Two days before CASA26 we printed the badges. Lay them out on a table and you see the event before it starts: operators and cloud comms platforms at the same table, one in four a founder or C-level, almost a third on stage, and AI companies at the same table.
Alianza and Vonage complete the CASA26 sponsor lineup — and two of our partners spent last week proving what the week is about.
The capability was never the problem. Coordination is. Six years of working groups, roundtables, partnerships and research keep pointing at the same finding — and CASA26 in Amsterdam is built to test it.
Partnership is the word every operator reaches for. Three questions separate a real one from procurement with a photograph attached — and why that argument is what CASA26 is built around.
Three earnings beats in seventy-two hours, three completely different verdicts from the market. Seven weeks to CASA26 — and nobody’s bingo card survived the summer.
CASA26 belongs to the people in the room. Here’s how that works in practice — passes, partners, sponsorship, and the room itself.
Last in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.
Every large operator has an innovation lab, an incubator, a venture arm, a digital unit — or all four. And yet, year after year, the breakthroughs that actually move the industry tend to arrive from somewhere else: a startup, a partnership, an outsider who saw the problem differently. At CASA25, one of the most uncomfortable and best-attended sessions asked the question out loud — why do telcos keep failing at innovation? The answer wasn’t a shortage of money, talent or technology. It was that the industry keeps treating innovation as something to own, when it is really something to orchestrate.
That is the subject of CASA26’s fourth and final pillar — innovation, ecosystems and real outcomes. And it’s the pillar the other three lead into. Intelligent engagement, sovereign AI, programmable networks: not one of them gets built by a single company acting alone.
The recurring mistake is to treat innovation as an internal capability — a team, a budget, a building. But in a multi-stakeholder industry, the breakthrough almost never sits inside one organisation. It sits in the combination.
Look at what each party actually holds. Telcos have distribution, scale, regulatory standing and decades of customer trust — and they move slowly, with their attention turned inward. Startups have speed, focus and ideas — and they lack the distribution and trust to scale them. Capital can fund the gap — but only if it can see a credible path from idea to deployment. Each holds a piece. None holds the whole.
The asset a telco lacks is rarely an idea. It’s the speed to act on one. The asset a startup lacks is rarely an idea either — it’s the reach and the trust to take one to market. Put them in the same room, with capital at the table, and the arithmetic changes. That is the case for ecosystems over products, and it is the principle CASA is built on.
If there was a single conclusion from CASA25, it was this: the technology is ready, the standards are maturing, the use cases are proven. The industry’s question has shifted from “can we?” to “how fast?” And “how fast” is not an engineering question. It’s an execution question — and in this industry, execution is a team sport that depends on partners aligning, not on one company’s roadmap.
This is where most innovation quietly dies. Not in the lab, but in the gap between a signed partnership and a live pilot. The industry is fluent in the theatre of innovation — the MOU, the demo, the press release — and far less practised at the unglamorous work of turning a promising collaboration into something deployed, paid for and scaled. CASA’s entire reason for existing is to close that gap.
This is the pillar where CASA tries hardest to be different: anchored in proof, not panels. At CASA25, the Case Directory’s “show me the money” sessions made use cases defend themselves with real numbers rather than slideware. Vonage put quantified results on the table — named deployments, not hypotheticals. And the Showcase Challenge turned a pitch session into real companies, with Telnyx, Radisys, XConnect and winner Tresic among those it put in front of the room.
The model keeps producing. Shush, which has partnered with Twilio to take its Sherlock authentication platform to carriers and enterprises, is the pattern in miniature: a startup’s speed and focus paired with an incumbent’s reach. That is what “ecosystem” means in practice, away from the slide.
Ideas and distribution still aren’t enough on their own. Durable innovation needs capital alongside them — early enough to matter, and patient enough to survive the distance between pilot and scale. It’s why CASA has deliberately brought investors into the room rather than keeping the conversation to vendors and operators, and why Sandbox Industries joined CASA26 as a strategic partner: to connect innovation with investment, and help turn promising collaborations into things that can actually be funded and built.
That partnership isn’t a logo on a website. Over recent months we’ve been on the road with Sandbox — sitting down with operators, cloud communications players and innovators across the ecosystem, connecting innovation with investment and testing where the real appetite for collaboration actually lies. The pattern in those conversations is consistent: the technology questions are largely settled, and the interest now is in who to build with, on what terms, and with whose capital behind it. That is the clearest signal yet that the ecosystem isn’t a conference theme. It’s already forming — and CASA26 is where it comes together in one room.
