Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:04):
Dag, why should application developers, which you call experience providers, care about Alianza Crux?

Dag Peak, Alianza (00:11):
So we are building a two-sided ecosystem here. The two-sided ecosystem is the communication service providers with their traditional telephony services and application developers that are building something interesting that solves some problem for a customer. You've got these two worlds. Application developers today can very easily integrate with payments or identity or maps in an afternoon because they have an easy API set to do that with. So very easy there. But when an application developer, we'll use the term experience provider, that's what we call them. When they want to integrate with a telephony network, and I said this in my keynote yesterday, they run into this wall of complexity. If you're some application developer and you want to integrate with the telco network, it's effectively impossible. It's effectively impossible. So Alianza Crux provides a, let's just call it an API surface, an orchestration layer that exposes APIs that gives an application developer the ability to integrate communication services from the telco network into their application.

(01:31):
So it's about simplification. It's about time to market. If you've got an application that wants to integrate with what's happening on the telco network, we use the example of Joe the Plumber. So if you're an experience provider who wants to deliver an answering agent to Joe the Plumber, and Joe the Plumber's got his telephone number painted on the side of his van, how do you attach your service to that telephone number? How do you do that? How do you literally practically do that? Do you do some lame three-way calling thing to attach your service to it? Do you port that telephone number away? Joe doesn't want to do that. It's just really, really hard to integrate with telephony services. Crux solves that problem.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (02:12):
So why can't EPs, experience providers, deliver the same end-user experience by going around the network by, for instance, working with a CPaaS, for example?

Dag Peak, Alianza (02:24):
Yeah. Let's come back to my favourite guy, Joe. Okay. Joe drives around town in a van, ladder on top, literally has his telephone number painted on the side. Okay. That telephone number is Joe's identity to his customers. It's the telephone number that they always have called. That is not a Twilio telephone number. That telephone number lives with the communication service provider that Joe has been contracted with for the last 20 years. And so sure, if an EP just wants to go the Twilio route, they could go talk to Joe and say, Joe, let's port your telephone number away. Joe's going to be like, "What are you even talking about? I just want an answering agent. I'm not going to port my telephone number to Twilio." It's that challenge right there that we're solving for the EPs.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:24):
You have used the term network-native. What does that mean?

Dag Peak, Alianza (03:28):
Network-native. Well, first I'm going to start out with what it doesn't mean. Service providers have had the thought that they will have to build everything themselves into the network. And I say everything themselves, I'm talking about building some kind of intelligent application, whether it's an answering agent or say a real-time language translation service or some kind of post-call reporting and analytics capability. Those are our three main use cases. Operators have had the idea that they have to build all of that themselves inside of the network. And so from one point of view, that might be network-native in the sense that it's all sitting in the network. But what we're doing is kind of breaking apart the intelligence component, which can come from an EP with everything else that the service provider has been doing very, very well for many years. Things like knowing the customer, KYC, being trusted by the customer, having a contract in place.

(04:35):
So identity, the fact that the SIM is attached to the customer. Those are true network-native components that the service provider continues to hold on to while bringing intelligence from the EP into that environment. So yes, we are bringing intelligence network-natively into the communication service providers and really bringing the best of both worlds to the customer.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (04:58):
What prevents hyperscalers, CPaaS, et cetera, from building an orchestration layer for themselves?

Dag Peak, Alianza (05:06):
They could. They could, but this is not the hyperscalers' business. What do the hyperscalers want? Take AWS, take GCP, take Azure. What they're fundamentally looking for is workloads. They're looking for applications to run on the infrastructure that they've deployed. This is what actually makes the partnership between say Alianza and AWS and Alianza and Microsoft so beautiful because what we are doing is giving an experience provider the ability to drop their application onto AWS or onto Azure and use our orchestration layer to connect in with the telecommunication services and we all win. So it's not that they can't do it, it's just not their focus.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:56):
Walk us through how Alianza Crux actually works and at what layer does it sit in exactly and what exactly is it providing in terms of signalling and media?

Dag Peak, Alianza (06:08):
When it comes to... one of the main challenges that developers have had is the fact that telecommunications networks are very complicated. We have been in the business of building infrastructure for telecommunication service providers for decades. We understand the complexity of telco networks. We understand the complexity of what it means to bring an application into the telco network. How does it work? At the highest level, there's a workflow. Alianza will bring experiences into an experience library. The service provider will be able to choose which experiences are made available to their customers like Joe the Plumber. Joe the Plumber will be able to select an experience and attach it to the line. Now behind the curtains, there's infrastructure. There's a connector that talks to the service provider's OSS/BSS and call control. There's a gateway which provides the path between the call happening in the telco network and the orchestration, the orchestrator we call it, and at the orchestrator is where the API services are exposed for the experience providers to engage with.

