MWC25 CPaaS RCS and More
I attended my first Mobile World Congress (#MWC25) in Barcelona. I believe it’s the biggest tech conference in the world. In this first MWC25 post, I want to share thoughts about CPaaS, RCS, and Infobip.
But first, just a bit on the general event.
I was already in Europe, so I thought this was the year to finally attend MWC. American tech is dominant in so many areas, but Europe is the leader in mobile. Nokia and Ericsson are European companies, and so is much of the ecosystem. The big exception is hardware, which is dominated by Asia. US mobility is relatively stationary.
In Europe, it becomes even clearer to me that UCaaS and mobility will converge. This still freaks out a lot of my colleagues, but it’s coming. One provider, one plan, number portability from softphone to smartphone—that was a common topic in my conversations with Alianza and RingCentral, but it came up in other interactions, too. More on this is a separate post.
I spent five days at MWC and walked 80k steps (the “mobile world” part). My hotel had a great location downtown, but that’s nowhere near the conference center. I had a 30 minute daily subway commute.
The event started on Sunday with Show Stoppers – cool new tech. I’ve attended Show Stoppers before at CES. I saw lots of cool things and met with many exciting people. A quick hat tip to Aduna, Alianza, AWS, the CPaaS Alliance, Ericsson, Microsoft, Ribbon, RingCentral, Tango, Vodafone, and Vonage for hosting thought-provoking meetings and conversations.
However, Infobip dominated my schedule. The company agreed to make many of its executives available to chat and recommended several sessions for me to attend. MWC has lots of theaters. Infobip is based in Croatia and is almost 20 years old. The CPaaS provider is recognized as a CPaaS Leader by many analyst firms.
Here are some of my take-aways that Infobip helped reveal.
1) Everyone needs CPaaS. I’ve championed CPaaS use cases within enterprises for a long time, but never realized that MNOs can benefit from CPaaS too. Most businesses can. Noel Wirzius from Deutsche Telecom shared with me how T-Mo uses CPaaS services.
2) RCS is Global This sounds obvious as that’s the whole point of a global standard. However, there is more to this than I considered. Yoshie Tsukamoto, from NTT Online, is a delight. Yoshie was educated in the US and speaks great English, but lives and works in Japan. She was excited to hear about my travels and adventures in Japan (thanks, NEC). Yoshie shared how NTT uses Infobip for omnichannel communications – in Japanese.
3) RCS is growing fast. I ran into Ivan Ostojic every day at MWC. Ivan is the Chief Business Officer at Infobip, and we discussed the recently published Message Trends Report. This Infobip research explores the 530 billion interactions on its platform since 2024. One key takeaway is that RCS is growing more quickly than most realize.
Ostojic hosted a session/chat with Google’s Josh Popper. Popper compared RCS to color TV adoption, which exploded after the ’64 Olympics. That adoption curve took nearly a decade because, as Popper pointed out, everyone had to buy new TVs. RCS is already enabled on our cell phones and is already providing real benefits to users (trust) and brands (conversion rates). It was in this session that the overlap between RCS and CCaaS became much clearer to me.
4) The scope of CPaaS Continues to Grow. This was a recurring theme. I heard it the loudest from Matija Razem and Viktorija Radman. Rezem is the Chief Commercial Officer at Infobip. He told me how Infobip works with companies and committees on Camara, Open Gateway, and more. Infobip achieved the milestone of 1,000 partners in 2024, and its roster of partners includes Nokia, Aduna, DT, Rakuten Viber, Vocalcom, and more.
Radman is the Telecom Business Director at Infobip. I didn’t get to interview her because she was on so many panels, but I did hear her present about how CPaaS is evolving. This includes network-level APIs and Infobit’s work with Aduna. I sat in an interesting closed-door session with Radman, Telefonica, Google, and others to discuss how to get developers more aware of network-level API capabilities. Radman shared interesting network API use cases with MNOs in Brazil during presentations. Radman was elected to the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) Board of Directors at MWC25.
5) It’s a Global Effort: Mobile tech is diverse. Tech giants like Nokia and Ericsson are European, the hardware is Asian, and the ecosystem is extremely diverse. Some European and Asian countries rely on mobile infrastructure far more than Americans—for communications, commerce, collaboration, and more.
Infobip started in a small village in Croatia about 19 years ago. It’s a leader today and has a very diverse workforce. I met employees from several countries. I discussed this with its founder and CEO, Silvio Kutic. He’s a straight shooter with a sense of humor.
Potential posts on my mind after my visit to MWC:
- Network APIs and Aduna
- The Future of Enterprise Communications
- RCS and CCaaS
- It’s About QoS
- The Future of Events
- Heads-Up Glasses and NexGen Mobility.