Podcast

Ep 17 – The Software Series: LastMileXchange

This week’s guest

James Grant & Andrew Hoskin

Co-Founders LastMileXchange

Regular listeners are familiar with the baseless objections I hear from telcos when I preach the business-transforming potential of the public cloud. For this episode, I’m joined by two industry pros who have believed in the public cloud for as long as I have – James Grant and Andrew Hoskin, co-founders of London-based LastMileXchange (LMX).

LMX helps carriers digitize and automate their global access quoting process. It moved to Amazon in 2010, started encouraging telcos to consider multi-tenant, cloud-based solutions, and ran into the same old-guard naysayers that I’ve dealt with over the years. But, like me, LMX started to feel things shifting a few years ago, and it can see a public cloud future for telco on the horizon. Listen to our conversation to hear about:

  • The challenges LMX has faced – and still faces – in helping telcos navigate their public cloud journey [3:27];
  • Where it believes customizations belong in products [6:17];
  • Why it’s hard for software vendors to say no when clients ask for customizations [10:13];
  • Its quest to make LMX a verb [13:12];
  • What the company has its eyes on next, including a multi-tenant, SaaS, access quoting solution that could change the competitive landscape for small- to medium-sized carriers [14:19].
  • Listen to the end for details on Cloud City at MWC in Barcelona [18:33]. See you there on June 28!

Links and Resources

  • You can find the transcript for this episode here.
  • Check out my article in Light Reading, Why do telco software companies have such lame valuation multiples?, where I talk about product-led companies vs. product and services companies
  • Read about all our plans for Cloud City at MWC 2021 in Barcelona
  • Calling all disruptive, innovative, telco software vendors – if your solutions are built on the public cloud, we want to host your company in our Cloud City – for free! Contact me for details 
  • And in case you’re interested, here’s a video of a snake swallowing a deer. (If you’re not sure what it’s doing here, listen to the end of this episode.)

Author’s bio

James Grant is commercial director and co-founder of LastMileXchange. He has an MSc in Human Geography and Economics and joined the telecom industry in 1996 working at Telecom Italia and Worldcom before co-founding LastMileXchange in 2005.

Andrew Hoskin is technical director and co-founder of LastMileXchange. He has a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and, while originally from Australia, moved to the UK in 1999, choosing the telecom industry over a career in forensics. Andrew worked at Worldcom and Verizon Business before co-founding LastMileXchange in 2005.


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The Telco in 20 podcast won a 2022 Gold Hermes Award and was recognized on Forrester’s 2021 list of the Top 100 Channel Podcasts and Feedspot’s Top 10 Telecom Podcasts list.

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Podcast Credits

  • Executive Producer and Host: Danielle Rios Royston, TelcoDR
  • Executive Producer: Kristin Donelson, OneLouder Marketing
  • Senior Producer: Lindsay Grubb, TillCo Media
  • Editor/Producer: Alisa Jenkins Wilson, Springboard Marketing
  • Audio Editing: Andrew Condell
  • Music: Dyami Wilson

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