Say blockchain one more time to me and I’m gonna puke. Honestly, from an esoteric technology only 3-4 years ago, to a blockbusting, life changing, world creating/devastating technology. Honestly, right now blockchain reminds me of the later 90’s dot.com hype.

Since the late 1990’s, we’ve seen multiple trends, starting with the late 90’s portals, the early 2000 video content sites, followed by the social networks, then to be followed by mobile apps – seems like every few years we have a new trend contender.  The current one is by far – blockchain. It’s literally enough to add the word blockchain to anything to make it seem more valuable, cooler and probably – something worth investing in. Now, will blockchain will remain with us for the years to come, I truly have no idea – and I won’t even try to hypothesise. But, when talking about blockchain there are two terms that always come to mind: ICO and ITO.

The ICO (Initial Coin Offering) or ITO (Initial Token Offering) is a mechanism for companies to raise funds from the crowd – by a means of selling a “tangible” item that is supposedly worth something. To give a very rough concept, imagine that “Sausage Inc.” announces an ICO, allowing you to purchase coins for several dollars worth. Once the sale is complete, you can sell your coins for sausages, or you can trade your coins to another coin (yes, even bitcoin). Now, while “Sausage Inc.” may claim that a single coin may be worth 10 Sausages, the actual value of the coin is purely speculative – but, as with stocks and securities, I have no problem with people gambling their money away – the main problem I have is this – there is no way of telling if an ICO/ITO is real or not.

Very much like the start-up industry, the blockchain industry has its set of “expert story tellers”. But in this case, instead of telling the story to a group of savvy investors, capable of performing a proper due diligence – you tell the story to Mom and Pop, who eventually will cough up cash for the coin sale – without even knowing if the sale is true or not.

A few months ago a friend of mine called me up saying: “Dude, you gotta look at this ICO, they’re selling at $0.5, aiming to get to $28”. He was talking about a coin for the adult industry, oddly named: ZUBICOIN.

I was about to choke when I heard the name – and I indicated, this must be a SCAM. Why did I say that? simple, Zubi in Hebrew Slang normally refers to a situation when one tells the other: “You’ll get nothing from me”. So, a ZUBICOIN is actually a “Nothing Coin”. Indeed, when digging deeper we saw that it’s most probably a scam, and then a couple of weeks later the entire thing got flagged as a scam – internationally. But, it didn’t stop the scammers from cashing out a little bit on Mom and Pop who got fast into the $0.5 coin sale frenzy.

The funny bit was this – if you went to the zubicoin ICO website, you would get all the information you needed in order to make a proper investment: A business plan, a vision, the dreaded white-paper (TL;DR) and all the relevant information, even the names of the people involved – it actually looked legit.

So, I decided to have a look at Linkedin to see, are there “blockchain story tellers” these days? well, I found multiple companies to help you “push your ICO” and some even will write up your “White Paper”. So, I decided to go on some Telegram groups (most of the Crypto people are on Telegram). Amazingly enough, you will find people who can easily build you a blockchain, build you the ICO concept, build the content, tell your story – all for less than $20K – and you will have a valid looking ICO/ITO, and they don’t care if it’s a scam or not – because they are not responsible.

This reminded me of the early days of wholesale VoIP, when a certain company sent spam emails saying: “But a Cisco 5400 and make thousands of dollars a month selling VoIP”. They kind’a neglected the fact that the people will get arrested and fined for violating laws in some countries, but who cares about that.

I truly believe in blockchain as a technology and I do believe we’re still a few years away from making it truly viable – so any startup that puts the blockchain buzz on its plan is automatically painted in my book as “suspicious”. In Israel alone, there are over 60 different companies branded as “blockchain companies”.

The above image isn’t up to date, as there are more companies.

So, I decided to create my own little list of check-marks for investing into a blockchain company, and here it is:

1. Does the company deal in financial services? Do they provide a security or a utility?
2. Does the problem presented on the website makes sense for blockchain technology?
3. Is the industry presented prone to multiple fraud or a high risk of scamming?
4. Do I truly understand what the company does? can I explain it in simple terms, without reading a 50 page white paper?
5. Is the company fully candid or are they hiding in plain sight? can you tell who are the people involved in the company? can you truly say you believe them?

And even these aren’t a fail safe from wasting your hard earned cash. Take a look at this coin chart (not gonna tell what coin this is):

This token initially started at $0.016, climbed to around $0.24 per token – representing a market cap of over $600M for the company, only to rapidly fall. Today, its valued at around $0.024 – and judging from the app downloads, I suspect it will eventually wither and die, as the market will loose interest. They raised over $20M from the coin sale – but it goes nowhere from there.