The innovation track at CASA26 is designed to move past the panel and toward the pilot:
These are working sessions, not keynotes — curated discussions, showcase pilots and the kind of strategy input that partners like McKinsey bring, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who can actually move from idea to execution together. It’s the CASA method: identify the opportunity, shape it with the right partners, and develop it into something real — through CPaaSAA’s acceleration initiatives, long after Amsterdam.
Intelligent engagement. Sovereign AI. Programmable networks. Each is a conversation the industry urgently needs to have. But a conversation is not an outcome. CASA26 exists to turn the four pillars into collaborations — which is why CASA is not really an event at all. It’s a working environment for the ecosystem, where the conversation continues long after the room empties. You don’t simply attend CASA. You become part of what follows.
All four pillars are open for partners to help shape and lead. If you want to be one of the organisations defining where this industry goes next — not just watching it happen — this is the room to be in.
The future of this industry will not be built by anyone alone. CASA26 is simply where the people who will build it are in the same place at the same time.
Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.
That completes the four pillars of CASA26 — Intelligent Engagement; AI, Sovereign Infrastructure & Agentic Systems; Network APIs & Telecom Transformation; and Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes. We’ll be announcing partners, speakers and sessions across each of them over the coming months.
Third in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.
In March, the GSMA Open Gateway initiative marked its third birthday at MWC Barcelona. The interesting thing wasn’t the milestone. It was the agenda. The headline sessions weren’t about new APIs or new standards — they were about monetisation, business outcomes, and what the programme itself now calls “the demand side.” Aduna’s CEO took the keynote on turning APIs into real-world impact. The closing panels were about which verticals will actually pay.
Read between the lines and the industry is quietly admitting something it spent three years avoiding: the APIs were never the hard part.
That is the real subject of CASA26’s third pillar — Network APIs and telecom transformation. And it’s the pillar where I’ll be most direct, because this is the conversation the industry most needs and most avoids.
It’s worth being fair first. The technical progress is real. Open Gateway is into its third year. CAMARA has standardised a credible set of service APIs. GSMA and TM Forum have a joint conformance certification programme, so an API certified once is trusted across the ecosystem. Aduna — backed by Ericsson and a roster of major operators — has stood up a genuine aggregation layer so a developer doesn’t have to integrate operator by operator. The hyperscalers — AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — have put network APIs into their marketplaces. Vonage, now an Ericsson company, has gone further and built network APIs into the core of its platform rather than treating them as a side catalogue. XConnect has done the unglamorous work of making cross-operator reach actually function.
In other words, the excuse is gone. For years, “it’s still early, the standards aren’t ready” was a fair answer. It no longer is. The road has been built.
So here is the uncomfortable question, and it’s a commercial one, not a technical one: the network is now programmable — but is it profitable? Programmable is not the same as profitable. And the industry has been far better at the first than the second.
The recurring failure of the Network API conversation is that it is conducted in the wrong units. We count APIs. We count operators onboarded. We count standards ratified and milestones hit. These are supply-side metrics, and the customer has never once asked how many APIs you have.
The questions that matter are the ones the industry is least comfortable with. What job does this get done, for whom? What does it replace, and is the replacement clearly better? What will someone actually pay, and on what commercial model — per call, per outcome, per seat, revenue share? Until those have answers, an API is a capability, not a business.
Some have already named the shift. Vonage’s Neelam Sandhu, newly into the CMO role, used her CASA25 keynote to reframe the company’s story from connectivity to outcomes — saying out loud the move this entire pillar is really about.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s the opposite. The good news is that the demand side is finally producing real answers — in one area especially.
The clearest near-term business case for Network APIs is not a new experience. It’s the quiet replacement of a broken one. The one-time password sent by SMS is insecure, easily intercepted, and a genuinely poor experience — and it underpins authentication for half the digital economy. Network APIs like Silent Authentication, Number Verification and SIM Swap detection replace it with something the operator can verify at the network level, in milliseconds, without a code to type.
This is the killer app GSMA has been pointing at — the argument made memorably at CASA25 that digital identity, not connectivity, is the operator’s most valuable and most defensible asset. It now has a regulatory tailwind: age-verification laws tightening across the US, EU and Australia put operators in a position no pure software vendor can occupy, because the trust and the subscriber relationship already sit with them. Beyond identity, Quality-on-Demand — guaranteed network performance for drones, robotics, live broadcast and immersive applications — is the next vertical wave.
