The Importance of Telecom Applications

TADSummit Online Asia took place a month ago. The ‘TAD’ in TADSummit means Telecom Application Development. Seems under exciting. So what is Alan doing? And why is Alan actually even bothering to devote all of his time and energy to this concept?

Because telecom applications are truly at the heart of the growth (and one can argue the innovation, though there is plenty of innovation in the transport side of things as well) of the industry, and we all need to make sure innovation is not stifled or owned “by a few.” This has created Billions (yes Billions, if not Trillions) of dollars of revenue and wealth for startups (that are no longer startups now) that created useful, new, easy to use applications targeted to either subscribers or businesses. Everyday, we all use telecom applications that at one time were some cool innovation and foreign concepts to us. The rate of telecoms innovation has truly been amazing since the early 90’s. All driven by applications.

These companies saw some kind of interesting concept that could be evinced through the telecom or enterprise networks. Applications we take for granted today, such as texting, video, SMS, unified communications, speech recognition, location services…. you name it, were created by some innovative companies that had to figure out how to get their vision realized using some kind of available building blocks, or what Alan calls the “tech stack”.

The BIG guys really had (have) no interest in anything that’s different or not controlled by them. The more it stays the same, the better it is for them. No innovation, or controlled innovation (controlled by me), means no disruption. And the money keeps pouring in, to them. The big telecom guys would stifle the innovation by putting all kinds of roadblocks in place, using standards bodies to delay the inevitable. In the meantime, innovation continued and what was created outside their realm would become defacto standards. Another way to get to the same place, yet waaaaaaaaaay faster.

This is what Alan is championing and why TADS is important. Let’s not lose this developer focus. You guys, the ecosystem, are much smarter than anyone else. We need this innovation. No one or two or three or four (you get my point) companies are smart enough to see all new emerging needs. An ecosystem, though, can. And that’s why we’ll continue to see new cool innovative applications emerge. All powered by some kind of base core elements.

The ability to innovate using easy to use, cost effective building blocks is at the heart of these new innovative telecom applications. When you get down to it, I’ve devoted my telecom career to this. At Sangoma, we have all kinds of elements in the telecom stack (from open source toolkits, to CPaaS, to network integration). And that’s why Sangoma supports what Alan is doing with TADs.

Keep innovating. The underlying building blocks will be there. You guys will figure out how to use them in ways never imagined.

If you want either read a brief synopsis of my keynote, or watch it, please click the link here. There is a brief overview of our tech stack provided and you can listen to me explain it.

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