Podcast #19 - Joshua Markham at Verizon

Joshua Markam, Developer Relations leader, sat down to discuss his role with Verizon APIs and the innovations around the Internet of Things. He discusses the challenges developers face in IoT connectivity, the significance of edge computing, and the future opportunities in the IoT space. The conversation also highlights Verizon's partnership with APImatic to enhance developer experience and the trends shaping telco APIs, including the emerging Camara standard.

Sid Maestre
Joshua, welcome to the podcast. Let's start by hearing about your journey into tech and what led you to your current position at Verizon.

Joshua Markham
Great question. Thanks. You know, I think there are a few things. I think I'm one of the unique ones where it was more of an accidental into tech. Although I did start off, I was a young data miner in finance, so it's not like it was completely out of left field. But you know, over time, you know, growing up in a wireless company, you get really good at routing, you get really good at switching, you get really good at carrier grade networking, but then I wanted to move closer more and more into software. And I love IoT, because that's where I've spent most of my career has really been about building new business models and or helping people do what they do better by adding a little bit of intelligence on a small device so that they can do cool things. But yeah, so it's been a long road.

How many years have you been with Verizon now? So I started when I was 11. It's been 26 years that I've been at Verizon. You know, we've the cool thing about our job is that people aren't connecting less things to the internet. So we might be working with a car manufacturer one day and then a dog collar company that's got GPS tracking. Historically, I was a little bit more on the industrial side, with distribution networks with utilities, oil and gas pipelines, ensuring that they had safety and security networks, everything from cathodic protection down to the connected oil drilling equipment, which, you know, which is a different world, but everybody was super smart and super kind, they're working hard. And so you learn a lot and you grow up really fast when you're working with all of these people have so much experience, it's been been a blast.

Sid Maestre
Awesome, awesome. So I think the first topic I'd like to dig into with you is around innovation at Verizon, around G and this IoT division that you're really focused on.

So you've been at the forefront of these G deployment. Can you share some of the most exciting innovations that you're seeing emerge specifically due to these new capabilities around G and internet of things?

Joshua Markham
Right. You know, I have a feeling that's a little bit like 4G, right? So that when 4G was rolled out, we didn't know TikTok and Instagram were going to be created. However, fundamentally, they had to have a different type of network to be able to do that.

We're in that same space of 5G right now to where some of the things we know are no-brainers, right? Like fixed wireless access for either remote machines in the IoT space or fixed wireless access for a branch of a bank or of a pharmacy. We're going to have more and more of this. It's about to speed up really quickly, right? So it's not just going to be your automobile that's going to have a 5G connectivity, but it will be applications that require a CV. And let's say you want to keep your device costs down on your camera and compute on site. So you're going to run some ML code there, but you'll also need to run relatively nearby, you know, something with more horsepower so that your inference server can be closer to you. So you can keep the bomb cost down on your equipment. And so you're going to see anything automotive is going to be first, then robotic and delivery is going to be second. And then you're going to start seeing these drones and computer vision and then a mixture of all of those, right, because delivery robots are already doing all of that on board, and then sometimes with nearby compute.

Sid Maestre
So this whole world of transportation, whether it's self-driving cars or logistics and shipping is going to really benefit from having this compute that's on the edge that's closer and more responsive in real time.

Joshua Markham
Yes. And that's, we're going to see that at like the low power use cases. Right.

And so as, as a chip set prices go down, we can fundamentally connect more things. And at the same time, we've, we're building these bigger, faster, stronger networks, right, that are going to require more bandwidth. The applications themselves are, you know, can become latency dependent that, especially in like smart grids, right. You've got to be able to make decisions in milliseconds. And so you're, you're going to have to have this paradigm where it starts with low latency and high, you may not even need high capacity, but you need low latency. And then we're also going to see we need high capacity, but we, latency is fine. And so you're starting to see us being able to tune the network per the application. So if you're just a water meter that needs to chirp, we've got something that's going to help you save your battery and then some strategies and some things that we've invested in the network to make those batteries last. And then we also have, Hey, let's go, let's go stream broadband TV, you know, directly from the camera live and, and have a great picture and great experience for the end users.

