Panel moderated by Amy Cameron (STL Partners) with Sebastian Schumann (Deutsche Telekom), Colm Sunderland (Head of Hyperscale, Indirect & CPaaS, BT International), Wendhy Kusumaatmadja (VP Digital Initiative, Telin), and Ahmed Omer (VP EngageX, e& enterprise)

At CASA25, Amy Cameron of STL Partners led one of the most forward-looking panels of the event — “The Telco of the Future.” Featuring senior leaders from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, the discussion explored how major operators are reshaping their networks, organizations, and business models to thrive in an AI-driven, platform-based world.

e& enterprise: Breaking Up to Speed Up

Ahmed Omer, VP of EngageX at e& enterprise, shared one of the boldest transformation stories in telecom. Once part of Etisalat’s legacy structure, e& enterprise now operates as an independent business with its own P&L — designed to move faster and innovate more freely.

“When you spin off a business, you take full accountability,” Omer explained. “It forces agility. You fail fast, learn, and move forward.”

Under his leadership, EngageX integrates the entire customer interaction journey — from marketing and CRM to CPaaS, contact center, and loyalty. That end-to-end approach allows e& enterprise to evolve from telco to full customer-experience provider.

Omer argued that future success depends on openness and collaboration:

“Telcos need to stop guarding margins and start sharing value across the ecosystem. You might give up margin now, but you gain magnitude later.”

He also highlighted E& Capital, the group’s venture arm, as a catalyst for non-organic growth — investing in startups, JVs, and acquisitions that complement the portfolio.

BT International: Building the Network for AI

Colm Sunderland, Head of Hyperscale, Indirect & CPaaS at BT International, described a transformation rooted in infrastructure and flexibility.

BT’s Global Fabric is a next-generation “any-to-any” platform built to deliver on-demand connectivity with sovereignty, security, and seamless integration.

“You can’t be a telco of the future if your services aren’t consumable,” Sunderland said. “The world expects on-demand, real-time capabilities — and the network has to match that.”

He envisions a world where bandwidth behaves like cloud capacity — elastic, intelligent, and dynamically priced. When Amy suggested “surge pricing for bandwidth,” Colm smiled:

“Exactly — like Ticketmaster or Uber. When demand spikes, capacity should reflect its real-time value.”

For Sunderland, digitization will ultimately define the future:

“It’s about giving customers a single digital pane of glass — low touch, high value, high speed.”

Deutsche Telekom: From Minutes to Meaning

Sebastian Schumann of Deutsche Telekom offered a wholesale-driven perspective. His team is developing a Digital Services Platform that unifies CPaaS, RBM, identity, and network APIs in one architecture.

“It’s not about selling APIs,” he said. “It’s about making what you already have consumable — in the way customers want to consume it.”

For Schumann, success means telcos moving beyond connectivity and participating directly in value creation:

“You don’t need to teach voice salespeople to sell APIs; you just make sure APIs are there when the customer needs them.”

Telin: Transformation Through People and Purpose

Representing Telin, the international arm of Telkom Indonesia, Wendhy Kusumaatmadja, VP Digital Initiative, brought an inspiring Southeast Asian perspective — one grounded in people and culture as much as technology.

“Innovation isn’t an instruction; it comes from people,” she said.

Telin’s transformation began by embedding agile culture across the company, empowering teams to act fast and work modularly. When asked to deliver a CPaaS platform in nine months, the team completed it in three — proof that transformation can be driven by mindset as much as tools.

“We start with what customers want and work backward,” Kusumaatmadja added. “We don’t want to fight alone — we want to be part of an ecosystem. It’s not competition; it’s co-opetition.”

Partners, Platforms & the Path Ahead

When Amy asked whether future growth would come from direct sales or through partners, the panel leaned decisively toward ecosystem collaboration.

Sunderland pointed to BT’s extensive global partner network; Omer described e&’s “partners of partners of partners” model; and Kusumaatmadja highlighted the value of learning through global alliances like TM Forum and MEF.

As Omer put it:

“Thirty years ago we built the towers. Now we need to build the ecosystems.”

What Will Drive Tomorrow’s Revenue?