(07:18):
So there are multiple elements involved, but it's all designed to make it very straightforward for that experience provider to attach their services to the telco services living on the operator's network. Now the real answer is come talk to Alianza, talk to the really smart guys, our sales engineering crew, our salespeople, and they'll tell you how it actually works.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (07:40):
You mentioned the orchestration layer. What exactly is it orchestrating and specifically in an AI voice environment?

Dag Peak, Alianza (07:51):
I like to start the answer to that one with the idea that the plumbing itself is relatively straightforward. You can take a telco platform and a SIP trunk and get a call out to an agent, but there's no orchestration layer. There's no orchestration at all, that's a connection. Here are the things that we're orchestrating. We are orchestrating that plumbing, that connectivity at the first layer. We are orchestrating entitlement. This application attaches to this line, that's orchestrated. Consent, privacy notices, regulatory compliance, that is orchestrated. Billing, who is buying what from whom in this multi-party arrangement between a communication service provider and an experience provider and an end customer and Alianza, right? There's a lot of complexity when you have all those parties involved. All of those things are being orchestrated. And so this is very much why we are focusing in on this term orchestration because we're bringing all of these pieces together to allow experience providers to attach their services to telecom services to drive some real value out to that end customer.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (09:15):
Does Alianza Crux have any scaling limitations?

Dag Peak, Alianza (09:20):
The platform will be able to support every single line on every single Alianza platform around the world. It will absolutely be able to scale up to that, no problem. But we are looking beyond that. We are looking to deploy this, and this is part of the roadmap. Part of the roadmap is to support non-Alianza call control platforms. Let's take, for example, this fundamental idea that what we're doing here is bringing conversations happening on telco networks into the world of AI and applications, the world of experience providers. There are many conversations flowing over the world's mobile networks. That's where most of the world's voice conversations are happening on the mobile networks. All of the mobile networks are based on IMS. We will absolutely... We have a roadmap plan to implement IMS-capable connectors such that we can layer the Crux orchestration layer on top of those networks so that experience providers will be able to attach their services to any operator, mobile operator in the world on IMS.

(10:31):
So when you talk about scale, you're starting to talk about billions and billions of billions of lines that will be able to be enabled when we get to the point when we release our IMS capabilities.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (10:45):
How does Alianza Crux fit into the standards environment developing around AI voice?

Dag Peak, Alianza (10:51):
Yeah. What we see is not that standards are developing around AI voice, we're seeing a lack of standards. There's a lot of standardisation happening say in the world of CAMARA and Aduna, so standardisation around just generic network APIs. What we have not seen though is a robust set of industry standards designed to support the three sets of use cases that we talked about, AI agents answering a call, AI capabilities inserted into the middle of a call, post-conversational intelligence reporting and analytics post-call. There's no real standards for that. And so one of the challenges that the standards bodies have is they just are moving too slow. The world of AI and applications is moving at a rate that the standards bodies just simply cannot keep up with. And so I'm not suggesting that we are going to become the standard, but what we are doing is looking to solve real business challenges for customers, how they bring conversations into their business workflows and giving operators a standardised way, at least from our point of view, to actually implement those kinds of services.

(12:12):
Now, do I envision a world where eventually it becomes an IETF standard of some sort? Perhaps, but I think that we will just be continuing to accelerate our capabilities faster and faster and faster and the standards bodies will have a difficult time ever keeping up with that.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (12:31):
As it relates to standards, what about vCons?

Dag Peak, Alianza (12:34):
Yeah, vCons are interesting. So if you're not familiar, vCons are effectively an industry standard way of collecting a conversation into what I like to say a durable digital artifact. So you start with a call recording and then you can transcribe it to get the text out of it. You can summarise it, get the meaning and intent out of that transcript, but then you can attach other things to it like a file that was shared during a meeting or you can collect consent and attach the consent that was collected to this vCon, this durable digital artifact. Then once you have this artifact, this vCon, then you can take that along and feed it into applications for that post-conversational intelligence kind of workflow. So that's an interesting standard that we will be supporting as a part of the Alianza roadmap. So when we announced Crux, what we were really announcing is a way to bring the world of applications and AI, the world of innovation to the world of telecommunications.

(13:47):
We are very, very proud of what we're doing here. We're not seeing anybody else in the industry looking at these challenges in the same way that we are. I'll tell you that the reaction of our customers, the reaction of many analysts has been just extremely positive. Now that we've been able to get this story out and talk about the actual challenges that we're solving, people are like, "Wow, this is really interesting." And so now it's incumbent on us to go out and prove that it's actually going to make a difference in the marketplace and make a difference in the industry. And I'll just leave with this. This is what I say all the time. I'll get up on stage, last words of every speech are, "There really, honestly, has never been a more exciting time to be part of telecommunications than there is right now." And I love what we're doing here.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (14:40):
Dag, thank you.

Dag Peak, Alianza (14:41):
Thank you very much.