Sid Maestre
It really sounds like there's this invisible world that is powering our lives that we aren't aware of, but it's ever present and it's helping deliver these great experiences.

Joshua Markham
And that means it's working, right? So if it feels closer to magic and you can't see it, then it's awesome.

However, it's highly engineered to work well for all these different use cases. But yes, that's a good thing.

Sid Maestre
So from your point of view, what are some of the key challenges that developers face when working with IoT connectivity and how do you think Verizon's API design is set up to address some of these challenges?

Joshua Markham
All right, so I kind of take that in three different buckets, right? So the first one is scale and good, bad, or indifferent. If anybody's changed their family rate plan with, uh, with whoever their carrier is, it's not always easy. And so imagine trying to do that with a, with 10,000 devices or a hundred thousand devices. So everything my team does and everything our developers do is really around and the product team for that matter is really to design for scale. Traditionally, IOT has required lower margins, both for us and our customers. And so we have to automate these transactions so that the business model actually holds up. So scale is one of them, you know, being able to activate 10,000 devices or deactivate 10,000 devices with a single API call starts to really make sense.

The second thing where API is really, really coming to place is really around the remoteness of the, of the nature of machines and, and IOT, which is in the oil and gas world, you might have a router that's sitting out there doing something very important that's six hours away from the nearest human. Um, and so you need to understand the state of the network and you'd understand the state of the device. And then, you know, having alerts and all of these things are, are API driven now. And then same thing with cars, right? So if, if a car has wifi in it and you've got to push, you know, critical gigabyte update, well, I needed at some point, you can't wait for wifi anymore. And you've just got to push it over the, over the wireless network. And so there are strategies and APIs that we can do to help them understand what's the best time to be able to do these things.

And then lastly is security. So we've got, you know, scale, remote, and then security, everything from locking down Sims to layering at all the pieces that we know about devices. Right. So your chip sets got to be secure. Every stack on your device has to be secure. And then the Sims got to be locked down. And then depending on the nature of the data, you know, do we put it in a private APN, do you pin up your own tunnels? You know, what are the best strategies to, to really, to really make it work for everybody. And we try to do all of that with just APIs as well.

And some of those strategies, they affect the others, right? So ensuring, like when we launched something like SIM secure, so that the, the SIM is ever removed out of a device and put into another one, they don't have access to your private network. I think the first iteration is, you know, we sign them all up and you're good. We use that in another thousand devices. Okay. Now we've got to go back and do that a thousand more times. And so over time, we have the opportunity to, you know, grow the services and ensure that, that they keep up with the scaling. The people.

Sid Maestre
So it really sounds like your APIs have grown from this necessity that you couldn't actually support these use cases if a human had to drive out and manage all of these connections or you had to have a person on the phone at Verizon manually activating and deactivating lines.

This is all unlocking a lot of use cases that weren't possible in the past.

Joshua Markham
Fast, right? So everything we do for scale, so there are seven people on my team and I always want us to be able to act like 70. And that means that we have to teach our customers how to correctly scale their services. You know, I think we only have 15 APIs, but it's over 300 end points. And so it gets highly nuanced because you're not just turning up a, you know, you're not turning up the exact same server every time. There's this dynamic nature of wireless technology and then as things progress and things change in their customer's hardware or their applications, you've got to take a lot of that into consideration when you're building these things.

Sid Maestre
How is Verizon leveraging this edge computing in conjunction with G and IoT?

And like, how is this impact the developer experience and the types of applications that you're seeing built?

Joshua Markham
So I think we're still early in this space. In fact, Verizon partnered with AWS and we've got wavelength zones together that actually sit in the Verizon network. And it's one of those things where we all know it makes sense because we know applications are going to matter for latency. However, I think there was a bit of delay in developers understanding that this is available to them.