The opportunity isn’t only the operators’. It belongs equally to the players who turn raw network signals into something an enterprise can buy with confidence. Shush is a case in point — its Sherlock platform packages identity, trust and fraud capabilities into a product a security team can actually deploy, rather than a kit of APIs they’d have to assemble themselves. In partnership with Twilio, it has already put silent network authentication into production with carriers such as DITO — replacing the SMS one-time password with precisely the network-level verification described above. That packaging layer, where a network signal becomes a business outcome, is where a great deal of the value — and the margin — is going to settle.
Identity and fraud is where the abstract finally becomes commercial: a real pain, a clearly better fix, a buyer who is already regulated into needing it. That is what every other Network API use case has to learn from.
There is a strategic risk hiding inside all this progress. The aggregation layer that makes Network APIs usable — Aduna, the hyperscaler marketplaces, the channel partners — is also the layer that can stand between the operator and the customer. If operators become the wholesale supplier of capabilities that someone else packages, prices and owns the relationship for, they will have built the road and handed the tolls to someone else.
This is the real “telecom transformation” question, and it’s not technical. It’s about where in the value chain the operator chooses to compete. We heard the early version at CASA25, where the “telco of the future” panel — e&, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Telin — circled exactly this tension between scale, partnership and control. The operators leaning hardest into Network APIs as a commercial discipline rather than a standards exercise — Orange and Vodafone among them, anchoring the Aduna model; BT building programmability into Global Fabric; the Asian operators like Telin treating it as a regional growth play — are the ones taking the question seriously. Whether they can move at the speed the opportunity demands is, as ever with telcos, the open question.
The Network API track at CASA26 is built to skip the milestone update and go straight to the commercial core:
These are analyst-led sessions with the operators, aggregators and platform players living the question — GSMA on the standards and identity story, the aggregation and channel players on distribution, and the operators on whether they can convert structural advantage into revenue before the window narrows.
This is also one of the CASA26 tracks open for a partner to help shape and lead. If your business depends on Network APIs becoming a market rather than a milestone, this is the room where that case gets argued honestly.
The network is finally programmable. Whether the industry programs it into a business — or watches someone else do it — is the only question that now matters.
Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.
Next in the series: Innovation, Ecosystems & Real Outcomes — why the breakthroughs will come from ecosystems, not incumbents acting alone, and how CASA turns conversations into collaborations.
Second in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.
A year ago, the story of AI in the Middle East was a story of pure ascent. The Gulf had decided it would not merely consume artificial intelligence; it would build the ground it runs on. Abu Dhabi broke ground on a gigawatt-scale compute cluster. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth stood up a national AI champion and raised its ambitions into the trillions. Washington cleared the export of tens of thousands of advanced GPUs that had been frozen for months. With more than three trillion dollars of sovereign capital behind them and regional data-centre capacity set to triple by the end of the decade, the Gulf states could build while everyone else waited for financing.
Then, in late February, the other face of the bet arrived. As the conflict with Iran escalated, drone and missile strikes hit data-centre infrastructure across the Gulf — and AWS confirmed its UAE region had been knocked offline, with recovery measured in months and customers told to move their workloads elsewhere. The region that had marketed itself as a safe harbour for the world’s data watched a flagship cloud region burn. In the space of twelve months, sovereignty went from a slide about data residency to a question with missiles attached: who physically controls the ground intelligence runs on — and what happens when that ground is contested?
That is the real subject of CASA26’s second pillar — AI, sovereign infrastructure and agentic systems. It’s also why e& enterprise’s Ahmed Omer is returning to CASA26 to talk through sovereignty from a Middle East vantage point that looks nothing like it did a year ago.
For most of the AI cycle, the centre of gravity sat in a handful of hyperscaler data centres where the largest models were trained. That era is closing. Models are commoditising — capable, open-weight, increasingly interchangeable. The defensible value is moving to a different question.
The hard part is no longer building the model. The hard part is deciding where it runs.
Training is a one-time, centralised act. Inference — the actual work of intelligence, performed millions of times a day — is not. It wants to be close to the data, close to the user, close to the decision. That pulls it out of the hyperscaler core and toward the edge: into networks, devices, enterprise premises and regional infrastructure. The economics point the same way. The binding constraint on AI is no longer chips alone; it is power, latency and the cost of moving data around. Inference at the edge is often cheaper, faster and easier to govern than inference shipped to a distant cloud and back.
