Over the past couple of months we have spoken at, sat in on and walked the floors of a run of them: platform user group meetings, partner summits, customer conferences. Good rooms, all of them. Service providers who build on the platform, the innovation partners who plug into it, sponsor floors full of AI voice, trust and number-management companies, the odd hackathon showing what next year’s features might look like.
And at every one of them, almost everyone already knew each other.
That is not a criticism. It is what these events are for. They deepen the relationships an ecosystem already has: customers learn the roadmap, partners meet the customers, the host hears what to build next. Done well, they are among the most valuable days in a company’s year.
But in the corridors we kept hearing the same question, and it is one these events cannot answer: who is not in the room?
One platform leader put it to us plainly: we have the partner logos on the slide. Now what?
The big shows are fading, and owned rooms can’t replace them
For two decades this industry met at a handful of big horizontal shows. Everybody went, so everybody met everybody, including people they had no reason yet to know. That model is weakening. Marketing budgets are moving out of trade show booths and into rooms companies own: user conferences, partner summits, customer advisory boards, private dinners, invitation-only retreats.
The logic is sound. An owned room is curated, on-message and full of people who matter to you today. The cost is less obvious. An owned room is built from your own address book. It deepens. It does not widen.
We saw the other side of that at CASA26. One platform in our community left with five serious conversations with telcos it had not worked with before. Five, from one room. Not because the platform did anything differently, but because of who else was in the room.
The asks we get have changed too. Members no longer ask us for bigger stages. They ask us to host dinners: a small table, the right people, enough time to talk about something deeper than the next release. And more and more of our partners want to hold their own gatherings next to ours: a side meeting, a partner session, a community get-together in the same week and the same city as CASA. Not because they cannot fill a room on their own, but because many of their guests are coming to ours anyway, and the conversation is better with both rooms side by side.
Strangers don’t come to your party
Look at who a platform needs to meet next, and who would actually accept the invitation.
A service provider that buys from a competing platform will not spend two days at your user conference. A telco will rarely send its network API or wholesale team to an event built around one platform’s partners. An AI voice startup with eight people and a product to sell has never heard of your partner programme, and has no reason to fly in to find out. Analysts and investors go where the whole market is, not one corner of it.
None of this is fixable with a bigger budget. It is a property of the invitation. When the host is a player in the market, everyone else reads the event as the host’s event, and decides accordingly. Neutrality is the one thing you cannot buy for your own room.
AI is making the innovators matter more
Why does this matter more now than it did five years ago? Because AI is changing where the value sits.
Think of a communications platform as the engine in a racing car. It is shared, stable and proven, and every team that licenses it gets the same one. What wins races is everything built around it. As service providers move into verticals, the difference comes from the pieces added on top: the healthcare workflow, the compliance layer, the AI agent that actually resolves the ticket. More and more of those pieces are built by small, specialised innovators, not by the platforms themselves.
That makes the innovators more important than they have ever been, and it leaves them with a hard problem. Their route to market runs through platforms and the service providers on them. They still need carrier paths, numbers, emergency calling and someone accountable when the call fails. And at some point most of them need investors who understand this market. Nowhere do all of those people come together.
The operators sit in this picture too. A service provider running on a platform buys its minutes, its trunking and its connectivity somewhere, often from the same operator. So for an operator active in the business market, a platform play of its own makes sense, and some are now buying or building one. It is a synergy, not a dependency: platform licensees keep their freedom to choose. But it puts operators, platforms and innovators in the same story.
Same challenge, three different starting points. The platforms need the innovators. The innovators need the platforms and the operators to get to market. The operators need both to make their networks and their trust services matter to the business customers they already have. They all need each other, and most of them do not really know each other. They are different worlds.
Three worlds that need each other, in one room
Most of the rooms we visited this year had two of the three. Telcos and AI companies, without the platforms. Platforms and their innovators, without the telcos. Getting two of these worlds together is hard but doable. Getting all three into the same room is much harder, and it is exactly where the value sits.
That is the triangle CPaaSAA has been building since 2019: telcos, cloud communications platforms and AI companies, with the analysts and investors around them, in one community. Our research interviews all three. Our working groups mix them. CASA puts them in the same house once a year. That neutrality took years to earn, and it is the part of what we do that members use most.
What we add is more than a room. We act as an honest broker: we select, we qualify, and we make sure every introduction is worth both sides’ time. That is the difference between a slide full of partner logos and partners who actually sell together.
An ecosystem within our ecosystem
We have spent the past few years building CPaaSAA into that meeting place: the platform for Intelligent Engagement, where these worlds find each other. Now, at the end of October, we are looking back on our own CASA26 and on a run of other partner events this autumn, and asking ourselves the honest questions. What worked? What could we do better? Where do we add the most value? Add the asks we get from members and the platform moves announced over the past few months, and the answer is clear: bringing all three corners together is the right role for us, and it is becoming more important. So we are doubling down on it, with a number of new initiatives in 2027.
Every ecosystem we look at has the same shape, whether the company at its centre is a platform, an operator or both: the partners who sell on one side, the innovators who make the offer different on the other, and the anchor in the middle. For some anchors the innovators are partners. For others they are customers too, because every AI agent still needs numbers, minutes and a network to run on. Either way, the anchor needs more of them, and the right ones.
So inside the wider CPaaSAA community we are building ecosystems of their own. An Accelerate member can anchor a programme for its resellers, integrators and innovation partners, bringing them into the Alliance at the normal membership tiers. They join one open community, not a private club: they sit in the working groups, read the research and meet everyone else. What stays the anchor’s own is the commercial relationship.
Around those programmes we will run focused sessions that members can sponsor and shine at. Smaller tables, not trade show floors. Each is built around a question rather than a sponsor, and about content and results: AI voice meets the carrier network, trust and the accountable call, what a vertical actually needs. Several members can back the same session with equal billing, and we build the guest list to include the operators, platforms and innovators none of them could invite on their own. Some sit alongside the moments the industry already gathers for. Others are closer to home, built around one market and its service providers.
Parts of this are already running. One of our Accelerate members has a programme like this for its voice AI partners, co-funding their first year in the Alliance. The dinners and side meetings members ask us for are early versions of the same thing. In 2027 we make it deliberate.
Convening once a year is not the same as building all year
None of this replaces anyone’s own event. Keep your user conference. It does a job nothing else does. The question is where you meet the people who are not in it yet, and where the conversation carries on between the events: in the working groups, the research and the community.
Communities are not built in two days. They are built in the weeks between the events, by people who keep showing up because the room is worth it.
Your own event shows you how strong your ecosystem is today. A shared room is where you meet the companies that decide what it becomes.
If you run a platform or an operator business with an ecosystem to grow, and you recognise this picture, talk to us. We are setting up the first programmes and sessions for 2027 now. Get in touch.
I've spent my career in IT and telecoms building bridges, from the early days of cloud communications to today's reset around APIs, CPaaS and AI.
As Founding Partner of The Next Cloud and CPaaSAA, I help telcos, CPaaS players and AI-native scaleups work out where they fit in the AI era, through strategy, ecosystem building and events.
My view: the value is moving from platforms to outcomes, and real innovation comes from ecosystems, not incumbents acting alone.
Based in Amsterdam, usually somewhere else.
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