The Telecom Long Tails

The Telecom Channel Partner Long Tail. 95/5 off-setting Pareto’s Principle of 80/20. However, effort and real dollars are spent on the unproductive 95%. That is money and energy that could go into producing partners or marketing.

I talk about what an Aligned Partner is in my Channel Playbook.

In 2006, Alec Saunders and Chris Wood had a discussion about the Voice Long Tail (see here and pdf). To me, 10 years later it has played out as written. 80% of the money and voice lines are still either Centrex, POTS, POTS replacement or SIP trunks of some kind. It may be even more than 80%. Windstream has 1 million SIP trunks off its Broadsoft and XO has 2 million. Add in the voice lines from cablecos which are generally SIP trunks or some VOIP POTS replacement. The Hosted PBX, UCaaS, UC&C and whatever we call it next amounts to 20% of the sales (that is an estimate). It probably is more dollars per sale by far.

Where would gaming VoIP put us? Where does in-app video and voice calls put us?

The thing that is just catching up is that for it to be more than POTS replacement it has to be specific and useful to the user who is going to make a change. Slack and Skype4B are examples. 8×8 with its Allstate integration is a niche app. We need more of those.

We need more turn-key packages like Slack-CRM-WebRTC-Gmail-Zendesk-Mailchimp in a single window. [What I like to call Business Process as a Service.] Cisco is trying with Spark. But for the vast majority of small businesses under 99 employees, they would need a package that was turn key, easy to use and specific for their industry. Niche. Vertical. We aren’t there yet.

Tags: agents, BPaaS, channel partners, hosted pbx, niche, skype, slack, strategy, UC, voice traffic, voip
Related tags: voice lines, voice, replacement, trunks