I was speaking to a drone company a couple of months ago and they were actually aware of it, right? Now, what they did know real well was all the physics that come into a wireless network while flying a drone, right? And so we were able to help them there. But they understood the power of edge computing. And I think we're really going to get to this blended space because if you talk to some people, edge computing is on the device itself. If you talk to us, it's really the edge of the network. And then if you talk to others, it's some made up place and everything's the edge. So what I really think we're going to be doing is it's going to be a sliding scale of where which portion of your application is going to live where and where's the most intelligent place to put each piece because the more compute you put on your hardware, their bomb goes up. However, TinyML has come a long way over the past, you know, five to seven years. And it's truly remarkable now to where a company can run a TinyML model on the sensor itself and not even in the EPROM or other memory locations that take battery life. So we're starting to see all these different areas that are really starting to become interesting.

And it's going to be kind of this long chain of, you know, for this device and this business model, I need most of it here or I need very little of it here. I need more horsepower here. And then in the far cloud, that's that's really, really, you know, the training and all those super heavy duty workloads are still going to live. And I think if we if we the easiest way to understand it, I think, is if we look at the smart grid, right. And so, you know, you've got these transformers, you've got these distribution networks that are massive. And then you're going to start having people putting energy back onto the grid. Right. And so with solar and wind coming up on private properties, they're actually putting it back onto the grid. And so even if even if the electric company shuts down a portion of the line, there still might be electricity feeding the line. And so they've got to be exactly aware of everything that's plugged in to their grid, because it's going to be this new world where energy is going to be coming from everywhere.

And then if you start to think that we haven't really figured out how to transport electricity much better than we did, you know, 50 years ago, the only thing that's really going to change is intelligence. And so always really, really bright people figured out how to transport energy for us. We turn on our lights. We're completely safe doing that. But what those people need is more information. And so you're going to see more and more devices that live inside the grid, providing more and more feedback.

And then you're going to need some of them are going to have different profiles. So some of them are going to be low latency.

I've got to get the packet out and I need insurance that it's going to go out. Then you're also going to need here's just a whole bunch of streaming data that's going to be coming your way. It can be a little late and it's it's more for my data scientists to go through it at some. But when you start making these decisions in milliseconds about where you're routing power and what devices need to do, that's when you kind of start to see this, the capabilities of 5G and nearby compute and increase overall connectivity to the grid. That's really going to kind of start to harness and orchestrate all of these, all of these things that are coming together right now.

Sid Maestre
Wow. It's just an exciting world.

I mean, when you talk about, you know, ML on devices and smart grids and drones, is there anything you haven't touched on today that you think, you know, you're hearing, you get feedback, you talk to your customers a lot. You're hearing what developers are excited about. Is there anything, any other opportunities that we haven't touched on today that you, you think is kind of interesting or future forward?

Joshua Markham
That's a great question. You know, I think there's always going to be opportunities because really smart people are going to have really good ideas that, that had different experiences and so they're just going to think creatively and different. And we're going to be here to help them. Right.

So we're going to have silly connected things and we're going to have educational and connected devices. You know, I think AR, VR is still in its infancy. Um, you know, we hear about it all the time, but it's going to be absolutely massive. I just think the hardware is not quite there yet. And the networks are getting there to be able to support that. And in the manner in which those applications desire to be treated is going to be the key portion of it. Right. And, you know, I'm trying to think like my daughter has a, has a little watch that's connected, you know, it's, and a little gizmo so we can see where she is in GPS and, and everything is going to be connected. I think sports is still vastly underrated from a opportunity standpoint. I think it's going to leave the professional soccer pitches or football pitches, and it's going to become more prevalent in our lives. You know, I always used to joke that I could connect your water bottle to the internet, but are you going to pay me to do it? Right.

Like, you know, so as, as, as prices go down on modules and they continue to do so, people are going to think these really, really cool ideas that make your life, that make our, make our lives better.

Sid Maestre
It sounds like a combination of creative ideas and economies of scale coming together to make business sense for people to create new experiences.

