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“Clean up the town square”: Tommy Sheahan looks at The Campaign Registry (TCR), public policy and national security, Red Oxygen Podcast, "We have to clean up the town square"

Part 3 of a 3 Part Series on Texting and Regulation and What You Need To Know Now

“Do we want a foreign entity Controlling the data flow of our most ubiquitous communications channel,” asks Tommy Sheahan, CEO and founder of Red Oxygen. “Unfortunately, this is not FCC. FCC this is The Campaign Registry which is owned by Tata.”

In this final segment of a three-part podcast series on SMS, texting, regulation, and the vetting process the carriers have established, Sheahan shares with us his concerns over having large flow of real time communications falling under the oversight of a non-domestic corporation. “Unfortunately, this is not FCC. FCC this is the Campaign Registry which is owned by Tata… We really need the lobby to get the FCC to step up,” adds Sheahan. “We need to stop spam. We need to be held accountable for the person sending the message and the platform delivering the message. So I'm all for that. But we need some consistency. And we need to make sure that the person doing this regulation is in our best interest.”

Red Oxygen is world's first application to person messaging. They provide billing, compliance, and delivery of text messages from our off -the -shelf components for Outlook, Gmail, Excel, or integrating to your ISV platform and provide the same billing, compliance, and delivery.

While Sheahan offers his company’s services as a path for organizations to find a path to compliance, he argues that a boarder solution rests with some leadership from the FCC to fix issues such as inconsistent policies and pricing models, to wider societal issues regarding content. “We have to clean up the town square,” says Sheahan.

Visit www.redoxygen.com

Crexendo Breaks Records with Outstanding 36% User Surge in 2023, Podcast, Second Part

“Our secret sauce is everybody works hard,” says Jeff Korn CEO at Crexendo. “Everybody at the company will do what's necessary and frankly our customer services I said before a second to none and if you have a problem you can pick up the phone, you can call Doug Gaylor, you can call me, you can call our vice presidents and we will answer and we will work to resolve it. Give that a shot at Microsoft that is never going to happen and that is one of the reasons we are now being able to pull customers who are leaving the number one and number two platform providers in the country.”

In this podcast Korn is joined by President and COO of Crexendo, Doug Gaylor. Gaylor points out that the company’s high rate of growth is occurring on two levels. 220 licensees selling the platform experienced significant growth and 21 new platform providers are selling the platform. “And those platform providers are… coming from Microsoft and coming from Cisco and coming from Asterix and other platforms out there,” says Gaylor. “And then we're also seeing a lot of individual growth coming from our direct customers as well. We saw 11% organic growth just in that sector just in Q3.” Gaylor note that Crexendo has grown larger than 8x8.

“If somebody needs all soft phones, great if somebody wants to go with all mobility, that's no problem,” adds Gaylor. We learn how Crexendo is helping customers makes wins with CPaaS and AI. “If somebody mentions a word We can have that trigger an action to bring a sales manager or bringing a supervisor onto that call immediately So that they can handle the situation maybe better than the customer service agent that's handling that call So we're seeing a lot of applications for AI and the best part about a dug is that these applications They used to be fortune 500, Fortune 1000 type applications because they were so expensive.”

Crexendo’s flexible model allows for customization and scale. The model can be suited for a small organization or a large enterprise. We hear that this model, combined with a hands-on approach, and a personal level of involvement by the leadership team, is driving growth.

Visit www.crexendo.com

Crexendo Breaks Records with Outstanding 36% User Surge in 2023, Podcast, First Part

“The premise of our vision has been to enable as many independent providers as we can, says Anand Buch, Chief Strategy Officer, Crexendo. “And so, for them to be able to differentiate, it really boils down to flexibility and what they can do with the platform.”

Crexendo announced that it has won Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Competitive Strategy Leadership Award for outstanding achievement in cloud communications. The company also reported a growth rate that is at twice the pace of the entire industry. In this first of two podcasts, we look at how Crexendo views the flexibility of its offerings, along with a focus on helping partners gain traction in the market and build brand equity for themselves. Anand Buch is joined by Jon Brinton, Chief Revenue Officer, in a 360 degree look at how Crexendo has differentiated itself in a very competitive market. 

“We've have positioned ourselves as champions of the independent service provider community for a long time and we are totally about as on an its set, enabling our partners to take our solutions and really build and deliver something that fits the needs of the end customers that they're targeting,” says Brinton. We learn that the award places Crexendo in a field otherwise occupied by technology giants, and even household brands. By sticking to a play that helps partners sell to business of many sizes, an offering that allows people to buy what they need and careful attention to customer needs, Crexendo has leveraged the personal service a small firm can offer along with a platform that can tackle virtually any use case.

“The biggest key element of the partner community is that our success is driven by their success. And they're the ones that have the best feel of the marketplace when it comes to the actual end user,” adds Buch.

