Ep 17 – The Software Series: 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!

THIS WEEK’S GUEST

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.