Each speaker identified a different catalyst for growth:

• Wendhy Kusumaatmadja — Agentic AI: embedding intelligence in every customer interaction.
• Sebastian Schumann — Participation: moving up the value chain.
• Colm Sunderland — Digitization & orchestration: making everything consumable.
• Ahmed Omer — Moments: using AI to personalize every customer journey.

A New Identity for Telcos

Ultimately, the “telco of the future” is defined not by infrastructure but by mindset — shifting from control to collaboration, from services to experiences, and from networks to ecosystems.

As Amy Cameron concluded:

“It’s not just what you sell, but how you sell it — and how you connect people, partners, and possibilities along the way.”

The Case Directory session at CASA25, moderated by CPaaS Acceleration Alliance’s research lead Andrew Collinson, brought together three sharp minds to explore how real-world examples can accelerate enterprise adoption of CPaaS, Network APIs, and Intelligent Engagement. Joining Andrew on stage were Amy Cameron (STL Partners), Robert Galop (Creo Solutions), and Hélène Vigue (GSMA). The conversation, while rooted in the Case Directory itself, became a much broader discussion about where enterprise demand really lies, what telcos are missing, and how partners can bridge the gap.

From Playbook to Case Directory

Andrew opened the session by introducing the Case Directory, a searchable repository of over 120 case studies drawn from the CPaaSAA Playbook, GSMA’s Open Gateway library, and other industry sources. The tool allows members to search use cases by industry, solution type, and business outcome, offering a fast way to see what’s working — from number verification APIs to customer engagement platforms.

“The idea,” Andrew explained, “wasn’t just to collect examples, but to make them useful — for inspiration, for learning, and maybe even as a sales enablement tool.”

He highlighted that most current case studies come from telecoms, finance, and technology, leaving whole sectors such as manufacturing, logistics, or agriculture largely untouched. That observation set the tone for the panel: if so much of the world’s economy depends on services and people, are we still focusing too narrowly on digital-native sectors?

“We’re Ignoring Half the World’s Workforce”

Robert Galop picked up on that point. Having worked across both enterprise IT and customer contact environments, he cautioned against over-focusing on digital-first industries.

“Two-thirds of global GDP comes from service businesses,” he reminded the audience. “Half the world’s workforce delivers services — yet most of our CPaaS use cases are still built for digital companies.”

For Robert, the next growth wave lies in bringing intelligent engagement to these under-served industries — those where people talk to people every day. “Automation and AI are great, but the real opportunity is in understanding conversations — capturing the voice of the customer through things like vCons (voice conversations in a standard format) — and using those insights to improve service quality and outcomes.”

Telcos Need to “Eat the Technology First”

Amy Cameron brought a healthy dose of realism from STL Partners’ enterprise research. Her assessment: enterprises may trust telcos, but they don’t see them as innovation partners yet.

“Enterprises usually put telcos fifth or sixth on their list of preferred digital transformation partners,” she said. “They see them as reliable, but not necessarily relevant.”

Her advice was simple but pointed: “Eat the technology first, then feed it to someone else.” Telcos, she argued, need to apply CPaaS and AI to their own operations — to improve how they engage with customers — before pitching those capabilities to enterprises. “They’re sitting on the data, the channels, and the customer base to do it better than anyone. They just don’t always use it.”

When it comes to enterprise demand, Amy sees a strong pull toward better connectivity, faster provisioning, and easier integration with IT systems — but not yet a rush toward telco-led transformation. She also noted that smaller, specialized service providers often outperform larger telcos because they act as consultants, packaging connectivity with practical solutions.

APIs Are Just Ingredients — Solutions Are the Dish

Hélène Vigue echoed that perspective from the GSMA side. “Enterprises don’t buy APIs,” she said. “They buy solutions to problems.”

Drawing on her experience with Mobile Identity and the Open Gateway initiative, she described how telcos are learning to embed APIs into real-world identity and security solutions. “In age assurance, fraud detection, or payment verification, mobile signals become part of a broader identity and access management solution,” she said. “That’s what enterprises want — not the API itself, but the problem solved.”

She noted that while early traction comes from financial services, demand is spreading across industries, from gig economy platforms verifying drivers to manufacturers ensuring trusted access to systems. The key, she emphasized, is partnerships: “Operators aren’t delivering these solutions alone. They rely on identity aggregators, security providers, and integrators to make it work.”