Visit www.crexendo.com

TADHack is the largest global hackathon focused on programmable communications since 2014. The event has helped tens of thousands of developers and innovators use programmable communications (UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, AI, vCon, IVR, Telecom API, etc.) to solve real-world problems). TadHack will take place in the weekend before Enterprise Connect 2024, and the winners (there’s a $3K prize) will be announced on Tuesday at a scheduled event at EC24, at the Gaylord in Orlando. The hackathon will take place at the nearby Valencia College West Campus, in person and online.

In this special Cloud Communications Alliance and TR Podcast, Alan Quayle Founder TADHack, TADSummit and Thomas Howe, of Strolid, discuss why everyone should consider participating: “Innovation is not the sole domain of developers, everyone can innovate,” says Quayle. Thomas Howe, of Strolid, discusses their creation, vCon, being standardized by the IETF, a PDF for conversations.

Strolid is a sponsor. They created. It's going to be important for all communications companies in our industry.

What may be interesting for your audience is at TADHack we have 2 categories of entries: Showcases and Hacks. Explained here in the rules: https://tadhack.com/2024/hackathon-rules/.

Hacks are what developers create. A Showcase could be an idea about how a UCaaS, CCaaS, Conferencing, or good old telco could use vCon. Strolid wants to see application ideas, and Showcases get free publicity at TADHack, and in the EC24 session. A showcase is simply a short video about the idea, with perhaps a couple of slides. We've had Showcase submitted since the first TADHack in 2014.

Innovation is not the sole domain of developers, everyone can innovate.

TADHack enables developers (hack) and innovators (showcase) to share ideas on using the TADHack sponsors’ technologies (STROLID with vCon). A showcase is simply a short presentation of an idea about how you can use the sponsors’ technologies in your business.

Previous TADHack sponsors include: Cisco, RingCentral, Jambonz, Avaya, Telnyx, Subspace, Simwood, Sagoma, NTT, Flowtoute, Matrix, Tropo, Temasys, Ericsson, Vidyo, Telestax, Symbol.ai, Stacuity, Huawei, Oracle, Ubuntu, Google, Nexmo, and more.

https://tadhack.com

This week, TelcoBridges, a leading designer and manufacturer of carrier-grade session border controller software, announced availability of their award-winning ProSBC session border controller software as a fully-managed service. ProSBC as a service includes a product license subscription, with a bundle of professional service hours to instantiate, configure, integrate, test and monitor the client’s SBC. The service is billed monthly with incentives for long duration contracts. Benefits include fast deployment, less time training, expert configuration, high reliability and peace of mind with 24×7 monitoring.

In this podcast, Alan Percy, CMO at TelcoBridges discusses the big advantages of buying ProSBC as a service. “We have customers who have maybe a little bit older network equipment, maybe soft switches, and to implement stir -shaking, we can drop a ProSBC as a service in the call path, and we can do either the authentication or the verification service for them very, very quickly, says Percy. He also looks at companies where the as a service model might, “…reduce their own labor costs and make their businesses more agile.” STIR/SHAKEN, call routing, robocall mitigation, DDoS and DOS protections are among a a set of SBC applications, which will now be available with the convenience and potential savings of an as a service model.

Visit www.telcobridges.com

Part 2 of a 3 Part Series on Texting and Regulation and What You Need To Know Now

“The intent of the campaign registry is good,” says Tommy Sheahan, CEO and Co-Founder of Red Oxygen. “I'm not saying it's bad. We need to stop spam. We need to be held accountable for the person sending the message and the platform delivering the message. So, I'm all for that, but we need some consistency, and we need to make sure that the person doing this regulation is in our best interest. And I think the FCC is our best opportunity to do that.”

In this second part of a three-part series on understanding texting and regulation, and what everyone needs to know now. In this podcast, we take a closer look at The Campaign Registry (TCR). Sheahan discusses the issue of foreign ownership of the TCR and discusses the potential role of the FCC. “We want a foreign entity controlling the data flow of our most ubiquitous communications channel. I have a feeling the answer is no.” Sheahan also points out a concurrent issue, consistency. “There's no consistency among the carriers. The carriers also have different threshold limits per day per text and what they allow, what they don't allow. We need some better consistency.”

Red Oxygen offers a path to compliance and solutions for their clients. However, Sheahan argues for more systemic reform. He makes the case for accountability and for the communications community to educated their respective elected officials, as well as a call for the FCC to step up oversite, as organization that can represent the national interest.

Visit www.redoxygen.com

Crexendo leadership thinks that different business model and interest in preserving partner equity, helps achieve growth, CPaaS, CCaaS, UCaaS coming together

“It seems like yesterday we hit three million users. And in fact, back in 2022, we were ranked the fastest growing of the highest growth rate in North America for third-party platforms selling through service providers. 2023, we kept going. I mean, the growth of that of our business has been accelerating,” says Jason Byrne, SVP of Marketing for Crexendo. Crexendo is maintaining a growth rate that is twice that of the industry as whole, meaning that the company is also growing market share.