This is the opening the telecom industry has been waiting for, whether or not it realises it.
Hyperscalers own scale. What they cannot easily own is proximity, regulatory standing and trust — the three things that decide where regulated intelligence is allowed to run. Operators have all three almost by default: physical infrastructure close to the user, deep compliance relationships with national regulators, and decades of being trusted with sensitive data.
Sovereign AI is usually framed as a burden — GDPR, the EU AI Act, data-residency rules, the long list of reasons a regulated enterprise cannot simply pipe its data into a centralised model. Framed that way, it’s a cost. Framed correctly, it’s a market. The very rules that make centralised LLMs unusable for a bank, a hospital or a government create demand for intelligence that runs on controlled, in-country, compliant infrastructure. Someone has to host that. The operator with edge sites, a power footprint and a regulator’s trust is better placed to do it than almost anyone.
We saw the early shape of this at CASA25. Deutsche Telekom set out a blueprint for a sovereign CPaaS built on European terms. KPN made the case that reinvention is as much about AI culture and capability inside the operator as about the technology itself. Intel joined the uncomfortable conversation about why telcos keep failing at innovation — which is, at heart, this exact gap between holding the right assets and actually moving on them. And BT’s work on UC Edge points at the same instinct: push capability out to where the customer and the data already are.
The assets are real. The question CASA26 has to answer is whether the industry can convert them into a commercial position before the window closes.
There is a third force tightening all of this: agentic AI. Once intelligence is distributed across networks, devices and enterprises, the next step is agents that don’t just answer but act — booking, paying, negotiating, resolving, on a customer’s or a company’s behalf, with a degree of autonomy.
That changes the stakes of “where it runs” entirely. An agent acting autonomously inside a regulated business is not a chatbot; it’s an actor with access, authority and consequences. The control plane — the layer that governs which agents may operate, on what data, under whose rules, with what audit trail — becomes the most valuable real estate in the stack. It is, in effect, the new orchestration layer, and it sits naturally next to the infrastructure that hosts the inference.
CASA has to be honest here, because the industry often isn’t. Much of what is sold today as “agentic AI” is still a demo. At CASA25, the agentic sessions — including the “beyond the buzz” discussion Kyle Nel led, with Intel among those at the table — kept returning to the unglamorous questions: consent, identity, trust, governance, and whether any of it survives an enterprise procurement process. The capability is racing ahead. The governance, the economics and the trust model are not. That gap is the opportunity, not the disappointment.
The AI and sovereignty track at CASA26 is built around the questions that decide who captures this — not the ones that demo well:
These are analyst-led discussions, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who build, regulate, finance and deploy this infrastructure — operators, chipmakers, investors and the regional voices, including e& enterprise, who are living the sovereignty question in real time.
This is also one of the CASA26 tracks open for a partner to help shape and lead. If your company’s future depends on where intelligence runs — and on being seen as one of the organisations defining the answer — this is the conversation to be inside, while the track is still open.
The cloud was built for humans. The next infrastructure is being built for intelligence — and the question of whose soil it stands on is no longer academic.
Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.
Next in the series: Network APIs & Telecom Transformation — from API counts to programmable networks, identity, and the business model operators keep missing.
First in a four-part series unpacking the pillars of CASA26.
At CASA25, four analysts looked at the same market and disagreed about its size by more than a factor of ten. That wasn’t a rounding error. It was a fundamental disagreement about what business this industry is actually in.
That argument is the real subject of CASA26’s first pillar — Intelligent Engagement — and it’s where we’ll begin this four-part series on the questions the industry needs to resolve before September. It’s the pillar closest to CASA’s origins, and the one with the most money attached.
For most of the last decade, the CPaaS story was a story about reach. Get a message into any channel, anywhere, at scale. That was genuinely valuable, and it built an industry. But it is now largely commoditised. A2P SMS is a margin business under structural pressure. Channels proliferate, prices compress, and “we can reach your customer” is no longer a position — it’s table stakes.
The value has moved up the stack. It now sits in context, intelligence, and increasingly in autonomy: knowing who the customer is, what they’re trying to do, and being able to act on that in the moment. Intelligent Engagement is the name for what comes after “channels.” It’s the convergence of CPaaS, conversational platforms, AI, and customer data into something an enterprise no longer treats as a cost line, but as its primary, intelligence-bearing interface with its customers.