Joshua Markham
Like, I've got a little system that waters my peppers when I'm gone, but I'm not going to productize it, right? It's just a fun thing to do, but we'll have somebody who is a hobbyist that's going to think of something really cool, that people are going to find value, and there's an actual business model around it that is going to come through.

And with AI getting better and better at writing software, it's going to be easier and easier for that hobbyist or that, you know, garage genius to build something that makes money.

Sid Maestre
Very cool. So I'd like to, to shift gears.

This is the developer experience podcast and you know, our art of, art of developer experience and API Matic is nice enough to help put this together. So I wanted to dive into Verizon and how they've partnered with API Matic. And maybe you could elaborate a bit on the goals around the partnership.

Joshua Markham
So this is an easy one. So at the end of the day, we want happy developers, right?

And we want interactions with our developers either in person or online to have as little friction as possible for them to be able to find what they want, how they want it, and us present it in an easy manner. If you notice we're a little bit different than an ISV, we aren't installing massive databases. I mean, we do behind the scenes for everything to work, but that's not our offer to the market. And so our developers are just like everybody else's developers, but our APIs are different. There's typically a thing attached to it. And so the overall goal is to be able to serve our developers in a modern way that makes sense.

I want to say that API Mac's done a great job of understanding our needs and our developers and then tweaking it until we feel like we've got it in.

Well, it's one other thing, one other thing. Yeah, that's the customer facing side. The other side of this is that we have to live with things, right? We've got to have our own CI CD pipeline of getting stuff updated to market. And so when you're talking about 300 different endpoints, you know, that's a lot on a when we're pushing code every two weeks, that's a lot of updates and new features to be done.

So being able to have the front shiny world look great. You know, it's not, it's, I don't feel like we're making sausage on the back end, right? I feel like it's nice and orderly, we've been able to fit in into our operational framework, so that it's not painful to make updates. Does that make sense?

Sid Maestre
So whenever your product and engineering teams are making those improvements or adding functionality on the API side of things, it can auto-matically flow into the front end so the developers are using the latest, greatest documentation that reflects your real API.

Joshua Markham
on a daily and weekly basis, right? So when we get the markup document from engineering, that's when our work starts, and that's when our tech writer gets it all flowing and gets it updated at the next release point.

Sid Maestre
That's great. And I'm curious, what were some of the considerations that led Verizon to choose APImatic as a partner when it came to enhancing your DX for your APIs?

Joshua Markham
You know, I think there are a few things that a modern development site should have, right? Your DAX should have a search. This is less on the platform, more on us, but you've got to have the business value described in the API. And then you have to go in deeper on the click, right? So there's value for the developer.

And this is how we look at a lot of things. This is how we do our developer days, is that we start off with what the why for the business side, and then we get into the technology for the developers. So that whoever joins our developer days gets everything they want. And you want that for your developer site specifically. You want a code sandbox or a playground that's actually able to be used and worked on. And then I think one of the things that I'm most happy about with APImatic are the SDKs and different languages. And so being able to meet the developer where they are in their paradigm. So if they're a Python developer, they're good to go. We've got everything they need on our site to be able to do that. I'm not a C sharp developer, I'm more Java and Python. And so I mean, code's code, you can read it and get it. But that's not what I spend my time doing. But all of those people are taken care of. And thank God, they don't need to call me for anything like that. So APImatic checked a lot of those boxes of what should you have and here's how to do it.

Sid Maestre
I've been in that position before where you've got a variety of languages that your developer community want to engage in and they'll come to you and they'll want to share some examples or they'll want you, they not so much debug your code, but like if they're running into issues, like they've got code they've written from scratch and you just kind of hold them off. Cause you don't want to get into that position of debugging their code.

Joshua Markham
Well, we can't right it'd be great if we had that service but we just don't scale enough to be able to do that and and so The the more tools we give our developers the better off they're absolutely going to be and our developers are slightly different right because we have a whole bunch of three GPP standards and a little bit of Verizon magic dust, you know kind of all behind the scenes making you know, this This wireless world work and the more we can abstract that from the developer experience and just have a clean high-level API with great documentation and code samples And then now we've even added our own little AI agent almost everything somebody needs is there And if they need a little extra help they can always call us

Sid Maestre
That's awesome.