The Mid-Market Goldmine

The panel also converged on one overlooked segment: small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Robert shared a recent case where a five-location hotel chain didn’t even know why customers were calling — until CPaaS analytics showed clear patterns. “They just needed simple insights,” he said. “That’s where we can make the biggest impact fastest.”

Andrew agreed, recalling his own experience running an SME unit inside a telco: “Large enterprises are complex, slow, and bureaucratic. Mid-market companies move faster and buy faster — if you solve a clear problem.”

Cloud Thinking, Network Delivery

The conversation naturally returned to network APIs — and what developers actually want from them. Amy shared findings from STL’s developer research: “When we asked developers what they’d pay telcos for, the top answers were network performance visibility and on-demand control — exactly what they already get from their cloud environments.”

In other words, developers get the value of APIs; they just don’t yet see it coming from telcos. As Amy put it, “There’s latent demand. It’s not about teaching them what APIs are — it’s about making them easy, available, and consistent.”

Hélène agreed, pointing out that Open Gateway is starting to make that happen — especially in China, where API adoption is surging thanks to clear regulation and strong government backing.

Audience Insights: “Make It Easier to Find and Use”

An audience member captured a sentiment shared by many: It’s still too hard to know where to find these APIs or how to integrate them. Both Hélène and Robert agreed — developers don’t naturally go to GSMA websites to search for APIs. They discover them through partners like Infobip, Sinch, or others.

As Hélène said, “The partner ecosystem is the delivery mechanism. Next year, we’ll put even more focus on making access and integration easier.”

Where Would You Invest?

Andrew closed the session with a playful but revealing challenge: If you had a pot of money to invest in telecom innovation, where would you put it?

Hélène chose age assurance — a hot, regulation-driven use case where identity APIs can deliver real social value. Robert naturally backed vCons — not just for analytics, but as the foundation for smarter automation and customer intelligence. Amy combined both ideas, saying she’d build a cybersecurity solution for small businesses that wraps these technologies into something simple, trusted, and easy to bundle with connectivity.

Takeaway: From Examples to Execution

The Case Directory is more than a library of success stories — it’s a mirror of where the industry stands. As the panel made clear, enterprises want simplicity, trust, and outcomes, not just APIs.

The challenge for telcos and CPaaS providers is to turn those case studies into living examples — solving real problems for real businesses, from financial fraud to age assurance to service automation.

Or, as Andrew summarized offstage later: “The magic isn’t in the number of APIs. It’s in how we use them to make businesses — and people — work better.”

Get Involved — Help Grow the Case Directory

The Case Directory is being released to CPaaSAA members as a shared resource to accelerate learning, collaboration, and innovation across the ecosystem.

If you’d like to contribute a case study, test the tool, or help expand coverage into new industries, reach out to andrew@cpaasaa.com or contact the CPaaS Acceleration Alliance team.

Your example might be the next one that helps the whole industry move forward.

At CASA25, the “State of CPaaS 2025” panel—moderated by Andrew Collinson—brought together four of the industry’s most experienced analysts and strategists: Nick Lane (MobileSquared), Amy Cameron (STL Partners), Raúl Castañon (S&P Global Market Intelligence), and Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey).

Rather than debating forecasts, the group aligned on something more important: Intelligent Engagement as the right framework for the next chapter of CPaaS evolution. They endorsed the core recommendations of the State of CPaaS report and added their own perspectives on how to drive growth—by improving trust, eliminating friction, and creating real business outcomes.

🧠 Shared Support for “Intelligent Engagement”

The panel broadly supported the idea that CPaaS, Network APIs, vCons, AI, and even CCaaS are no longer separate markets, but interdependent components of a single, evolving ecosystem.

This idea—Intelligent Engagement—shifts the focus from technology layers to business value:

• Using intelligence and data to create context-aware, proactive engagement
• Balancing automation with trust and consent
• Building an ecosystem where communication, identity, and AI reinforce each other

As Andrew put it, “It’s not about 80 or 100 billion—it’s about how these capabilities go together, and what value they unlock.”