In other words – examine your blockchain investments really well – they normally make cash to the “token/coin seller” only at the end of the day.

Early 2017, we’ve decided to start working on our penetration to the US market. Now, as any CEO would know, penetrating a new market requires several things to exist: a clear and concise go to market strategy, a dedicated and loyal team to take the effort forward, the trust of your employees – and most importantly, the calm and support from your family and friends. With this post, I would like to talk about the last one, family and friends.

What can we say, we tend to take our family and friends for granted – while we are globetrotting 10,000 miles sitting on our heads, they are the ones left behind. Your wife left home with 2 kids in early grades, your aging parents that sometimes require your assistance, your friends who normally rely on your advice and support – all of those, the minute you walk on that airplane, are put on pause in your head till you get back. But truth is, life doesn’t pause – it never pauses. Even 10,000 miles away, if your daughter needs you she will call you on the phone, she will whatsapp you from here to tomorrow and of course, Skype video is now her best friend. It’s very easy for us, the CEO’s to forget, specifically when we are in a totally different timezone – but you should never forget.

So, here are my small insights and advice for the upcoming globetrotting CEO:

• Don’t disappear
  It’s so easy to completely disappear, especially when your new timezone is 7 or 10 hours away. You wake up, your family and friends to go bed. Dude, don’t be in such a rush to bed, nothing will kill you if you start talking to your family at 1AM – you didn’t plan on sleeping anyway, so don’t tell me a stupid story.
• Don’t Overcompensate
  On your first trips you will overcompensate. You will spend your entire per-diem budget on finding gifts for your loved ones. Don’t say you won’t – you will, trust me, I know. Overcompensating works for the 2-3 first trips, afterwards it becomes the norm. Your family needs you, not your wallet – make sure you are available for the really important stuff. Btw, don’t take into every new fad that kids have, it will drive you insane.
• Escape the rush
  When travelling, it’s very easy to work yourself to death. You are doing it because you are away, you want to make good use of your time – while at the same time, without knowing, you are punishing yourself. Don’t do that, find some time to simply put your head down and relax a bit. Something I’ve learned from my wife, always find something that you enjoy and try to do it. For example, I try to go see a movie on every trip. Yes, there are plenty of movies on the plane and I can surely stream with Netflix, but nothing beats the experience of sitting in a proper theater. Besides, watching Avengers on 42″ or IMAX isn’t even a choice, is it?
• Make it your home
  You checked into your hotel, you open the door – and there it is, your room for the next 5-10 days. If you are staying anything beyond 2 nights at a hotel, make the room your home. Go out, get some drinks and snacks you like – and stock up your mini-bar accordingly. It’s always nice to come back to your room after a full day and finding a cool drink you like.
• Be a walking pharmacy
  This is something I learned on my last trip – always, but always, bring your own medicine on your trips. Even if you are not sick, make sure you travel with the medicine you are used to taking, for the various common issues. For example, on my last trip, I caught a flu that literally dropped me to bed for 3 days – it was awful. Imagine going an important business trip, with meetings set up and you can’t hold them, because you are sick. You can always walk into a pharmacy and start buying stuff, but if you need to stand around the store with your smartphone, searching google for every medicine derivatives – you’ve done something wrong.
• Walk, don’t ride
  If you are inside a large metropolitan area and you have meetings in various places, check if you can walk the distance. One of my favorite head clearing techniques is to go to a meeting, then after the meeting, walk back to my hotel – even if it’s 10 miles away. Why? exercise is good for you, it stimulates your body and releases endorphins. As these are released into the body, you will be able to process your meetings better and come up with solutions to challenges and issues. On my last trip, I found myself walking from Brooklyn, over the Williamsburg bridge into Manhattan and then all the way up to 30th St.
• Don’t be stingy
  Yes, roaming charges are expensive – but travelling without proper communications is literally death. Make sure you have a good roaming plan, you have a local SIM card as well and that your phone is able to carry video calls – trust me, it’s worth every penny. You really don’t want to miss your daughter doing her first cartwheel, or you miss her music recital – simply because you were away on business.

Here is the last piece of advice and I believe it is the most important one – find a confidant you can talk to. You are on foreign lands, away from your family and friends – and in many times, you don’t have anyone to talk to and share your thoughts. Finding a friend or colleague in foreign lands isn’t easy, but as your globetrotting stabilizes, this is a must. I’ve been coming in and out of Manhattan during the past 14 months, almost every 5 weeks. It’s somewhat crazy when you think about it, i’ve travelled almost 150,000 miles in one year. I’m grateful that I have both family and friends in Manhattan I can talk to, as it makes each trip easier to tackle and digest.