I'm wondering if you could walk me through what a typical journey for a developer integrating with Verizon's APIs now and maybe how that differed before you had the partnership. What was that developer onboarding experience like?

Joshua Markham
So, onboarding is always a discussion forever, and I think it will be for every developer group. One, we do have a path for new developers to go and put a credit card. They can buy some sims with some data and get going, and they have access to the documentation. Most of our developers have a big relationship with Verizon, or they sign a contract with us, and they get access to a little bit more.

One of the first things, our original documentation was very flat, so it was very easy to search with the Control-F, but it didn't add the texture that you needed for some of these experiences, right? So now, we have one of our engineers, not on the DevRel team, meet with the customer, go them through the platform, because we're about the platform and an API platform. They'll walk them through the platform and then say, oh yeah, everything that's available here is available via API, and the customer has developers and they want to do it. Then that's when my team gets engaged, and once they actually get onboarded, then we've got a million videos out there posted on the site and on YouTube to get them started, and then when they run into a problem or come into a tertiary problem at that point, reach out to us.

We're going to be there to help you. Our typical walkthroughs have kind of changed lately. So one of the greatest ones was get a large customer come to us. It was a Python developer. He just needed just a little bit of help. One of my engineers said, oh, that's great. Listen, we've got this SDK over here in Python. Over here, we've got the code sandbox, the playground that you can use, and then oh yeah, we've got an AI assistant right down here, and so literally, the engineer walked the customer, showed him the SDK, grabbed some code in the playground, and then went down to the AI assistant to build a page, and the AI assistant just built him a page. There was so little friction, and actually, it can be a really short phone call, but that idea of getting to OK 200 is it's always kind of that directional goal for all of us, right?

Like how fast can we get to 200 of these people? That's a little hard to track with what we do because of the nature of our business, but the time to 200 is much faster now, and we can actually, when they're on there looking at documentation, they can get to 200 on the same page, right? So they can test the code live and see it work, see the JSON, see the HTTP, whatever it is they want to see. Their Tomcat server, they can turn on the Java, you know, we're good.

Sid Maestre
It definitely sounds like there's several stages that your customers go through where they see more of an interface that they can interact with the network. And then if APIs are part of their business plan, then they go down, they bring in their developers and they go down that path as well.

Joshua Markham
And there are, so if we look at the customer journey, you know, there's some contractual stuff that we've got to get done first, and then we'll typically have a kickoff call with them on kind of getting started. And then we'll walk them through, you know, our OAuth, and then it's going to start with the blocking and tackling, right? Activation, deactivation, all, all those typical telco things.

And then we'll take them through, you know, some more of the advanced stuff, like where's my device and based on network information, what's the health of my device, how's the cell site doing where my device is. And some of those are more advanced conversations that take a little bit longer to get to, because we still have to do the blocking and tackling. They still got to get set up on being able to manage things and being able to manage the relationship with Verizon. But then after that, you know, we want them to have the best, have the best run practice that they can possibly have. And a lot of time is you need metadata from the network, you need metadata from the devices in order to lower your support and operational costs along the way.

So that's typically how it goes. We normally talk to him a couple of times. First, I'm just getting them up and running. And then the second time is, okay, here are the cool things that you can do. And here's why it's going to be important to you.

Sid Maestre
The partnership with APImatic has been going for definitely over two years. I'm not sure if we hit the third year mark yet.

What are some plans? Are there plans to expand the scope of the partnership between Verizon and APImatic in the future that you can talk about?

Joshua Markham
That's a great question. So I think there are a few things that go into this. One, several different groups inside of Verizon are developing APIs. And so on one hand, we have this great thing that APIs are being thought of at the inception of applications and or solutions, which traditionally has just kind of been held to the IoT teams. So that entire idea of adding APIs is really important.