Byrne tells us that “Cultivating a community-based or a community of service providers,” and then offering them a equity building approach to the market, has been a key to the company’s success. “We have hackathons, tons of educational resources, you know, really keeping that communication channel open between themselves, not just us, right? The biggest, I think, one of the most positive things when using that, our platform as a service provider built in our platform is that community where folks, other service providers will exchange information, exchange what's working, what's not, and how to combat those bigger goliaths out in the industry…At the very core of the NetSapiens platform and the Crexendo approach has been to put the control back in the service providers hands and both on the commercial model.”

Crexendo’s pay for what you need model vs a fixed seat by seat, pay for license by license, even when many of those licenses are not being concurrently utilized at all hours, is another major, disruptive element.

Byrne also takes us into the near future, where he sees UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS, basically coming together into new, connected offerings, that will enable the Crexendo partners to offer fresh ideas to their customers.

Visit www.crexendo.com

Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on Texting and Regulation and What You Need To Know Now

“We act as a managed service provider for all those ISVs struggling to deal with the new regulations with the campaign registry from a compliance perspective, a billing perspective, and a delivery perspective,” says Tommy Sheahan, CEO and Co-Founder of Red Oxygen.

The law of unintended consequences works overtime when married with fast moving technology, complexity and the cat and mouse forever game played by the world’s most trusted technology and communications company, and the bad actors who try to prey on their customers. In this far-reaching podcast series, we will be looking at the campaign registry, how to get into compliance, and some larger, urgent, public policy issues. Sheahan will walk us through the world of SMS, from its earliest days, into our time where its pushed voice aside, as a primary means of communication, to the public policy challenges we face.

“The intent is good. The problem is it's very onerous on, let's say you've written some software for dance studios or home health services, right? And you've got a thousand home health agencies throughout the United States. You have to register each one of these entities, right? Even to be a one-man home health care provider. And you have to register their content. And that's a very onerous process. You got to communicate with all your customers. And then you might've been giving these text messages away for free, but you don't know how many text messages this home health care provider sent versus this one.”

In this segment, we learn how Red Oxygen helps you fix that problem.

https://redoxygen.com/

“Our aim is to get it back to grade A 100% health. And that's as it left the manufacturer OEM at its original point of sale. And that's Genesis. That's Genesis in a nutshell,” says Thomas Gardner of Ultratest, a Restore Technology Company. In this podcast, we learn that Ultratest offers two product families: Genesis and Nemesis.

Ultratest is a member of the ASCDI, the ITAD Association. The company is based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, in the U.K. Gardner tells us that the company offers a combination of hardware and software solution, predominantly aimed at the erasure test and repair of hard drives and SSDs. Ultratest aims its offerings at ITADs, third-party logistics, and reverse logistics. We learn how Genesis and Nemesis can help them not only erase data but make other milestones. With Genesis, a used hard drive, perhaps obtained for $20, can be brought back to a top condition where it can be sold for $40.

Nemesis is like Genesis, a software and hardware solution. Nemesis is used on routers, switches, firewalls, access points, and other hardware coming out of data center. According to Gardner, Nemesis answers an on-going challenge, with equipment going back into use, not completely cleared of old, and sensitive data.

The MSP and channel communities encounter gear in these categories, every day. Instead of shredding old drives and seeing them off to landfill, drives can be put back into use. Recycled products can help match public and private goals.

“We are attending a few events this year. We'll be at the Broker Bin meeting in London in May. We signed up for the ITAD Summit in Miami, finishing off a year with the European Broker meeting in October,” adds Garner.  We'll be attending all those shows. We'll be bringing our machines with us, both Genesis and Nemesis, to showcase our offerings. We'd love to meet you there.”

https://www.ultratestsolutions.com/

Transforming recurring services renewals into an income growth opportunity, SmarTrak.io, Part 2 of 4 Podcast Series, Strategic growth opportunity vs. tactical necessity, Cisco blessed solution enable partners to see “need in the haystack.”

Strategic growth opportunity vs. tactical necessity, Cisco blessed solution enable partners to see “need in the haystack.”

“What SmarTrak.io allows you to do is streamline that process and really engage with the data in a way that allows you to find those needles in a haystack,” says Stu Holloway, CRO of SmarTrak.io. “And while you can go through the renewals process and maximize that renewal, it also allows you to have a more strategic conversation by identifying things that are coming end of life, getting those tech refresh opportunities.” SmarTrak is a SaaS application that's purpose built specifically for Cisco to help Cisco partners manage the renewals process.

In part two of our four-part series on how SmarTrak.io is changing the way Cisco partners go about going their renewal work, we hear how SmarTrak.io went from helping the Cisco community go from dealing with the enormous amount of detailed data, that Cisco partners begin with, to offering deep insights into their customer’s needs.

In pace of a reactionary process, Stu discusses a proactive approach. That proactive approach means better conversations, more imaginative approaches, and turning a chore into a win.

Visit www.smartrak.io