Recently, an announcement made by #Slack had showed me how small respect and acknowledgement current technology companies have, for the roots and bases of their current technology. The announcement made is the following:

Unfortunately, support for gateways is ending. Starting on May 15th, it will no longer be possible to connect to Slack using the IRC and XMPP gateways. Learn more

Now, I remember the first time I’ve seen #slack – the person who showed it to me was only 24 and I said: “Are you fuck’n kidding me? that’s a glorified web interface to IRC”. Seriously, it even adopted the same directive and channel structure as IRC. It was so similar to IRC, that it even reminded me of the same flaws of IRC. And then the #bots came and i was thinking to myself: “What? a new type of eggdrop bot bullshit, again?” – honestly, for a 40+ year old geek, #Slack is nothing more a spiffed up version of IRC that simply looks a little better. Actually, if you are an Open Source developer, IRC is so common with the various projects – that #Slack is considered an obscene word. The cool kids now use #RocketChat and #MatterMost, but still, these are nothing more than a #Slack alternative, which in turn is a clone of the old IRC network. Yes, it has several new features that make it awesome for developers and team building, but the basics are still the basics.

Now, regardless of how successful #Slack will be, it will not ever be as successful as IRC. The span of IRC across the Internet is not millions of users, it’s billions of users. With over 30 different IRC networks world wide (with DALnet, EFnet, Freenode probably the biggest). Thousands of servers collaborating freely across the world and a very low barrier of entry, the IRC standard is here to stay.

#Slack’s announcement of “separation” from IRC and XMPP, to me sounds like: “Hey Dad, you’re an old dude man and you’re embarrassing me. I’m going to deny any type of connection that is suggested between us from now on.” – sounds familiar? If #Slack would have truly wanted to show its appreciation to its predecessor, it would have easily would have been able to say: “As #Slack had evolved, the support for IRC gatewaying will become community based only. #Slack will continue to provide the community with the various APIs required to connect to the #Slack network, however, that support will be performed by the community.”. Doing so will provide the community and #Slack two things. If the community sees a true need, it will continue supporting the IRC gatewaying function – if not, it will die. Personally, I find #Slack’s one sided announcement irritating and insulting, as it simply spits in the faces of the creators of the original.

Over the course of the past few months I’ve come to learn that running your own venture is not about myself and it’s not about the venture – it’s about one simple thing, my ability to let go and let others do their job. Being a tech-head and a CEO is always problematic – it’s the never ending conflict between the “I’ll do it myself in 10 minutes” and the “I need to let go”. It’s so hard to let go, personally speaking, it’s virtually impossible at times. But, and this is the biggest but in the world, if as CEOs we want our companies to evolve, grow, expand and succeed in their goals – we must simply let go.

What have I let go? I have let go of my own personal desire to know each and every line of code in our platform. I’ve let go of my own fear of not having intricate details of each and every one of our products. I’ve let go my overbearing nature of telling other people what and how to do things, and most importantly, I’ve accepted the fact that just like myself – other people prefer to be shown the way, but walk it on their own. Personally speaking, it’s one of the most frightening thing a person needs to do. It’s like walking into a self-driven car, put the destination and sit in the back, grasping the seat with fear, praying and hoping that the car doesn’t crash into another one along the way. But, if you learn how to communicate with said self-driven car – you rapidly realize that while it is autonomous, it listens to you. You are able to direct it and point out various flaws to it – after all, it is intelligent, but still lacks your years of experience and know-how.

So, as I’ve let go of some things, I had to take ownership of other things. While I no longer cared how the “Object Factory” was implemented, and the reasoning of using one library against another was no longer an issue to me – I’ve discovered that my mind started racing to deal with the larger questions. For example: “How to increase my deal funnel?”, “How to I convey my thoughts and ideas in a clearer way?”, “How do I turn my ideas into actionable items?” – and then I realized one little thing, all these questions are no longer about me, they are all about THEM.

Who are THEM? Them are the company employees that work alongside with me with a shared vision, them are the various prospects that we converse with, them are our customers and partners whom we’re at constant communications. It’s no longer about my own personal wellbeing or success – it’s about theirs. Their success become my company’s success, their personal growth and advancement are my advancement and growth – and as they grow and advance, so do I, as a leader, as a CEO, as a person – and as a human being.

In the world of business it’s easy to forget. Easy to forget that we are all human, that we all make mistakes, that at the end of day we all crave and desire the same basic things. I used to work to someone who said: “If an employee doesn’t challenge me technically, I have no use for that employee” –  what a stupid thing to say. This is not a Trivia contest, this is not an academic decathlon, business has its own set of challenges and issues. Some are technical, but most of them are not.

