Telecom is still broken. Ordering a 1GB Internet port in a Lit building has turned from a 2 week turn up to a 100-day pain in the ass.

In cable news, you get a site survey done supposedly before quoting. You get the quote; give it to the customer who says Yes. You get paperwork; customer signs paperwork. Then three days after the paperwork is submitted, the site survey comes back. “Subject: Construction required. Comments: A site survey was completed that determine there is a total construction cost of $71,972 for construction to bring service. Your organization can pay the contribution of $69,687 or we can amend the contract to 36 months and increase total MRC to $2,400.” Mind you , that $2400 per month is for cable broadband – 150×10. This happens TOO often. It makes no sense to me at all.

There are new acronyms to know in Security. According to 451 Research, “Managed security services (MSS) is an emerging sector of the security and managed services market. As new security threats evolve, many organizations find they lack the expertise to protect against increasingly complex attacks and meet compliance requirements. Security is one of the IT functions that can be managed by a service provider.” MSS providers are MSSPs. If the MSSP develops and delivers security technologies and services, it is a security service technology provider (SSTP). If the MSSP focuses on delivering security services, but does not develop their own technology, then these MSSPs are “pure play”. There are also Hybrids that mix the two. Fun, right?

Businesses buy a lot of software. Office365, Google for Work, email and web hosting just being the start. CRM, UC, conferencing, digital marketing technology, Business Intelligence (BI), Virtualization, Data Storage and Database and ERP. 451 Research survey suggests that spending will be up for software in 2017.

“SAN-based Storage (67%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Arrays (59%) are currently the most widely used storage systems by companies, followed by Backup/Recovery Software and Disk Backup Appliances (44%),” according to 451 Research. “Respondents were asked which storage systems and related products, including upgrades/refreshes, they plan to purchase in 2017, and SAN-based Storage Arrays (48%) tops the list, followed by Third-party Cloud Storage Services (34%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Array (34%).”

This leads me to suggest that you ask your customers about software and storage. There is money to be made there and you are leaving it on the table.

Tags: apps, backup, crm, marketing, msp, saas, SAAS, security, telecom is broken
Related tags: based storage, storage systems, security services, network attached, attached storage, storage

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Pay TV is in turmoil due to cord cutting. Retail is in upheaval due to changing buying habits as well as a transition in how people spend free time.

“The U.S. (and the world) is in the midst of a sea change in how we spend our leisure time. Young people are less inclined to indulge in America’s favorite pastime: zoning out in front of the TV. On average, people ages 18 to 24 spend half as much time watching live and recorded television as 35-to-49-year-old Americans, according to Nielsen…… Young people are definitely watching video, but it’s more likely something from YouTube or a friend’s Snapchat story on their phone than the episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” their parents are watching on the living room TV.”

“All told, traditional cable, satellite and telco pay-TV services (not counting OTT offerings) lost a net of about 1.64 million video subscribers last year as compared to a loss of some 980,000 in 2015.” [telecomp]

Telco TV was too late to the party. It cost the telcos billions of CAPEX dollars to find out that cord cutting was real and OTT video – Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Sling TV -was going to be the winner.

The economics look upside down. Bear with me here. Right now the cable operators are winning the war for both broadband and voice. In many areas, cable is now the incumbent voice provider.

With triple-play the operator sees ARPU of about $161. If the customer only buys broadband – which is happening more and more – the ARPU drops to $65. Never mind the tax implications for federal, state ad local government (they are screwed either way), just consider what this does for revenue numbers.

The ripple effects are already being seen. ESPN, the Disney owned sports channel, is in a tail spin with a loss of about $500M in revenue per year from cord cutters. Cable channels are either being closed by the content owners or re-named and re-tooled. There aren’t 500 useless channels; there are 1M with all of the streams and social media. This will be a real problem for content creators, actors, writers and advertisers.

Windstream, CenturyLink and other RLECs (Frontier, Fairpoint, TDS, et al) have been working hard to get the percentage of revenue from residential/consumers from the average of 75% to a 50/50 mix with business services. Windstream bought EarthLink; CenturyLink bought Level3. TDS bought managed IT firms and data centers. Fairpoint sold itself to Consolidated Comms. Frontier keeps buying states from Verizon and AT&T; consequently, their mix is still heavily consumer.

Everyone has a revenue problem. Pricing pressure has squeezed every operator. It will get worse. Millennials don’t want to pay a cable company. They have a huge cellular bill and student loans totaling $1 Trillion. Couple that with stagnant wages and a bleak jobs future that is getting darker with all the investment in robotics and AI, the economic outlook doesn’t look bright. As I have asked before: if wages are stagnant, how does someone continue to keep the economy spinning with buying?

I hope, unlike cord cutting, that operators don’t have their head in the sand on this issue.

With 5G trials rolling out, will the next generation – who aren’t buying homes and aren’t buying cars – buy wireline broadband? A few analysts say Unlikely. I already know several twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings that do NOT have terrestrial / wireline broadband. It is all smartphone and hotspot at home.

What does that do to the economics of the network? Business revenue will become even more important. And as revenues decrease, price increases will result, which will mean less subscribers.

