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.

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.

Innovation is not a department

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.

The problem isn’t invention. It’s execution.

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.

What real outcomes actually look like

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.

Capital is the missing third

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.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

The innovation track at CASA26 is designed to move past the panel and toward the pilot:

• What turns a partnership from an MOU into a deployment — and what kills it in between?
• How do an operator and a startup actually work together without the startup being crushed by procurement or the operator slowed to a halt?
• How does capital get into the ecosystem early enough to change outcomes rather than just reward them?
• And what does a real outcome look like — how do we measure it, and hold ourselves to it?

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.

The whole series points here

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.

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.

The messaging layer is no longer where the value lives

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.

The forecast gap is an identity gap

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.

Voice is the clearest proof that the category is real

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.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

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:

• Where does the margin genuinely sit once the channel is commoditised — and what are enterprises demonstrably willing to pay for?
• What does “outcome-based” mean in an actual contract, and who is brave enough to sign one?
• How do you build customer context into engagement without colliding with trust, consent and data sovereignty — the subject of our other pillars, and not separable from this one?
• What separates an AI feature that demos well from an agent that survives contact with a real enterprise’s compliance, brand and economics?

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.

In a powerful and refreshingly down-to-earth keynote at CASA25, Sebastian Schumann of Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier pulled back the curtain on one of the most ambitious initiatives in European telecom: building a sovereign CPaaS platform, purpose-built for the wholesale market — and for a world increasingly defined by trust, sovereignty, and intelligent engagement.

This isn’t just another API platform. It’s a blueprint for how telcos can reclaim the CPaaS narrative, embed themselves deeper into enterprise value chains, and offer something that the tech giants simply can’t: control, compliance, and carrier-grade connectivity — at scale.

🔍 The Why: It All Starts with Sovereignty

Deutsche Telekom’s CPaaS platform was born out of a hard regulatory reality. As Sebastian shared, their prior communications tech stack — hosted on a US-based hyperscaler — was abruptly deemed non-compliant for sensitive sectors like healthcare and government.

“We couldn’t even use infrastructure that belonged to the big US hyperscalers,” Sebastian explained. “So we built our own — in Europe, for Europe.”

This shift became an opportunity, not a setback. In fact, it became a key differentiator. European enterprises, especially in regulated industries, are increasingly demanding data sovereignty, local hosting, and compliance with EU laws like GDPR and Schrems II.

Deutsche Telekom’s new CPaaS platform is hosted completely within Europe, built with open-source components like SignalWire and Mation, and architected to be disconnected from third-country data jurisdictions.

It’s not just a product. It’s a position — one that’s uniquely valuable in today’s world of rising digital nationalism and privacy expectations.

⚙️ The How: Telco Assets + Software Mindset

What makes Deutsche Telekom’s approach stand out is their clear focus on building, not buying.

Their team assembled a CPaaS platform from the ground up, layering modern APIs on top of decades of core telco infrastructure:

• Billions of voice minutes already flow through their aggregation stack
• SMS and RCS connectivity is managed directly or via Google’s hub, with Telekom handling the commercial aggregation that’s still a pain point in RCS
• The CPaaS layer is carrier-owned, carrier-operated, and extensible via open standards or compatibility layers

And they’ve embraced developer-centric principles without falling into the telco trap of waiting on standards committees.

“We didn’t wait for the standards. We used what’s already the de facto standard in the market,” Sebastian said. “Real-world compatibility is more important than agreement by committee.”

To ease onboarding, they even offer compatibility layers for customers migrating from “the big guys,” allowing them to reuse existing integrations and switch endpoints without rewriting applications.

🛠 The What: Not Just APIs — Solutions

This isn’t about API counts or developer dashboards. Deutsche Telekom’s platform is designed to solve real customer problems, with a special focus on wholesale enablers and enterprise resellers.

In fact, Sebastian made a point to say:

“You don’t sell APIs. You sell what’s behind them — the capabilities. And really, you sell a solution to a problem.”

That’s why the platform includes a low-code integration layer, allowing customers to connect CPaaS capabilities directly into systems like Salesforce or other CRMs — without needing deep technical teams or external SI support.

Think of it like this:

You’re an enterprise who needs to trigger a voice notification from Salesforce You don’t want to hire developers Deutsche Telekom’s platform lets you drag and drop that integration as part of a managed service — fully hosted in a European sovereign cloud

This is what Intelligent Engagement looks like in practice:

CPaaS that starts with a use case, not an API spec.

🤝 A Platform and a Product: White-Label CPaaS for Carriers

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

Deutsche Telekom isn’t just offering CPaaS to large enterprise customers — they’re enabling other telcos to plug in their own trunks, white-label the platform, and run their own branded CPaaS on top of Telekom’s infrastructure.

It’s a multi-layered go-to-market model:

Serve direct wholesale traffic generators Enable partners and telcos to offer CPaaS under their own brand Offer full-stack capabilities: from local trunks and termination to CRM integration and billing

For smaller telcos looking to enter CPaaS or modernize their enterprise offering, this could be a fast track to market, bypassing years of development.

📚 The Roadblocks: Education & Awareness

Despite the technical readiness and regulatory fit, the biggest challenge isn’t code — it’s culture.

“Educating our own salespeople was tough,” Sebastian admitted.

“They know how to sell SMS and voice — now we’re asking them to sell something that helps others sell voice and SMS. It’s a different mindset.”

And enterprise customers don’t always speak the language of CPaaS. They don’t ask for APIs — they ask for automation, web interfaces, and ways to simplify communication workflows.

This underscores the need for solutions storytelling, not just product specs.

🧭 Why This Matters

Deutsche Telekom’s CPaaS initiative isn’t just a technical feat — it’s a strategic blueprint for European telcos looking to stay relevant in a cloud-first, AI-driven, privacy-sensitive world.

• ✅ It reclaims telco value by combining connectivity with software
• ✅ It meets rising enterprise demand for sovereignty and trust
• ✅ It turns legacy assets into future-facing solutions
• ✅ It empowers other telcos to participate in CPaaS without building from scratch

And most importantly, it does all this without waiting for the perfect standard or the next committee meeting.

“It’s not black and white,” Sebastian said. “But if you have the numbers, the routes, and compatibility — you’re in the game.”

🚀 Final Word

At CASA25, Deutsche Telekom showed what’s possible when a telco leans into its strengths, learns from the platform players, and delivers value the European way — with control, compliance, and real-world business models.

It’s not just CPaaS. It’s CPaaS with purpose.