So, what CEO will you be?

Being an entrepreneur is very challenging – everyone will tell you that. If you would ask various entrepreneurs what are their challenges, most of them would indicate one of the following:

1. Raising funds for my venture
2. Defining the product
3. Building a strategy
4. Hiring the right people
5. Dealing with customers
6. Dealing with employees
7. Dealing with investors
8. Dealing with Banks
9. Dealing…
10. Dealing…
11. Dealing…

Then if you ask most of them what is the thing they need help with, they will most probably answer: “Oh, I already have people working on all of these – they’re covered”. The thing is, that most entrepreneurs won’t admit, or purely are afraid to admit – the only thing the challenges them truly is: LONELINESS. It never quite hit me, at least as hard as it did during 2017, how lonely is the seat of the CEO.

If you ask my dad how hard the role of the CEO is, he will comment: “It’s not hard, you get the deals, other people do the work and you collect the cash.” – and that is soooooooo wrong. Most CEO’s are alone. Alone with their decisions, alone with their achievements, alone with their failures, alone with their mistakes and alone with their guilt. As CEO’s we are always examined, by our employees, by our customers, by our partners, by the market – if in some manner it is capable of thought or perception, you are being examined, judged and executed according to it. You can be perfect at everything, mess up one little thing – and from that moment you are cursed (at least by one of them) – or if you’re in Hollywood, you’re toxic.

Regardless of what you believe, there are things CEOs can’t talk about with other people. Things that CEOs can talk to other CEOs only – why? because no one other than another CEO will understand these. A CEO may be tackling financial issues, business issues, operational issues or any other type of issue – he is always the CEO, for good and for bad.

Since July 2015 I’ve been undergoing a personal coaching process. For some it would seem really odd that a CEO may need coaching, specifically when that CEO provides mentorship to other start-ups. However, allow me to say the following, every CEO, and I do mean EVERY CEO, needs a personal coach to work them. The coach doesn’t tell you what to do, he simply provides another level of external reflection on your actions and thoughts, kind of like an alter-ego that may sometimes say: “You know, that’s a good idea, have your considered all possible options? can you see other options? can you backup your decision with fact or just gutt feeling?”. Your coach can be a hired business/personal coach, or for the lack of a better term, it can be another CEO you trust, or a seasoned family member with some serious lifelong experience – but it has to be someone you look up to, someone you trust and most importantly, someone who is capable of listening and reflecting with you – not simply tell you what to do.

Since September 2016, the business coaching had evolved into CEO peer review sessions. Peer reviews are really important – I never quite realized how important they are, till I started attending these myself. As I previously said, the CEO chair and office are a lonely one. Being inside a Peer review group of CEOs helps get an additional perspective on things. There are various forms of review boards, the one I am part of is called TAB. Don’t get me wrong, the review board is there not to echo your thoughts, it is there to provide you with a set of “slanted mirrors”, with each CEO in the review board seeing your issues from a different angle – each one giving his own feelings, reflections and experience into the mix. Personally speaking, without the assistance of the review board I’m a part of, I’m not sure I would have been able to pull off 2017 as I did.

Thus, allow me to provide you with the following pieces of advice:

1. If you are an entrepreneur or CEO and you are contemplating upon an issue, feel free to contact me via the message board – leave me your email, I promise to come back to you.
2. If you are about to lose your mind about something relating to your business – relax! It’s nothing more than a minor anxiety attack, take a deep breath, pour yourself a nice little drink and reflect. After 5 minutes, trust me, it would all look extremely simple.
3. Make sure you have someone to confide with – it’s important. If you are going to some form of therapy, DO NOT CONFIDE with your therapist – they are therapist, not business people. Only confide with people who can truly appreciate your currently status and position, anything else is just imagination.

And the most important advice is the following:

With every challenge and difficulty lies an opportunity. Winners see the opportunity in everything, losers see only the difficulties – be a winner

Now, while most of the demos that were presented indeed showed original work and high level of talent, I can’t stress out how disgusted I was with “false dangerous demos” that came on stage. With all due respect, going on the stage and showing off a feature of a commercial product is simply not the spirit of dangerous demos. This is all about being original, being cheeky, walking on the bleeding edge willing to fail publicly and having a good laugh about it. For me, Dangerous Demos is very much like climbing Mt. Everest – We climb it because it’s there and its a challenge. We want to climb it with our feet and grit, not reach the top of the mountain with a helicopter. Yes, indeed the feature shown by company X or Y had talented people work on it, but there is no risk associated with it – as the feature simply works.

