On November 12 and 13 TADS will happen.  TADS bills itself in the following way: “TADSummit (TADS) is focused on building an essential yet missing component of the Telecom Industry, the telecom application developer ecosystem that creates new services and customer value to address the revenue decline from the commoditization of voice and messaging.”

What is so different about TADS compared to other conferences or initiatives that relate to telecom Value-Added Services?  First of all, this is the only conference that really understands that the old way of telecom applications via “walled gardens” are gone and seeks to combine the telecom services with new applications.  Not quite the wild west of the OTT.  Not quite the slowness of waiting for standards to be agreed upon. Other industry initiatives, such as RCS, are fine, and have produced some applications, but ultimately it becomes too little too late.  This conference embraces the “web way” of application development for the telecom industry and embraces that the telcos should deploy them. That is really the difference maker here. 

So why does Dialogic care?  Much of Dialogic’s success over the years has been because there were value-added services created by our customers that were successful at the telcos, such as Color Ring Back Tones, Voice Text, Network Voice Mail / IVR, Conferencing, etc.  These revenue generating apps used (and still use) our media and signaling engines underneath them.  These services made literally billions of dollars to our customer base and millions of dollars for us.  Because they were successful we were successful.

Dialogic’s business has moved away from the board-based offerings that thrived in the PSTN era to software-based media servers and software-based signaling that are great for this new NFV / WebRTC / video era.  But while the engines that we have been selling have changed over the years, our business model has not – we are still here to enable the creation and deployment of cool value-added revenue generating applications by those that use our underlying media and signaling engines.  We have a lot to offer in enabling the application developer ecosystem. We understand and respect how it works.  Our business model supports it.  Our products support it.  Together let’s all go on the ride.

I hope to see you at the conference, but if you can’t make it be sure to stay tuned by checking out my blog for the latest updates and catch up on twitter at @JMachiDialogic. You may register for the conference here.