LATAM Telecom

#MWC19 starting in one hour pic.twitter.com/nOx6JSWaWx — Raul Castañon (@rcastanonm) February 25, 2019 Excited to attend MWC for the fifth time. A lot of briefings lined up including Samsung, VMware, Tango Networks, Ericsson, Huawei, Telefonica, Polycom, Ribbon Communications, Infobip, Tata Communications, Twilio, Buddy Platform ... too many to list. I'll be publishing a spotlight report on the event and company impact reports from my different briefings. Also proud to be judge for the MWC Glomo Awards for the fifth time. A lot of work ahead this week but very happy to be back in beautiful Barcelona.

I had the opportunity to attend the Cisco 2019 Collaboration Analyst Summit in San Jose. This was very good timing on Cisco's behalf. The company shared upcoming updates that will be announced next month at Enterprise Connect; the event also provided an opportunity to meet Amy Chang, SVP and GM of the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group. My main takeaways are that Cisco is streamlining its Collaboration portfolio and improving the end user experience with a strong focus on workflow integration; it is also working on improving how it does business with its customers and partner network. 451 Research subscribers can read my comments following this link .

Excited to attend the analyst summit for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) Connex '19 in Monaco. It is a special occasion as ALE is celebrating its first 100 years. This is my first time attending an ALE event but they have been on my radar for the last few years. Last year I wrote about how its acquisition of of a majority stake in Austria-based Sipwise would enhance ALE's CPaaS and UCaaS offerings; 451 Research subscribers can read my report by following this link . My key takeaway from the event: ALE plans to leverage its networking and communications portfolios to focus on five key verticals (education, government, transportation, healthcare and hospitality) with digital transformation initiatives. The company will face intense competition but its vertical-focused approach and position as a vendor of CPaaS, UCaaS, IoT and networking technologies provide an important differentiation. Daniel Doppler from @quicktextAI talks about Zoe at Connex 2019, an intelligent assist...

Apple made voice recognition mainstream when it launched Siri with the iPhone 4S in October 2011, influencing consumers' familiarity with voice-enabled applications. Our expectation was that human-computer interaction (HCI) could evolve and that by 2015, voice-enabled applications would be widely used on computers, smartphones and wearable devices by consumers and in the workplace. It is four years past our initial prediction, but there are signs that 2019 will be a turning point for the industry. Voice is emerging as the main user interface for many applications, devices and appliances. This includes smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, which according to 451 Research's most recent VoCUL Smart Home Leading Indicator survey, continue to be the most-owned smart home devices. The trend is now extending into the enterprise, but unlike the consumer segment, adoption is driven by use cases rather than devices. In this report, we look at six companies – Apprente, A...

At its 2018 industry analyst event Vonage shared its progress in the past few years, highlighting its shift from the residential market to its current focus on business customers. Company executives also revealed product developments and recent acquisitions that show the direction in which the company is heading with its One Vonage platform, leveraging synergies with its communications PaaS (CPaaS), contact center (CCaaS) and unified communications (UCaaS) offerings. 451 Research subscribers can read my full report  here . Just four years after shifting its focus to the business segment, Vonage's strategy is showing strong results. The company is set to surpass $1bn+ in annual revenue for the first time this year, with business customers accounting for nearly 60%. The company will face intense competition from other players that are also incorporating CPaaS into their product roadmaps. However, its early start as a VoIP provider and its innovative approach – with CPaaS at the hea...

451 Research CEO Martin McCarthy recently announced the 451 Firestarters program at the Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit. 451 Firestarters is an analyst-led program that recognizes exceptional innovation in the technology industry regardless of its origin. Each Firestarter awardee falls into one of the four categories outlined in 4SIGHT, our major new report that seeks to empower the digital revolution: Contextual Experience, Invisible Infrastructure, Pervasive Intelligence and Universal Risk. I am happy to share that my nomination was included with the inaugural group of 451 Firestarters awardees. To read more about how Twilio's impressive journey led to its nomination, click on the link below. 451 Firestarters: Twilio – Contextual experience. Twilio is a cloud communications platform as a service company that allows software developers to perform various communications using web service APIs. Adyen – Contextual experience. Adyen enables businesses to accept and p...

This week I attended the 2009 Latin America Mobile VAS Forum in Miami (June 8-10), with the participation of analysts, technology vendors and operators. The global economic downturn is, not suprisingly, on everyone's mind. This topic kept coming up repeatedly and the attendance to the event, about half of what we saw in previous years is also an indicator of the tough times we face. However, it was encouraging to interact with technology vendors and operators who remain optimistic about the future. In the next weeks I will add more posts about this meeting and the discussions I had both with operators and technology vendors. This week, I want to share my thoughts on a presentation by Marcelo Castelo of the Brazilian Agency F.biz. Marcelo's presentation, titled "The Mobile as a Mass Media Channel With Internet Characteristics: The Possibilities of the Mobile Marketing" focused on case studies in mobile marketing from Latin America. The case studies shared by Marcelo s...