This years’ Astricon marked a special occasion, this was the first time that all leading Open Source VoIP projects participated in the show: Asterisk, Freeswitch, Kamailio, OpenSIPS and Homer. Now, for those who are new to this community, this would seem like something trivial and meaningless. For someone like me, who had been with these projects for over a decade, it’s nothing short than a miracle for something like this to happen. Some may not know this, but Freeswitch developer were originally working on the Asterisk project, while OpenSIPS developers were originally working on the Kamailio (OpenSER) project. The projects branched off due to differences of opinions between people, hence the splits. For example, while Freeswitch people were a little fed-up with the methodology with which Digium was accepting patches to the project, the OpenSIPS project people wanted to go to a more “market oriented” product, while the original OpenSER was fairly “Academic” in nature. The diversity of people and diversity of opinions is the thing that drove all these projects to their success. Nonetheless, when the projects split, some invisible “bad-blood” could have been sensed. Since the various splits, over a decade passed and I believe that the various projects had come to accept one another. Where one project took one path, the other took another, eventually turning each project into its own unique being, instead of being a mere competitive clone. I’ve known most of the people involved in these projects and their creation over the years and during previous years, it was always hard to get them to talk, due to these feelings. Last week was the first time that some of them met face-to-face in over 12 years, which was impressive. I’m not sure exactly who is the person behind this “summit of the minds”, but who ever they are, they need to keep this up and make sure that the projects keep on innovating and succeeding.

Now, let’s talk content. The overall panel of talks and presentations that Astricon boasts is nothing short of amazing. The sheer number of speakers and subjects turns the event to something that is sometimes confusing and hard to attend. Multiple talks at the same time, on 4-5 different tracks, with multiple points of interest always pose a hard choice – “What should I attend?”. However, this year was one of the most packed ones. For example, during the pre-conference day (AKA: DevCon), RedHat held a “NFV Track” which I really wanted to attend, but couldn’t, as I was attending DevCon. I wanted to attend some of the container talks, but couldn’t, as I was either talking at the same time – or was attending a different talk as well. In other words, I really hope the Video’s are good, as I would be truly disappointed. In this respect, I really like KamailioWorld. This one has one track, mostly technical in nature – and you can attend all the talks. It’s not because there aren’t enough speakers, I’m confident that many people answer the call-for-papers, it’s simply a choice of the organizers. In the past, Astricon used to have 3 tracks, thus the choice was simpler. I believe that maybe adding another day to the conference, or changing the format a little bit will enable people to get more from the conference.

I have other thoughts, but I believe these are the primary ones. C’ya all again next year @Astricon 2018.

Regardless if the attribution is correct or not, the sentence can be interpreted in various forms. It all depends on who you are, how you see yourself and how you see others. Or to be more exact, not how you see others – but how you communicate with others. But in order to understand communications, let’s try and get a grasp on how people communicate. In order to do this, I would like to introduce you to a small psychology related term, called DISC.

“DISC is a behavior assessment tool based on the DISC theory of psychologist William Moulton Marston, which centers on four different behavioral traits: dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. This theory was then developed into a behavioral assessment tool by industrial psychologist Walter Vernon Clarke.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment

Now, without dwelling too much into the psychology analysis, or the “accurateness” of the DISC assessment methodology, judging from my personal experience with DISC assessments, they are fairly accurate – or at least, as accurate as you can get with human behaviour is in play. So, DISC stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission and Compliance. Some describe it Dominance, Influence, Supportive and Compliant. In general, they all means the same thing exactly. Each of us is a mix of these 4 traits, where the statistics show the following:

Only 5% of society will exhibit a single dominant trait. For example, a person with an extremely high “D”, but all others will be really low – will be a highly passive aggressive person, with very little care towards other people and a very short trigger. Basically, this person will be a decision making machine, but mainly for the sake of making a decision.

80% of society will exhibit two dominant traits. For example, a person with high levels of “I” and “S” will normally be a very good sales person, while a person with high levels of “D” and “S” will natural born leaders. A combination of high “D” and high “C” will result in a highly results driven person, driven much by fact, however capable of making rapid gut based decisions.

15% of society exhibit 3 dominant traits – these are your true motivational leaders. For example, a person with a combination of high “D”,”S” and “I” will be a combination of a sales person, a leader and a mentor. A person with a combination of high “D”, “S” and “C” will be a a mentor, a doer, a facts driven decision maker. A combination of high “I”, “S” and “C” will an ultimate team member, highly influencial, highly supportive and facts driven – these are normally highly valued teachers, highly valued mentors and role models.

