A Platform or a Collection of Parts? Neelam Sandhu’s One-Year Scorecard on the Programmable Network
A year ago Neelam Sandhu asked whether the industry could do for mobile networks what the cloud did for computing. At CASA26 she came back to check. More has moved than it seems, but unevenly, and AI may redraw the whole value chain before it settles.
Neelam Sandhu’s CASA26 keynote, one year on from her question about the network as a platform
At CASA25, Neelam Sandhu, then CMO of Vonage, asked whether this industry could do for mobile networks what the cloud did for computing. The cloud did not take off because the infrastructure existed, she argued. It took off because the infrastructure became programmable, consumable and available on demand. Mobile networks are just as powerful, built over decades from 1G to 5G. Expose them through APIs and SDKs that developers and enterprises can easily use, and they could become a platform.
A year later she came back to CASA26 to check the scorecard, at the time as founder of her own advisory firm, NS Executive Advisory, working with companies across tech and telecoms. She has since joined Alianza as its Chief Marketing and Ecosystem Officer, very much for the reasons this talk is about: how telecoms is being reshaped, where the value will be created, and why the industry has to innovate. She still believes the opportunity is real. She deliberately puts no number on it: the estimates vary widely, few people believe them, and the opportunity itself is not yet defined. And she wondered whether her question should change. Not can we, but will we?
From CPaaS 1.0 to 4.0
What connects the cloud stack and the network stack, Neelam argued, is communications APIs and AI. She described CPaaS in four stages. CPaaS 1.0 made voice, messaging and video programmable, and is now a mature market. CPaaS 2.0 moved up to omnichannel engagement and into customer experience, closer to the contact centre. CPaaS 3.0 brings AI and agents into engagement, with huge value but also huge movement, as the boundaries between CPaaS, CCaaS, CRM and workflow platforms blur and consolidation looms.
CPaaS 4.0 is the next leap: network intelligence such as identity, location, device information, fraud signals and quality of service inside the engagement layer. We are not there yet. The market around 3.0 has not settled, and the ecosystem is not aligned on what 4.0 should be or how to get there.
Progress, and contradictory signals
There has been meaningful progress. More standardisation, more APIs, more operators and channel partners in GSMA Open Gateway, more aggregation and distribution, and fresh leadership arriving in telecoms from outside the industry. Hyperscalers and AI infrastructure players are paying attention. And on the demand side there are real enterprise use cases now, in security, identity and authentication, not just demos.
But Neelam asked the uncomfortable question. Open Gateway has added many participants, yet the share of the world’s mobile networks it reaches has barely moved. Are we adding participants and APIs so that it feels like progress, without turning reach into commercial value? Operators join aggregation models while pursuing direct routes to market at the same time. More APIs are exposed, with modest monetisation. Commercial models are still unsettled. And above all, the developer pull that every platform economy needs, from the cloud to smartphones, has not arrived. A handful of use cases, however important, does not make a platform.
Is this simply an emerging market finding its feet, or a deeper problem of alignment? Neelam’s answer was coopetition: compete for where value is captured, collaborate to create the market in the first place. Exposing technology is not the same as creating a market.
AI could redraw the value chain
This is the turn in the talk. The industry has asked what AI can do for the market. The bigger question is what AI does to the structure of the value chain.
Aggregators and API platforms today add discovery, standardisation, SDKs, documentation and the combination of APIs. AI agents can increasingly do some of that themselves, and developer workflows are becoming agent-first. Either aggregators become more valuable, as the trusted, secure interface agents look for, or, which Neelam thinks more likely, they become less differentiated. That is the disintermediation question.
For operators, imagine the network successfully programmable. If developers and agents discover those capabilities through cloud and AI platforms, someone else owns the interface, the orchestration and the customer relationship. The operator provides something valuable and moves further from where value is captured. That is the commoditisation question. And for hyperscalers and AI platforms, the network becomes one more set of tools next to compute, data and models: a potential new control point. AI may not add a box to the diagram. It may redraw it.
From operating networks to productising them
Her prescription had four parts. Collaborate and standardise, because no single company can create this market, and developers and enterprises need to know who to work with. Simplify and productise, because developers should not need to understand how a mobile network works to use it, just as the cloud abstracted its complexity. Start with the customer problem and sell the outcome, not the plumbing. And leapfrog rather than iterate, faster, alongside an AI ecosystem that does not wait.
She left the room with three questions. Are we really ready for change, in operating model, business model, commercial model and culture, not just technology? Are we building a platform, or a collection of parts? And the potentially trillion-dollar one: if the network does become a platform, who captures the value?
A collection of parts is not a platform. Our thanks to Neelam for coming back to hold the industry to its own question, and our congratulations on her new role at Alianza.
More from CASA26
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CASA26 ran 21–23 September 2026 at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam, hosted by CPaaSAA. This is part of our Thursday series on Trust.