That reframing sounds abstract until you attach a number to it.
Come back to that order-of-magnitude disagreement, because it’s the most revealing thing CASA25 surfaced. It would be easy to read the spread as a measurement problem. It isn’t. It’s a disagreement about what business we think we’re in.
If you measure messages sent, you get one number, and it’s a shrinking one. If you measure engagement outcomes — intents resolved, journeys completed, fraud prevented, revenue influenced, churn avoided — you get a very different number, and it’s growing. The gap between the pessimistic and optimistic forecasts is, in effect, the gap between vendors who still sell volume and vendors who have learned to sell outcomes. The market isn’t waiting for permission to grow. It’s waiting for providers to reposition.
This is also where the industry has to be honest with itself. One of the sharpest moments at CASA25 was the “all bars, no bucks” challenge — the observation that we have built extraordinary capability and have not been disciplined about monetising it. The constraint on Intelligent Engagement is not the technology. The technology is ready. The constraint is the business model, and the willingness to charge for results rather than throughput.
If you want a live example of the shift, look at voice. For years it was the legacy channel everyone was quietly migrating away from. AI has reversed that almost overnight. Natural, programmable, low-latency voice has turned the oldest channel into one of the most interesting — not as a call, but as an interface for agents that can understand and act. Radisys made exactly this case at CASA25: voice is back, not because we missed it, but because it became intelligent. Telnyx showed the same shift from the developer side — the move from “ask your developer” to “ask your assistant,” with voice as a programmable, AI-native capability rather than a legacy line.
Agentic systems push the same logic further. The trajectory runs from broadcasting messages, to orchestrating journeys, to deploying agents that act on customer context with a degree of autonomy. Each step moves the provider closer to the outcome — and closer to the part of the value chain the enterprise actually pays a premium for.
The companies already winning here have made the same move in their own positioning. The leaders we heard from at CASA25 were not selling channels — they were selling business results, with the channel as an implementation detail. Sinch framed it as the shift from aggregation to orchestration. Infobip talked about scaling intelligent engagement. Vonage made the case for moving from connectivity to outcomes. Different language, same realisation: the value is in the result, not the route. That is the whole game.
And the market is starting to reward the move. Twilio — the company that effectively defined CPaaS — has just posted its fastest organic growth in years, and credits the acceleration squarely to voice and messaging reimagined around AI. The clearest sign yet that intelligent engagement isn’t a thesis about the future. It’s already in the numbers.
The same logic is now reshaping the players one layer up. In a recent CPaaSAA Talk, 8×8’s CEO Sam Wilson made the case for collapsing the old silos — UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS converging into a single engagement layer — on the simple grounds that customers don’t experience your org chart, they experience the outcome. That convergence is the structural story behind this pillar. The stack is consolidating around intelligence, and the providers who own the whole motion — context, channel and action — are the ones who get paid for the result rather than the traffic.
And this is no longer only a vendor story. Operators are climbing into the same layer. At CASA25, Deutsche Telekom set out a blueprint for a sovereign CPaaS, and KPN argued that trust itself is the product, not a feature bolted on. e& enterprise is further down that road than most — building an outcome-based play rather than a connectivity one — and Ahmed Omer returns to CASA26 to talk through what that looks like from the Middle East. Operators bring what the pure-play vendors structurally cannot: customer relationships, regulatory standing, and trust. Whether they move fast enough is the open question — but the ones who do will reshape this category, not just take part in it.
It would be easy to spend a session admiring the framework. We’re not interested in that. At CASA26 the Intelligent Engagement track is built to move from concept to commercial reality, with the questions that actually decide who captures the upside:
These are analyst-led discussions anchored in real use cases, in a room of around 150 senior leaders who buy, build and finance this category. That is the point of CASA: not an audience, but a working group of the people who can actually move it forward.
Intelligent Engagement is also one of the tracks at CASA26 that a partner can help shape and lead. If your company’s future depends on this category being understood correctly — and on being seen as one of the people defining it — that’s a conversation worth having now, while the track is still open.
Amsterdam. September 21–23. The next chapter starts now.
Next in the series: AI, Sovereign Infrastructure & Agentic Systems — where the intelligence layer meets the question of who controls it.
