In a press release, Birch says TotalCloud PBX Sales Rise 70% in 2015. I have no idea how that is possible when it takes them forever to port AND that the second quarter just ended. Unless sales were like $100 per month in 4Q2014. “Birch mentions that their metered TotalCloud PBX plan starts at just $15.99 per seat.”

If you are looking for more pricing and review, PCMag has Broadvoice Cloud PBX Review & Rating. This is the BSFT shop that bought IKANO.

Now that isn’t really UC&C, but I figured for the ITSPs it would be good info. The UC&C space is heating up, but it really seems to be 8×8 and RC making all the noise. You don’t hear about Alteva or Evolve or Thinking Phones or even Shoretel Sky making moves around UC&C. Citrix buying Grasshopper was a move. Cisco and Microsoft are the big names battling it out as they try to figure it out. Even ININ and Avaya have been quiet. This means that you have time to put the bundle and message together!

RC buys Glip to go deeper into the business UC market. This will move them toward UC&C, which is pivoting to mean teamware for the emphasis on collaboration. RC will re-brand Glip as RC Teams, according to this interview with the RC CEO Vlad.

Most of the noise in US is about either mobility or WebRTC.

The WebRTC noise is about browser based real-time comms (RTC). 3CX (a Windows based premise PBX) rolled out a new version of WebMeeting that uses WebRTC. WebRTC allows users to make audio and video calls and do some screen sharing via a browser (Firefox or Chrome) without plugins.

On the mobility front, Genband is pushing forward with fring as a mobile app and softphone as well as a cloud based ecosystem for its customers. It follows the BroadCloud plan. There has been a lot of chatter about the demise of the desk phone. It’s just chatter, since a majority of phones are location based (receptionist, break room, lobby, warehouse)- and Boomers and some Gen X still want their desk phones. We need more FMC to bridge calls back and forth from mobile to desk. I think desk phones will be replaced by android phones and UC headsets that seamlessly work with mobile apps like UC-One or Skype. It isn’t seamless yet.

And lastly in the UC space, the editors at NoJitter finally agree with me for a change: Integration Is the Name of the Game.
As Hosted VoIP became Hosted PBX, then Hosted UC and now UC&C, the integration to make the pieces seamlessly work together on a laptop, tablet, smartphone and desk will be crucial for the winner in this space. Some ITSPs are shifting to cloud services like VPS and even SAAS. I think that the working UC&C bundle that is as simple as the iPhone or Join.me is going to be the clear cut winner.

You need to be pushing SMS to all DIDs; softphones; headsets; why not sell tablets + softphone + bluetooth? Audio and web conferencing and screen share and IM/chat/SMS with Presence as well as hosted email, fax-to-email, vociemail-to-email, call loogs, recording, analytics, portal and Sharepoint or something like Google Docs. Sounds like a lot but your job isn’t to deliver dial-tone — that is the basic requirement to play the game — your job is to deliver a communication platform that workers can use with some training to be productive and flexible. That is your job – technology provider – not dial-tone provider.

Fone.do writes that voicemail is dead. Indeed a major bank dumped a large portion of their voicemail system. Everything is dying.

Not All Deployments Are Created Equal (HPBX) by Edgewater.

IKANO was a dial-up POP aggregator. Then it got into DSL, because it had to. Dial-up was shrinking.

DSL Extreme was founded by Jim Murphy. It was sold to IKANO in 2006. IKANO slowly tried other services, like becoming a Google Apps for SP partner. This year (2015), Jim Murphy bought DSL EXtreme back from IKANO under his new company, the Broadsoft based VoIP company called Broadvoice.[More detail in this release.] The broadband combined with the Hosted VoIP makes for a nice bundle for BV.

IKANO CEO George Naspo is now the CEO of VirtaCore, a cloud infrastructure company. Doug Pollei, who was running the Google Apps program, is over at VirtaCore, too.

Shaun Hoggan is at Adobe.

In this quick round up, there were 4 recent announcements of Gigabit broadband.

C Spire is using fixed wireless to deliver Gigabit broadband to Mississippi. The fourth city to get it is Clinton, Mississippi. According to DSLR, the rates are: “1 Gbps Internet access is available for $70 a month, $90 a month for combined Internet and home phone, $130 for Internet and super HD TV and $150 a month for the three-service package.”

In the fixed wireless Gigabit space, Rapid Systems has turned up Gigabit in rural Hardee County Florida.

Google will be expanding in San Antonio, Texas now that it got the approval.

Quicken founder, Dan Gilbert, is bringing “gigabit broadband service to Detroit via a new startup ISP named Rocket Fiber.” It will be around $70 per month.

Interesting tidbit, “One thing the company hopes gives it a leg up in Detroit is the fact that Gilbert’s Rock Ventures, which is funding the gigabit deployment, also owns more than 75 properties totaling more than 12 million square feet of commercial real estate in downtown Detroit. FCC rules prohibit exclusive MDU deals, but the company hopes this cross-ownership helps speed along installs.” [DSLR]

Cox Bumping $99 Ultimate Tier From 150 to 300 Mbps

ARS has a story about Verizon demanding exclusive deals from landlords before installing FiOS in NYC. It isn’t just in NYC. Even in Tampa, the property management companies lock up the telco closet and prevent tenants from getting services that they want.

In other fixed wireless news, Vivint is pushing 100 Mbps Broadband for $60/month. Vivint is a smart home technology provider who is using a hybrid system of licensed and unlicensed spectrum to deliver 100Mbps. It is an interesting read on how they are doing it (here and ARS and here).

A lot of stuff comes in via RSS, email, twitter and FB feeds. I try to only share the really good stuff, like the following:

“Growth is more valuable than profitability and you can always focus on profits once you have “captured the market.”” Agree or disagree? Fred Wilson writes about it here. “generating more revenues each year than the expenses you are spending to do that, is a really valuable constraint on a management team. It forces them to think creatively and logically about the investments they want to make. It roots out bad investments in people, product, sales, marketing, and elsewhere in the business and helps to maintain a lean and mean highly functioning organization.”

Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist in NYC. I read his blog every day, like I do Seth Godin’s. The two have a way of writing about a topic that clarifies it (for me). Fred wrote another blog this week about the factors that go into your team and whether they are loyal or mercenaries. Some of that has to do with your culture and the way you hire. Mission, vision and culture are 3 components of the success of many companies. Mission, vision, values are the WHY. It makes it about more than money.

ANPI’s blog is about email, but it could be about IM/chat and text. “Email is a popular and easy way to communicate. We all write and read emails dozens of times a day, both business and personal. But you don’t get any nuance from email. You don’t get emotion.” Emoticons are not enough. Try video chat or video email (vine, facetime, skype, hangout, etc.). After it catches fire in your org, it will be easier to sell to your customers.

22 Reasons 79% of Any Workforce is Woefully Unproductive

An interesting To-Do List — on paper with pen!!

“The telecommunications industry has come a long way in 25 years. Soon, PSTN could become obsolete and go the way of the dinosaur.”

[WebRTC] “creates more islands of communication as it makes it easy to add UC capabilities in other applications.” – Amir Zmora of Audiocodes

These quotes came from the page for an e-book Dell is distributing. “The e-book below features VoIP history, UC (unified communications) drivers and trends, and the potential future of WebRTC.” Interesting read.

FYI…

Broadvoice just announced a UC suite release. It includes Instant Messaging and Presence; “video calling; screen sharing and crystal clear voice calling with full PSTN connectivity.” In addition, they added “Hosted Email service featuring integrated communication tools such as visual voicemail, virtual fax, click-to-call, call logs and voicemail to email transcription.”