The analysts talk about UCaaS HERE.
Th Avaya bankruptcy: they all seem to take it at face value and that it will all go according to plan. I think it will go more the way of the Windstream bankruptcy, where the banks that just gave them unsecured loans and the fraud will throw a wrench in this deal.
RingCentral will make out because they have a seat on the Board and will be putting ASO on Avaya paper. That relationship changed. Enterprise customers cannot easily move. They want Private Cloud which they can get from NEC, Mitel or Rackspace.
ZOHO enters the UC space. Zoho’s CRM and productivity suites have 30M users.
This was the most interesting Question: “Webex sees a decline in collaboration revenues (-10%) – are we really seeing a reduction in online meetings and collaboration as Cisco’s CFO suggests?”
Microsoft Teams is killing it. There could be real explanations for this decline: (1) Businesses with multiple collab apps are now moving to one. ZK suggests better packaging for WFH sales would help. (2) Some of this could be price compression like Jon Arnold mentions. Or the way Cisco is bundling/discounting Webex. (3) It could actually be a sales decline. Webex is a weird resell for the CSPs that used to run Broadsoft. There is a licensing server. They have to jump through Cisco hoops for certification. AND they don’t actually run the application, Cisco does. That isn’t a lot of incentive for many CSPs to push Cisco. CallTower is now advertising Webex, Microsoft and Zoom.
UCaaS was a solution during the pandemic, when people were on fire and needed anything to put out the fire. Today, we still have Work From Home, yet selling UCaaS is harder and slowing. Why?
The key to winning for UCaaS players is really about integrations and packaging.
Partners can still make money the way inter-connects did despite the fact the PBX box resides in the cloud. It will be the local support, integrations, training and upselling of functionality that wins the day.
Jon Arnold says that no one goes into UC to make money any more. They do it to make their customer stickier. That doesn’t bode well for the pure plays.