And then I think the second thing is we've had a great experience with APImatic. It's working with us, working with a telco is a little bit different than working with an ianspe, and it's because of all of the intricacies and complexities that we have as how we grew up as a business. API took the time to actually like learn our business and learn what our developers cared about and learned, you know, what is that developer journey across the way? It's like what API is the old 80 20, you know, what's, what's the most important first and let's, let's get those dialed in and like, okay, let's dial in everything else. And that was a long process. I'm not too terribly long, but I think the way API actually listened and worked with us to get it done is what really kind of differentiated along the way and kept us happy.

You know, I think there's always more to do. I guess that earlier, these, these are living, breathing things that are always going to be discussed and talked about and tweaked. And I think one of the newest things is the sample applications that we're talking about doing together so that, uh, that customers can come in and they may not, they may just need it internally. They don't necessarily even need it on an external website. And so let's, let's have the code there for them, right? Let's, let's, let's reduce their struggles and time. And then as a, as Verizon grows, our API set, hopefully there's more and more platforms that API man, it can be a part of.

Sid Maestre
It sounds like at Verizon, your APIs are being treated as products more and more and thought of in those terms.

Joshua Markham
Yes. You know, I, I spoke to Kristoff and, uh, you know, this, this idea of is an API product, is it not a product? Is it, I think the answer is it's, it can be both, right? Um, in some instances, depending on what they're doing, the API itself is the product. If you want to go through the idea of a product and well, what you're really selling is information and like, okay, that's fine. But it's, it's definitely accessed via an API and so, and so that's fine. And then other things, the APIs are not the product, but they're the delivery method for the actual product. And, and so I'm comfortable either way people look at it.

I think some are definitely more products than others, but, uh, we, it's been an old podcast just talking about this API product.

Sid Maestre
I think there are definitely some books that are coming out that are really pushing that message. And it probably resonates for a lot of people in a lot of companies, but isn't a one size fits all.

I'm curious if we can shift gears again and look towards the future of the telecom API space. I'm wondering from your perspective, what are some of the most significant trends that you think are shaping telcos and APIs right now?

Joshua Markham
I don't know if I have strong opinions, but I've got opinions on everything. But, you know, I think traditionally what has driven APIs and telcos has been the Internet of Things, right? It's really been around these business models of scale so that, you know, people could do these massive large rollouts. And so in that case, the the business model was the thing that we were fulfilling, right? What's going to change that are going to be the metadata from the network itself. If it can be presented in a secure way, that's acceptable to customers. That's the next the next thing, right? And you've got to be very careful with that.

But if we if we want to build new and differentiated APIs that aren't necessarily connected to a thing that you own. So we call mobile devices, you ease. If you don't own the UAE, is there value in the for the person who does to allow you to use. Certain aspects. Of of their data, I think most of it is going to be around security and fraud detection, right? So one of the one of the oldest APIs out there is, you know, number verification. So we all see it with our banks. This is the number we have for you on record. Can you answer the text message, right? Can you hit yes, or can you type in the code we just sent you? So that's that's been around forever. It it makes sense to the market. It resonates with software developers. And that's just going to continue to grow. That's not going to that's not going to really shrink, right? And then. If we start thinking, you know, hey, let's let's take that model right there, the number verification model, or the other things that we can do in novel ways that makes sense to software developers and actually makes sense to telcos and makes sense for the end users. For us to supply those services. And it's going to be pretty cool pretty soon. I think we could probably we could probably push code faster than it would be adopted. Right. OK. And so I think it's it's still early. So telcos have had this latent capability of doing these things. Just the majority of them haven't gone full bore into pushing this idea that the metadata of the network or the user in some way, shape or form delivered securely because we're all heavy, heavily regulated is going to be a new business model on the side. Right.

Sid Maestre
Interesting. So when you talk about security and your network and identity, in a way, with their phone number being part of your identity, I'm just trying to think. I hear about a lot of concern with AI and voice verification and fraud and fraud detection around that.

Is that something that everyone's going to have to build on their own or is that something you think telcos might enable for businesses?