So, back to our previous statement: “If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room” – means multiple things to multiple people, depending on their behavioral traits. While one person may interpret it as: “Damn, this room is filled with idiots, I need to leave this place”, another may interpret this as: “Wait, the people in this room appear to be wrong, how can I fix that?”, while the third may say: “These people are just wrong and I’m going to tell them out loud”. The interpretation of the statement is in direct relation to your behavioural traits. For example, a person with a high “D” only will believe his decisions and thoughts are what counts and everything else is pointless. While at the same time, a person with a high “D” and “I” will believe that he’s right and everybody else is wrong, but he needs to educate them and teach them.

These various communication styles and behavioral traits will dictate the dynamics and performance of your team. It is true that every team will have a leader, be it a choosen one or a naturally appointed one – but the performance is directly dependent on each persons’ ability to communicate their thoughts and ideas to the other team members, in a manner that they can relate to and able to assimilate the information accordingly. For example, a person with a high “D” will responed better to the phrase: “I see your point, however, let’s try and examine another point of view or option”, than to the phrase “Dude, you’re so wrong, I can’t even start expressing it!”. While at the time, a person with a high “C” and low “D” will respond better to the phrase: “Go over the facts and give me some options”, than the phrase “Dude, just make a decision already!”.

While understanding the various communication traits people exhibit in close quarters is one thing, it is entirely a different thing to maintain proper communication paths with open source projects. It is fairly amazing at how poorly, sometimes, people within various projects communicate with one another. Not because they don’t want, simply because they don’t see and discuss things in person on a regular basis, which makes their communications based on email, chat, forums and the yearly developers meetup. This drives a situation where developers working alone in remote locations will provide a highly valued product, but only if they communicate with their team members on a regular basis. Of course, I don’t expect open source projects to perform DISC assessments to their team members, that would be just plain bizzare, but people should always try to assess the communication traits of their team members and figure out what works well with whom. We do it naturally, but if you try and thing about deeper, you may discover new things and new methods of promoting ideas, agendas and most importantly – innovation and exelence.

Do we perform DISC assessments as part of hiring process – absolutely. Do we rule out a candidate due to their results in the assessment – absolutely not. The assessment only helps us in understanding who the person is, how they communicate and should we hire them – how do we introduce them to the team and instruct the team leader accordingly, in order to successfully assimilate them to the team. Hiring someone new is hard, you always want to make the best choice. Sometimes, the most qualified person is simply bad for the team – in that case it’s a bad hire. But if you hire someone that fits the communication style inside your team and they are highly qualified for the job – you have a win-win situation.

According to SkyHigh Networks study, the following may come as a shock to most – but most  enterprises will use up to 900 different cloud applications. These require an amazing number  of over 1,500 different cloud services in order to work. Out of these 1,500 cloud services, a group of 50 top-most cloud services can be observed, normally relating directly to infrastructure – we’ll call these “Super Clouds”.

The “Super Clouds” can be divided into several “Primary” groups:

– Infrastructure Clouds (Amazon AWS, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure, etc.)
– Customer Relation Clouds (Salesforce, ZenDesk, etc.)
– Real Time Communication Clouds (Twilio, Nexmo, Tropo, etc.)

It is very common for a company to work solely with various cloud services – in order to provide a service. However, using cloud services has a tipping point, which is: “When is a cloud service no longer commercially viable for my service?” – or in other words: “When do I become Uber for  Twilio?”

Twilio’s stock recently dropped significantly, following Uber’s announcement – http://bit.ly/2rVbzxG. Judging from the PR, Uber was paying Twilio over $12M a year for their services, which means that for same cash, Uber could actually buyout a telecom company to do the same service. And apparently, this is exactly what’s going to happen, as Uber works to establish the same level of service with internal resources.

Now, the question that comes to mind is the following: “What is my tipping point?” – and while most will not agree with my writing (specifically if they are working for an RTC Cloud service), every, and I do mean EVERY type of service has a tipping point. To figure out an estimate your tipping point, try following the below rules to provide an “educated guess” of your tipping point – before getting there.

