Had some technical delays last week, so here’s last week’s newsletter and on Thursday will be this week’s newsletter.

A big week for the CCaaS space - especially for Talkdesk. First, the CCaaS MQ landed and then Td (finally) announced its successful Series D.

The MQ has the same three Leaders as last year: Genesys Cloud, NICE CXOne, and Talkdesk. I am putting together some deep thoughts on the MQ, but will share here some quick reactions here.

It’s a surprise how little things changed. CCaaS is changing quickly (as are meetings). We are seeing massive valuations, new releases, AI breakthroughs, and more. Yet, Gartner’s new CCaaS MQ looks a lot like last year’s MQ. Innovative, turbulent markets usually have more shake-ups year-to-year. Not only does CCaaS appear to be relatively stable, but there isn’t that much differentiation among providers (the dots are mostly clustered near the center). More to come on this topic.

Talkdesk finally confirmed rumors of its Series D (raised $230M) that upped its valuation to $10B! Is Td worth $10B? I don’t see how. There’s a sucker VC born every hour. Td hired its first CFO to manage its new wad of cash. I would just put it all into crypto.

It’s an impressive valuation for any company, especially a pure-play built on Twilio and Amazon AI. Presumably, it’s a very high multiplier on revenue. I can see a few scenarios where these investors win. That’s because there’s no dominant provider today and there will be in the future. Td certainly has a chance, but we are in early innings. There’s also a shorter-term IPO scenario to consider if it can continue to show rapid growth.

This is content from the July Insider Report. Consider purchasing a subscription.

5G Software: When President Trump was at war with Huawei, the US put a lot of pressure on allies to avoid network hardware from Chinese companies. If only there were an American alternative. That seems to be happening now, and in American style, the new solution is software, not hardware. 

AT&T announced it is moving its 5G management systems to Azure, and Vodafone is piloting an Ericsson/Google partnership. This dance might look familiar to the UCC crowd. Basically, cellular is transitioning from bespoke hardware to commodity (radio) hardware powered by the cloud. 

RCS Is Closer: It took over a decade, but the next generation of SMS is arriving in the US. Now that Verizon finally caved, it looks like all three big US wireless carriers will support RCS (by default) within a year. Google agreed to host the back-end and provide the mobile client (Android Messages) — though it’s meant to be an open platform. 

Just to keep things complicated, Verizon will continue to preload its Verizon Message+ (VM+) application, too, until Google can sync messages across multiple endpoints. RCS offers a variety of upgrades over SMS, including high-res images and video sharing, maps and directions, location sharing, typing indicator, and more. The latest RCS twist adds encryption, too. 

RCS and Apple iMessage only offer encryption within their ecosystems. RCS will supposedly work across US carriers (assuming everyone uses Android Messages). Apple has not indicated any interest in supporting RCS on the iPhone. Rich-formatted messaging will drive new services for CPaaS providers. 

Three episodes rescheduled in a row, no new episode this week.