Telesign VP Pierre Demarche works to innovate programmable communication solutions

The cloud. What was once a term for visible moisture in the sky has now become a hot tech term that is a vital part of everyday life. Working in Silicon Valley, Pierre Demarche knows this better than most. Demarche is the Vice President of Product and Marketing at Telesign, a Communications Platform as a Service company, founded on security. He is responsible for a vast amount of components at TeleSign, including product development, which means he is well-versed in how to make new forms of cloud communications work for his target market.

“I want to further drive the success of TeleSign and the transaction between BICS and TeleSign. Since the acquisition we have been scaling up the operations and the organizations and launched a lot of new products. As we are growing, we want to accelerate the development of new innovative digital security and identity solutions. We see a lot of traction around our new products from companies all over the world. I want to capitalize on the foundations that have been built to bring TeleSign to the next level, being the leader in the mobile identity and authentication space and fully seizing the market opportunity to set TeleSign as a large and successful company for the future,” said Demarche.

As part of that, Demarche want to further invest into some key technologies and developments to bring new innovative solutions, at the intersection between the identity and digital security market and the cloud communication markets, that will help and support companies worldwide to generate more business, engage and secure with their end users through their online experience. As a result, they are shortly launching a new version of their Score product which will leverage unique machine learning algorithms providing risk score around phone numbers worldwide, which is a unique asset that is already enabling companies today that interact and know their end users through their phone number to secure and take key business decisions based on the score value provided by TeleSign. In parallel, they have launched RCS that is a new cloud communication solutions.

Rich Communication Services (RCS) has arrived and with it the future of cloud communications. On its face RCS is essentially enriched mobile messaging, letting businesses engage with customers using features traditionally associated with other peer to peer over-the-top messaging services like WhatsApp or iMessage. What’s exciting about the arrival of RCS though is how it affects the future of A2P messaging. Specifically in regards to alerts, reminders, and notifications that a brand might send its users, RCS unlocks the world of pictures, GIFs, rich cards and even chat bot functionality. An RCS message can set a calendar invite, provide light customer support all with beautiful corporate branding. In short, it is going to set the tone for how brands interact with their customers moving forward. TeleSign just launched a new RCS product and is one of the leaders offering unique solutions to enable brands to engage with their end users, in a space that sees more and more disruption in the way that enterprises communicate with consumers through their online experience

“CPaaS becomes a very large terminology. There are a lot of players, investments and innovation and it becomes more and more fragmented. Eventually, it is a question of providing solutions enabling enterprises to engage, communicate, connect and collaborate with their end users but in complementarity with a high experience and level of insight. That is where TeleSign is uniquely positioned with a strong identity and security DNA, providing solutions that enables brands to protect and connect online experiences with sophisticated customer identity and engagement solutions,” said Demarche.

In addition, with BICS, TeleSign has all telco assets available that support all the CPaaS solutions, which clearly provide a competitive advantage to launch unique solutions leveraging assets from both telco and software spaces, develop at higher cadence and go to market faster, and provide a higher level of quality and lowest cost structure.

TeleSign is having a very enterprise solutioning approach, customizing solutions to the specific needs of its customers and interacting deeply with them along all the steps of the relationships as a business partner. That is the way the organization is set up and the way Demarche operates and leads his organization. This approach allows him to drive the product roadmap, product strategy and investments in the most efficient way as he and his team know what the customers need in a space where lots of players invest massively with sometimes little or no profit generated, which puts at risk the entire longer term success of the company.

"I have worked with Pierre for more than two years on a number of strategic projects. I greatly value his vision in how mobile identity and programmable telecom provide unique solutions to enterprises globally," said Alan Quayle, owner of TADsummit, a very influential think tank around programmable telecommunications.

RCS is undoubtedly a hot topic on the market. Everyone has their own opinion about its potential and long-term impact. However, few people truly understand the global picture in the space, how RCS fits into a global solution and how to position RCS within a solution environment and not simply as one messaging product for enterprises. Demarche, however, not only understands how to do this, but is in the process of implementing it. Telesign is very early in the product life cycle of RCS, but it promises to be a massive success for the company.

“The real success for me is not the isolated success of one product or feature but the success of the whole product strategy that I am leading and consequent growth of the company that I am accountable for. With the traction we see since the launch of RCS though, we can at least claim validation of some of those assumptions. But my vision on our product strategy and market position remains global and consists of multiple steps and iterations. This is one of those steps that is driving us towards our longer-term vision,” he concluded.

By Annabelle Lee

Sept. 15th, 2019