Rules of Thumb

• Your infrastructure cloud is the least of your worries
  As storage, CPU, networking and bandwidth costs drop world-wide – so does your infrastructure costs. IaaS and PaaS providers are constantly updating prices and are in constant competition. In addition, when you commit to certain sizing, they can be negotiated with. I have several colleagues working at the 3 main competitors – they are in such competition, where they are willing to pay the migration prices and render services for up to 12 or 24 months for free, in order to get new business.
• Customer Relation Clouds hold your most critical data
  As your service/product is consumer oriented, your customers are your most important asset. Take great care at choosing your partner and make sure you don’t outgrow them. In addition, make sure that if you use one, you truly need their service. Sometimes, a simple VTiger or other self hosted CRM will be enough. In other words, Salesforce isn’t always the answer.
• Understand your business
  If your business is selling rides (Uber, Lyft, Via, etc), tools like Twilio are a pure expense. If your business is building premium rate services or providing custom IVR services, Twilio is part of your pricing model. Understand how each and every cloud provider affects your business, your bottom line and most importantly, its affect on the consumer.

Normally, most companies in the RTC space will start using Amazon AWS as their IaaS and services such as Twilio, Plivo, Tropo and others as their CPaas. Now, let us examine a hypothetical service use case:

– Step 1: User uses an application to dial into an IVR
– Step 2: IVR uses speech recognition to analyze the caller intent
– Step 3: IVR forwards the call to a PSTN line and records the call for future transcription

Let us assume that we utilize Twilio to store the recordings, Google Speech API for transcription, Twilio for the IVR application and we’re forwarding to a phone number in the US. Now, let’s assume that the average call duration is 5 minutes. Thus, we can extrapolate the following:

– Cost of transcription using Google Speech API: $0.06 USD
– Cost of call termination: $0.065 USD
– Cost of call recording: $0.0125 USD
– Cost of IVR handling at Twilio: $0.06 USD

So, where is the tipping point for this use case? Let’s try and separate into 2 distinct business cases: a chargeable service (a transcription service) and a free service (eg. Uber Driver Connection).

• A Chargeable Service
  Assumption: we charge a flat $0.25 USD per minute
  Let’s calculate our monthly revenue and expense according to the number of users and minutes served.

– Up-to 1,000 users – generating 50,000 monthly minutes: $12,500 – $9,625 = $2,875
– Up-to 10,000 users – generating 500,000 monthly minutes: $125,000 – $96,250 = $28,750
– Up-to 50,000 users – generating 2,500,000 monthly minutes: $625,000 – $481,250 = $143,750

Honestly, not a bad model for a medium size business. But the minute you take in the multitude of marketing costs, office costs, operational costs, etc – you need around 500,000 users in order to truly make your business profitable. Yes, I can negotiate some volume discounts with Twilio and the Google, but still, even after that, my overall discount will be 20%? maybe 30% – so the math will look like this:

– Up-to 1,000 users – generating 50,000 monthly minutes: $12,500 – $9,625 = $2,875
– Up-to 10,000 users – generating 500,000 monthly minutes with a 30% discount: $125,000 – $48,475 = $57,625
– Up-to 50,000 users – generating 2,500,000 monthly minutes with a 30% discount: $625,000 – $336,875 = $288,125

But, just to be honest with ourselves, even at a monthly cost of $48,475 USD, I can actually build my own platform to do the same thing. In this case, the 500,000 minutes mark is very much a tipping point.

• A Free Service
  Assumption: we charge a flat $0.00 USD per minute
  Let’s calculate our monthly revenue and expense according to the number of users and minutes served.

– Up-to 1,000 users – generating 50,000 monthly minutes: $9,625
– Up-to 10,000 users – generating 500,000 monthly minutes with a 30% discount: $48,475
– Up-to 50,000 users – generating 2,500,000 monthly minutes with a 30% discount: $336,875

In this case, there is just no case in building this service using Twilio or a similar service, because it will be too darn expensive from the start. Twilio will provide a wonderful test bed and PoV environment, but when push comes to shove – it will just not hold up the financial aspects.This is a major part why services such as Uber, Lyft, Gett and others will eventually leave Twilio type services, simply due to the fact that at some point, the service they are consuming becomes too expensive – and they must take the service back home to make sure they are competitive and profitable.

When Greenfield started working on Cloudonix – we understood from the start the above growth issue, and that’s why Cloudonix isn’t priced or serviced in such a way. In addition, as Cloudonix includes the ability to obtain your own slice of Cloudonix or even your own on premise installation – your investment is always safe.

To learn more about our Cloudonix CPaaS and our On-premise offering, click here.

[ted id=2652]

I found the talk not only interesting, but also it made me think about the Open Source world, trying to apply the same concepts and thinking. I rapidly realised that the Open Source world also has its own set of Takers, Givers and Matchers.

So, let’s talk a little bit about Open Source Givers. The givers will be those who either initiate in open source project, constantly contribute to open source projects, preach and promote the usage of open source as a way of life and most importantly – they do so not because of a commercial or financial agenda – they do so because that’s what they believe in. These include people like John “Maddog” Hall, Linux Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie and many others. These people operate under a premise that their work is vitally important, not the world, to mankind and the well being of others.