Joshua Markham
That's a great question, and probably a little too detailed. I think the companies all understand AI is important to them, like everybody understands that. Our developers are already developing with a buddy, and Microsoft and everybody else doing it too. The next stage of that is how do we not use those AI companions, but how do we start infusing applications with AI and ML, and then how do we build them to help with the fraud? We're already doing that.

There have been studies around AI listening to phone calls with a customer support agent on the line, and the AI is very good, very, very good. It's detecting fraud in the first minute of the phone call. Because of the words that they choose, the tone in which they speak, all of these things start to yell, hey, you can get a screen pop for your customer service rep that, hey, fraud is likely a fraud call. Someone's trying to pull a Kevin Mitnick on you. We're going to have a whole host of these ... I don't want to call them microservices because they aren't small, but we're going to have these point services that will be available to help continually combat fraud because fraudsters are always a step ahead. They're really bright people, and they know what they're doing. If they're serious or not, they're typically pretty bright people trying to figure out new ways.

Sid Maestre
new ways to make a dollar. Right. Right. I guess a question that I'd like to hear your perspective on because from the end consumer perspective you've got Verizon, but then you've also got other big telco brands and they always seem to be competing for customers.

I imagine APIs can be a differentiator when you get into the business arena. Are there things that you see that differentiate you from other telecom providers?

Joshua Markham
You know, I think what is unique about us, and I always sing the praises of our developers. But with my team being intertwined with these large customers who use a lot of Verizon services, they can have a new idea for an API or a new service. My team is highly experienced, so they have ideas all the time. The product team has new ideas. And we can actually take a customer request, bring it back into the product machine, and I've seen this turnout push out code within a month for something new that makes sense, not only for this customer, but for others.

Now, that's not every time, right? Because we've got to have product capital and all those things, but it is capable. And so I think one thing that's unique about us is that we do on our own platform. We push code and updates every two weeks to it. It's an incredibly well-run, tight machine, and we iterate really well.

Now, there are those times in which you're tackling larger, I don't even want to say problems, but larger tasks that are going to require a year's worth of work and a lot of, you know, capital dollars to do it. But I think it's the level at which we constantly improve on things and tweak to make it better for the customer.

A lot of times coming directly from customer asks, it's not even a new product. It's just, hey, can I get this exact same thing, but I need it to look this way, and here's why. You're like, that makes so much sense. And guess what? That's better on our systems. So you just incentivize this to build it for you. So, you know, it's not always that easy. But, you know, when you've been doing this for 10 years and you've got a lot of the same developers, you get really, really, your CICD pipeline becomes really smooth.

Sid Maestre
It definitely sounds like you're wearing that developer advocate hat and advocating for customers and developers internally, which is part of the job that maybe people don't think about, but that can really influence the developer experience because you're talking to those developers who are customers.

Joshua Markham
Right, that's hard to measure, right? It's hard to find value in that. But I think the customers at the end of the day, it does strengthen that relationship between the two entities. And it's just, it's a great story.

It's hard to always pinpoint a value on it. But our customers typically feel like they're being heard. Now, sometimes we have to, it doesn't preclude us from ever having grown up conversations with saying, you know, there is a system limitation to do it this way. Can you please do it this way? And nine times out of 10, those are fine, but you know, we all have to have grown up conversations sometimes said.

Sid Maestre
I'd love to wrap up our conversation with the topic of standards and this new standard Kamara.

There's a lot of talk, a lot of buzz about it. Maybe for our listeners who aren't plugged into the telco world, could you explain what this is about and why this is gaining momentum?

Joshua Markham
A few years ago, this idea, it's kind of called the Camara APIs or standards, and they're not truly standards, but it's called really good guidance on API structures around specific use cases and functions inside of the wireless world. And so some of those APIs we were talking about earlier, you know, what if the telcos had a standard API language and format and structure for some of the things you're going to be doing a whole lot. And we touched on one of them, one of the big ones, which is fraud, yet several tier one carriers are actively investing in it across the globe. I've been on a few of the standards calls, and so the standards are being developed.

