There is at least one conference per week but some weeks there are a couple.

Enterprise Connect in Orlando is the next show I attend on 3/27-3/20.

Then I am off to WAN Summit in NYC on April 3-4. This is my first time attending but the agenda is relevant (pretty much SD-WAN all day) with GTT, Tata, GC and others. One topic dear to everyone’s heart: Getting to the WAN – Challenges and Strategies in the Last Mile.

Channel Partners Expo in Vegas is April 10-13.

Cloud Comm Alliance has a Money Matters half-day in NYC on 4/27.

So Amazon opened a store to sell triple play bundles from Frontier and cable. They closed that store. The headline is great.

Why does a company with 50+ people need an HR office? Read Tech: It’s Time To Grow Up About HR.

Why do so many entrepreneurs hate their lives? Not many people know that Entrepreneurs suffer from depression and a high suicide rate (not as high as military veterans though). Good read.

The ROI of thanking your customers.

There is a high cost of disruption from running Slack and other IM/chat all day. This article does the math. We live in a world that thinks multi-tasking is awesome. It isn’t. We don’t really multi-task so much as work on but not complete a number of tasks through out the day.

Sales is Hard

“If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync.” Seth Godin

This slide deck, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast“, while long (100 slides) does present the issue, What is Culture?, clearly.

Verizon closed on XO. XO is now XO, a Verizon Company. It will be business as usual for XO for a little while. Yet Verizon did re-org, according to CRN. “Telecom giant Verizon has revealed a newly restructured business unit geared toward reaching more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Verizon Business Markets. Verizon Business Markets (VBM) was formally known as Verizon Small Business, according to the business unit’s new LinkedIn page. Janet Schijns, vice president of global channels for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, is now leading the new unit as chief channel executive and vice president for VBM.”

“TPG Capital finished up its acquisitions of RCN and Grande from ABRY for $1.6B and $650M, respectively. TPG is combining the two companies into what will be the 7th largest US cable company and plans to expand and enhance operations across the combined footprints.” It will still be the 7th when VZ buys Charter.

“Strome Fiber Holdings, LLC announced today that it has acquired all of the network and colocation assets of AF-Southeast, LLC. The acquired network and colocation assets consist of a contiguous dark fiber network, constructed along secure private right-of-ways, that extends from Atlanta, Georgia to Miami, Florida including interconnection to key data centers in both markets and strategic access points in between.” [source]

Interesting look at Google’s deal with RingCentral. It involves WebRTC to power voice and video calls through the Google for Work productivity suite.

Dialpad is Craig Walker’s latest venture. It was formerly known as Switch.co before Walker bought the rights to the name and domain for dialpad back from Yahoo. He was an investor in Dialpad which sold to Yahoo in 2005. Walker was also the co-founder of Grand Central that Google acquired in 2007. It became Google Voice in 2009. Now Google is trying to revive Google Voice – and Walker is trying to revive Dialpad.

I actually didn’t know about Jotspot or Springboard or Google Sites (slide 8). Interesting concept that they should market better.

BTW, Google Voice now has a separate mobile app from Hangouts. See more here.