Podcast

Ep 17 – The Software Series: LastMileXchange

April 6, 2021

This week’s guest

James Grant & Andrew Hoskin

Co-Founders LastMileXchange

Regular listeners are familiar with the baseless objections I hear from telcos when I preach the business-transforming potential of the public cloud. For this episode, I’m joined by two industry pros who have believed in the public cloud for as long as I have – James Grant and Andrew Hoskin, co-founders of London-based LastMileXchange (LMX).

LMX helps carriers digitize and automate their global access quoting process. It moved to Amazon in 2010, started encouraging telcos to consider multi-tenant, cloud-based solutions, and ran into the same old-guard naysayers that I’ve dealt with over the years. But, like me, LMX started to feel things shifting a few years ago, and it can see a public cloud future for telco on the horizon. Listen to our conversation to hear about:

The challenges LMX has faced – and still faces – in helping telcos navigate their public cloud journey [3:27];
Where it believes customizations belong in products [6:17];
Why it’s hard for software vendors to say no when clients ask for customizations [10:13];
Its quest to make LMX a verb [13:12];
What the company has its eyes on next, including a multi-tenant, SaaS, access quoting solution that could change the competitive landscape for small- to medium-sized carriers [14:19].
Listen to the end for details on Cloud City at MWC in Barcelona [18:33]. See you there on June 28!

Links and Resources

You can find the transcript for this episode here.
Check out my article in Light Reading, Why do telco software companies have such lame valuation multiples?, where I talk about product-led companies vs. product and services companies
Read about all our plans for Cloud City at MWC 2021 in Barcelona
Calling all disruptive, innovative, telco software vendors – if your solutions are built on the public cloud, we want to host your company in our Cloud City – for free! Contact me for details
And in case you’re interested, here’s a video of a snake swallowing a deer. (If you’re not sure what it’s doing here, listen to the end of this episode.)

Author’s bio

James Grant is commercial director and co-founder of LastMileXchange. He has an MSc in Human Geography and Economics and joined the telecom industry in 1996 working at Telecom Italia and Worldcom before co-founding LastMileXchange in 2005.

Andrew Hoskin is technical director and co-founder of LastMileXchange. He has a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and, while originally from Australia, moved to the UK in 1999, choosing the telecom industry over a career in forensics. Andrew worked at Worldcom and Verizon Business before co-founding LastMileXchange in 2005.

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