🧩 The Analysts’ Recommendations

Each analyst offered practical advice on how telcos and CPaaS players can accelerate Intelligent Engagement, reduce friction, and rebuild trust.

Nick Lane (MobileSquared)

• Educate brands and consumers about richer, two-way communication.
• Help enterprises move beyond one-way alerts to conversational engagement.
• Tackle the trust deficit in business messaging by improving quality and verification.
• Learn from mobile advertising, where user engagement and ARPU are much higher.

Raúl Castañon (S&P Global)

• Focus on user experience, not just security: “Reduce friction first, revenue will follow.”
• Recognize that the success path is already proven—aggregation, developer ecosystems, and enterprise co-creation.
• Telcos need to close the execution gap, not wait for perfect conditions.

Amy Cameron (STL Partners)

• Prioritize anti-fraud and identity APIs—they solve a real enterprise pain point.
• Develop location and IoT-related APIs that can scale without full market coordination.
• Push toward 5G Standalone, since network monetization depends on it.
• Look at AI and automation as critical to operationalizing API use cases.

Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey)

• Trust must become the foundation: consumers no longer trust anonymous channels.
• Fix inflated or fraudulent traffic—clean up CPaaS to be the trusted layer of digital interaction.
• Recognize that the opportunity isn’t in technology alone, but in becoming the trusted broker that connects enterprises and customers safely and intelligently.

🧭 Different Perspectives, Shared Direction

While their expertise comes from different vantage points—Nick from messaging, Amy and Ferry from telco APIs, Raúl from a vendor-revenue base—they converged on one point:

The definitions may differ, but the direction is clear.

All agreed that fragmentation, slow API rollout, and poor communication of value are holding the market back. The path forward is not to obsess over individual segments or metrics, but to synchronize innovation across the ecosystem.

🔁 From Forecasts to Outcomes

Andrew closed the session with a reminder:

“We need to stop talking in acronyms, and start talking about outcomes.”

The real opportunity is not whether the market reaches $30B, $80B, or $100B—but how fast we can:

• Deploy APIs and services that solve real business problems
• Build trust into every interaction
• Reduce friction in communication and onboarding
• And align as an industry around Intelligent Engagement

🔚 Final Word: Trust as the New Growth Engine

Every forecast, every strategy, every API ultimately leads back to one thing: trust.

Consumers ignore messages they don’t trust. Enterprises hesitate to adopt what they can’t control. Developers disengage from complexity and inconsistency.

If the industry can make Intelligent Engagement synonymous with trusted, value-driven communication, growth will follow naturally.

Because in the end, Intelligent Engagement isn’t just a framework—it’s a mindset.

A call to work together, connect the layers, and make digital interaction smarter, safer, and more human.

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→ Read the full State of CPaaS 2025 report to explore how CPaaS, Network APIs, vCons, and AI converge into Intelligent Engagement—and what the industry must do next to accelerate it.

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Can CPaaS (and its adjacent technologies) grow to $100 billion or more?

The discussion was data-driven, often dense—and more importantly, deeply revealing. Because behind the market forecasts and API adoption charts lay a bigger truth:

The real opportunity isn’t in any one forecast—it’s in how we work together to unlock business value across the ecosystem.

📊 Where’s the Money? Mixed Forecasts, But Closer Than They Seem

Each panelist arrived with a different model and number. At first glance, they seemed miles apart. But dig into the definitions, and the picture gets clearer.

• Nick Lane (MobileSquared) focused on business messaging, especially SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS. Nick recently cut his CPaaS forecast for 2029 due to Meta’s new WhatsApp pricing. He now expects ~$11B rather than $19B by 2029, highlighting how sensitive messaging revenue is to platform moves.
• Amy Cameron (STL Partners) projected ~$31B in Network API revenue by 2030, but emphasized that STL uses a bottom-up use case model, estimating demand across fraud prevention, connected vehicles, predictive networking, and more. STL’s model includes APIs beyond the current Open Gateway set and even future capabilities like predictive network performance.
• Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey), often cited for the famous $100–$300B figure, clarified that the “core” Network API revenue is around $30B—but McKinsey adds in enablement revenue (e.g., edge compute) and telco-delivered solutions built on top of APIs to reach their broader total. His perspective focuses on what telcos could earn if they build full-stack, API-enabled enterprise services.
• Raúl Castañon (S&P Global) brought the grounded reality check, using a bottom-up approach based on observable revenue from today’s CPaaS providers like Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, etc. He agreed the potential is there, but emphasized that the key enablers still need to be delivered—especially real services, go-to-market skills, and trust.

