disrupted is telecom itself. New local or shared spectrum bands (such as CBRS in the US), programmable cloud-based cores, eSIM and various other enablers are making it much easier for enterprises, IT companies, cities and Internet/cloud players to build their own private 4G – and soon 5G – networks.

That’s not to say it’s as simple as installing Wi-Fi, but for various organisations from airports to oil companies to hospitals, it’s becoming a more realistic proposition. There are also various hybrids, where telcos can sell “slices” or local/enterprise MVNO deals, or allow companies to just run a separate private core network. Add in a new set of wholesale models (called Neutral Host), and the future wireless operator landscape looks very different from today.

We’re seeing the democratisation of “programmable cellular networks”.

17:30+

Gather in The Bog TADSummit Americas Review and Improvement Plan (only for those that want to)

We’ll gather at The Bog
Discussion on how TADSummit Americas went and can be improved
Review on the CXTech handle and whether its sticking
Review of how TADHack Global went and can be improved
Looking forward to TADSummit EMEA.