Podcast

Ep 15 – Totogi: The new ant at the picnic

March 16, 2021

Last week I took part in TelecomTV’s DSP Leaders World Forum in two ways: a panel and a talk, both available by registering here. I love the talk, so I’ve turned it into a podcast episode to share it with the world.

It starts with a killer David-and-Goliath business story: Siebel vs Salesforce. You may remember how Marc Benioff’s tiny, little challenger Saleforce toppled tech-giant Siebel with innovation and courage.

Marc’s big idea was that there should be a single CRM that customers would access through the internet – nothing would be installed on premise. When the industry started to become aware of Salesforce, the startup was called “an ant at the picnic.” It ran up against the same objections I hear from telco execs every day about why they can’t use the public cloud. Hit the play button to hear:

The Siebel vs Salesforce story [2:20];
The naysayers’ list of why Salesforce would never win [4:05];
Why the naysayers were wrong [5:27];
The truth about the customization trap [7:12]; and
An introduction to webscale charging engine Totogi, and why it will change everything for Telco [10:00];

Intrigued? Curious? I hope so! Listen now.

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Check out the Totogi website
Watch the video version of my DSP Leaders World Forum talk
Read Bloomberg’s February 2000 article calling Salesforce “an ant at the picnic”
This is a super cool TelecomTV page of my panels, talks, interviews and resources
Get ready for MWC21:
- Learn more about safety plans for MWC21 in Barcelona
- Get the stats from The New York Times Global Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker
- Read more about the event on the MWC Barcelona website
Check out my favorite GIF from the past week:

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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.

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