Those don't happen overnight, but, you know, it's a little bit easier in the API world to design a standard with open API and all that stuff than it is designing the relationship between a UPC and other wireless infrastructure. So it's easy compared to what we normally do. But you know, there's a new JV that we just announced with Ericsson and Verizon's invested as well called Aduna. And that's really going to kind of be the hub for helping push these API standards and get them out in the world. And I think one of the things you would see is that instead of having you might be using some of these APIs from an API aggregator, it might be with a cloud provider, now under the hood, it's Verizon or under the hood, it's one of our competitors. But fundamentally, the API structure is going to be really same and executed the same. And I think it's going to make sense for some industries first, and then other industries later as the API set grows, you know, so it's going to make a ton of sense for banking, right? Anything we can do to help with fraud, it's going to be a win for everybody involved. And then I think as time moves on, the API set will grow and it'll make more and more sense in different industries as well.

Sid Maestre
Is Verizon going to be adopting these standards inside of your API strategy?

Joshua Markham
We are. So we are actively investing and working and building on Camara standardized APIs. It's a little bit different than my set of developers. My developers are typically attached to a thing or a service.

Think more, people who are building for mobile phones. What if I was a video streaming company and my customer paid me for that concert ticket that they want to stream live? Well, I want them to have the best experience, right? So built into my pricing model is the ability for me to add some quality of service or, you know, quality on demand. So what if I were able to send Verizon an API or any carrier an API and say, hey, for the next two hours while Sid's watching this concert, don't drop packets on the stream, you know? And that's the type of stuff that's down the road that, you know, I would say is within the realm of reality of being out there.

And there are some fundamental things that the 5G networks have to have enabled to be able to do that. You know, I would say those investment strategies are already there for everybody. And so then it will just be this business model of, hey, I need this. And so when you start stacking up these different things like fraud, quality on demand, and I imagine there'd be 50 fraud different APIs because so many mathematicians have studied the numbers. So they're getting really good at detecting it. And then there are ways that we'll be able to reinforce some of those and help them from a different angle than they've been able to help for in the past.

And I think the standards are going to be big. However, that's not going to preclude carriers from building differentiated APIs still. So they may stay to the kamari structure, but perhaps it's, you know, it's only offered by carrier A, B, or C.

Sid Maestre
Interesting. So that in that example, like quality on demand.

So you've got, you know, 50,000 people who want to stream or 100,000 people want to stream this concert for the next two hours. They're all on different carriers. And so having a consistent standard means that your API, you're just building to not one API, but the data structures. Yeah, you're pretty close. Just maybe different base URL, but like you're communicating in the exact same way. You aren't having to transform your packages into different formats for different carriers. That could be a nightmare.

Joshua Markham
all of it's the same, right? And so let's take that a little bit further, right? So now we've got these developers with these standard set of APIs. Well, what do developers do? Well, they're gonna post their code to GitHub, providing it's, you know, they're part of that world. They'll post it and then, you know, toolings, someone's gonna create a tool because they need to test certain things. And then, you know, all of this stuff is gonna grow, right? So GitHub will have more around mobile APIs and then developers will have better tools to understand the nature of wireless networks and why certain things are important.

And you don't ever get an IP address magically, right? You don't ever have really good service and never drop a packet magically. And so there are some of these underlying things and underlying ideas that developers are gonna have to understand kind of in this new world. But as much as we can abstract that away from them, then they're gonna be successful, right? So if you're developing for Android, there's always a wait function, right? Every API has a wait because you're waiting on a promise, right? And so what if we can start to lower those needs and requirements because we've got 5G networks and we've got quality on demand where you're part of a special slice for the next two hours and get delivered a really cool experience, whatever that experience may be.

Sid Maestre
That's really cool. Really interesting stuff.

Well, I just want to say thanks for joining me today and educating me on Verizon and the telecom space and the future and all the magic that's happening without me really even being aware of all the work that you guys are doing in the industry to make my life that much better.

Joshua Markham
No, it was it was my pleasure said and so yeah, we're always here for you guys just like y'all are always here for us so we appreciate it.