So, who are our Open Source takers? sorry to say, the number of Open Source takers is far greater than that of the givers. The takers are your “Script kiddies” or “Closed integrators”. Those people who use and abuse Open Source without acknowledging its existence.  In Israel, as an example, when Open Source was still in its infancy stage – people were roaming about claiming that they created a specific project or other. For example, I recall that in 2006, a company in Israel claimed it was the creator of Asterisk – and that their AMP based PBX system is their own creation. How Rude!

Who are your Open Source matchers? matchers are people who jump from being a giver and a taker according to their requirements. These people utilize open source projects, contribute code from time to time, promote the project – nominally due to a business reasoning – and these constitute a slightly bigger portion than the givers. While Open Source innovation relies on Givers, it’s progress into the business world and adaptation to the enterprise relies mostly on Matchers. Takers do not promote the Open Source industry, in some extreme cases, the actually harm the industry.

So, are you a giver, matcher or a taker?

So, during ITExpo 2017 (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida), Digium unveiled their new D65 Color Screen IP phone. Malcolm Davenport and the good people at Digium were inclined to send me a couple of phones for testing, which I was fairly happy to do – specifically due to the addition of the Opus Codec to the hardware.

If you are not familiar with Opus – you had most probably been living under a rock for the past 3-4 years. Opus is the codec that makes tools like Skype, Hangouts and others work so well. Unlike the traditional g7xx codecs, Opus is a variable bit rate codec, provides HD voice capabilities, has superior network conditions handling (via FEC) and in all – is a far better codec for any VoIP platform. You’re probably asking what is FEC? I’ll explain later.

Consistency and simplicity are a must – and Digium phones are both. One of the things I really like about Digium phones is that they are simple to configure, even without DPMA. The screens are identical to the previous models and are so tight together, that getting a phone up and running takes no longer than a few seconds.

Minor disappointment – the phones were shipped with a firmware that didn’t include the Opus codec – so I had to upgrade the firmware. Ok, no big deal there – but a minor nuisance.

So, I proceeded to get the phone configured to work with our Cloudonix.io platform. What is cloudonix.io? Cloudonix is our home-grown Real Time Communications Cloud platform – but that’s a different post altogether. This nice thing about Cloudonix is that it utilizes Opus to its full extent. Ranging from dynamic Jitter Buffering, Forward Error Correction across the entire media stack, Variable bit rate and sample rate support (via the Cloudonix.io mobile SDK) – in other words, if the Digium phones performs as good as the Cloudonix.io mobile SDK – we have a solid winner here.

So, I hooked the phone up and then proceeded to do some basic condition testing with Opus. All tests were conducted in the following manner:

• Step 1: Connectivity with no network quality affects
• Step 2: Introduction of 5% packet loss (using `neteq`)
• Step 3: Introduction of 10% packet loss (using `neteq`)
• Step 4: Introduction of 15% packet loss (using `neteq`)
• Step 5: Introduction of 20% packet loss (using `neteq`)
• Step 6: Introduction of 25% packet loss (using `neteq`)
• Step 7: Extreme condition of 40% packet loss (using `neteq`)

Test 1: Media Relay and server located under 150mSec away

• Step 1: Audio was perfect, HD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 2: Audio was perfect, HD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 3: Audio was good, HD Voice was exhibited all the way, minor network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 4: Audio was good, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, minor network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 5: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, moderate network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 6: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, major network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 7: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, extreme network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in

Test 2: Media Relay and server located under 250mSec away

• Step 1: Audio was perfect, HD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 2: Audio was perfect, HD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 3: Audio was good, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, minor network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 4: Audio was good, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, moderate network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 5: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, major network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 6: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, major network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 7: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, extreme network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in

Test 3: Media Relay and server located under 450mSec away

• Step 1: Audio was perfect, SD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 2: Audio was perfect, SD Voice was exhibited all the way
• Step 3: Audio was good, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, minor network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 4: Audio was good, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, major network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 5: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, major network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 6: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, extreme network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in
• Step 7: Audio was fair, SD Voice was exhibited all the way, extreme network reconditioning at the beginning, till FEC kicks fully in

Ok, I was willing to accept the fact that if I’m able to carry a good audio call, for almost 3-4 minutes, while `neteq` was introducing a static 20% packet-loss condition – sounds like a winner to me.

All in all, till I get my hands on the Digium D80 for testing it’s Opus capabilities, the D65 is by far my “Go To Market” IP Phone for desktop Opus support – 2 thumbs up!