🧭 A Word on Definitions: When “CPaaS” Means Different Things to Different Experts

One of the most important takeaways wasn’t in the charts—it was in the disconnect.

Each analyst defines CPaaS differently.

Nick focuses on messaging-centric CPaaS, anchored in the realities of commercial traffic volumes and pricing models. Amy is focused on telco platform potential and how mobile networks evolve to support new use cases. Ferry looks at the network API economy, and how telcos can monetize their infrastructure in an API-first world. Raúl focuses on actual financial performance, rooted in existing vendor results.

No wonder the numbers vary so widely. It’s not disagreement—it’s different slices of an evolving puzzle.

If anything, this diversity shows that the industry urgently needs a shared framing—a bigger umbrella that can encompass the shifting tech stack and unify business strategy.

💡 Intelligent Engagement: A New Umbrella for a Fragmented Industry

That’s where the concept of Intelligent Engagement comes in.

Intelligent Engagement reframes the market not in terms of CPaaS vs. APIs vs. AI vs. CCaaS—but as a connected continuum:

CPaaS remains a foundation for programmable communication. Network APIs bring context and capability from the network layer. AI and vCons make interactions more autonomous and personalized. CCaaS, where it aligns, becomes the operational layer for engagement.

This is no longer about technology layers in isolation. It’s about:

• Reducing friction
• Adding trust
• Creating meaningful business outcomes for brands, platforms, and end users.

✅ Analyst Recommendations: How to Unlock the Value

The panel closed with each expert offering actionable advice—not on how to predict the future, but how to shape it. Their top priorities:

🧠 Nick Lane (MobileSquared)

• Educate brands and consumers on two-way communication
• Help businesses move from alert-style messaging to real engagement
• Recognize that trust and relevance are key to consumer responses
• Learn from mobile advertising—where ARPU is 10x higher than messaging

🧠 Raúl Castañon (S&P Global)

• Focus on frictionless user experiences, especially for authentication
• Study how early CPaaS players scaled—aggregators, developer tools, use cases
• Telcos must stop saying “we don’t have the skills”—and start finding partners who do

🧠 Amy Cameron (STL Partners)

• Prioritize anti-fraud and identity APIs now—they’re real, needed, and monetizable
• Explore location and IoT-related APIs with direct enterprise relevance
• Push for 5G Standalone adoption—it’s the gateway to future network monetization

🧠 Ferry Grijpink (McKinsey)

• Focus on building trust—CPaaS and messaging have a spam problem
• Become a trusted channel consumers can rely on
• Deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right way—even silently
• Clean up inflated traffic and make RCS or future channels truly trustworthy

🔁 It’s Not About the Forecast. It’s About Working Together.

The final message from Andrew Collinson summed it up best:

“We need to stop talking in acronyms, and start talking about outcomes.”

The truth is, the difference between $30B and $100B is not a number—it’s a mindset.

The market will not grow because of forecasts. It will grow because:

• Telcos move faster
• APIs become productized
• Trust becomes the foundation
• We stop duplicating effort and start aligning strategies

And most importantly: we tell a better story. A story not about APIs or messaging formats, but about Intelligent Engagement—the outcome every enterprise is chasing.

🔚 Final Word: Trust Is the Starting Point

If there was one thread running through every analyst’s comment, it was trust. Consumers don’t trust anonymous messages. Enterprises don’t trust vendor lock-in. Developers don’t trust empty promises.

Becoming a trusted broker of intelligent engagement—for identity, communications, and AI interactions—is where the real long-term value lies.

That’s the real opportunity for telcos, platforms, and innovators. Not to chase forecasts, but to lead the next era of engagement by building smarter, safer, and more connected digital experiences.

To dive deeper, download the full State of CPaaS 2025 Report and explore how CPaaS, AI, Network APIs, and more are converging into the era of Intelligent Engagement.