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.

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.

The plumbing finally works

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.

We counted the APIs. We forgot to ask what they’re worth.

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.

Identity and fraud is the wedge

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.

The disintermediation question nobody wants to ask

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.

What CASA26 will do with this pillar

The Network API track at CASA26 is built to skip the milestone update and go straight to the commercial core:

• Which use cases actually have a buyer and a price — and which are still capabilities in search of a business?
• What pricing and commercial models survive contact with a real enterprise: per-call, per-outcome, revenue share?
• How do operators avoid being disintermediated by the very aggregators and hyperscalers that make the APIs usable?
• Is identity the wedge that finally makes the rest of the catalogue sellable?

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.