Planet Networks believes that rural and under-served areas will still be on wireline because 4G and 5G will not get there any time soon. That may be true – so RLECs will be happy – but the majority (80%) of the population lives in urban areas.

In other nations, cellular (including fixed cellular) are sometimes the only available network. It is cheaper to put up towers and radios than to dig up streets and sidewalks to lay fiber.

Tags: 4G, arpu, broadband, cable, cableco, cellular, financials, jobs, telco tv, TV, tv, wireline
Related tags: wireline broadband, young people, cable, revenue, broadband, buying

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Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

I received 2 notices in 2 weeks about hacks that got my email address and other personal information. This after not one, but 2 huge hacks at Yahoo! that affected me also. It is not a question of IF but WHEN you will be hacked — and what you must do about it.

“Only two months into 2017 and already 13 million people have had personal information compromised. Attackers breached 15 companies in February alone. Among them, the biggest names included popular music festival Coachella, restaurant chain Arby’s, and the InterContinental Hotel Group.”

I was one of 393,430,309 people pwned in the River City Media Spam List data breach. The Compromised data consisted of Email addresses, IP addresses, Names, Physical addresses.

“In January 2017, a massive trove of data from River City Media was found exposed online. The data was found to contain almost 1.4 billion records including email and IP addresses, names and physical addresses, all of which was used as part of an enormous spam operation. Once de-duplicated, there were 393 million unique email addresses within the exposed data.” [source]

This warning came with the notice: “When financial information is in question, it’s important that data breach victims monitor their bank accounts and credit cards for fraudulent activity. Contact your bank or credit provider if you see anything that looks odd.” But I didn’t get a notice of the breach from River City Media or anyone. I got the notice from a monitoring system I signed up for.

Also with the notice: “Why are you only hearing about this now? Whilst the breach occurred in January, sometimes there can be a lengthy lead time of months or even years before the data is disclosed publicly.” Like Yahoo or any of the EMR systems.

I just found out about the September 2016 breach to NetProspex. “In 2016, a list of over 33 million individuals in corporate America sourced from Dun & Bradstreet’s NetProspex service was leaked online. D&B believe the targeted marketing data was lost by a customer who purchased it from them. It contained extensive personal and corporate information including names, email addresses, job titles and general information about the employer.” The Compromised data: Email addresses, Employers, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses. Did D&B or NetProspex contact me? NO!!

Currently there is a successful GMAIL phishing scam going on. See more at LifeHacker. We need more user training on how to handle email and data.

One Tampa firm, BayCare, did an assessment of their workers’ knowledge of scam email. It went sideways. But you SHOULD be checking to see if workers follow safe email procedures, since that is the Number 1 way that hacks occur!

There is more:

Privacy hawks in Congress call on Homeland Security to warn Americans of SS7 hacking threat.

You Won’t Believe How Many Organizations Have Experienced Large Cyber-attacks by Rich Tehrani

For its 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (available for download here), Verizon used a final data set of 64,199 security incidents and 2,260 data breaches.

The problem with selling cyber-security solutions is (A) the cost; and (B) no one thinks it will happen to them. You have to sell it like Life Insurance. Sir, one day you will die. Then what?

No one is immune.

From VZE: “Take a look through the list of published data breaches and one thing will immediately strike you: no location, industry or organization is immune from attack. Even with the strongest defenses, you can’t bank on not being breached. But you can deter the criminals.”

Tags: privacy, security, vz
Related tags: email addresses, physical addresses, addresses names, names physical, personal information, email

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Cloud Farming has to be the new TEM (telecom expense management). Years ago, auditing was how you got your foot in the door to an enterprise. It turned out to be more work than most wanted or realized. And many enterprises were under long term contracts. It wasn’t profitable. Many auditing firms pulled up their tents. Now some CPAs are in that game, like CliftonLarsonAllen.

Now we have a bunch of hype around Cloud Farming and cloud assessments. That sounds great, but buyer beware! Unless you have a Cloud Architect or Network Architect on staff to review these plans, are you sure you have the clients best interest at heart?

In cloud, the hard part is the MIGRATION. In data center world, a colocation migration for a Fortune 5000 firm is a two year plan. Two years to move a data center cage! The circuits, the boxes, the IP addresses, the mapping, the design, the physical move, the duplication, yadda, yadda.

I sat in meetings on software migration projects in the early 2000s that took over a year to plan. Yes, a year to plan before starting the migration, which took two-plus years.

‘Verizon Communications Inc. announced that it has moved more than 150,000 employees to Google’s productivity apps, called G Suite,” Bloomberg reported. I’d like to know how long that took.

8×8 sold some big accounts in the last 15 months – “Announced new deal with Regus, the leading global workplace provider, to deploy 8×8 Enterprise Communications as a Service (ECaaS) solution at Regus worldwide business centers.” And 8×8 “Announced 2,400-seat deployment across nine global locations for new enterprise customer NetSuite.” Neither of these deployments happened quickly. Try a year of roll out. Global LNP is a bigger nut to crack than getting some RLEC to release a number.

I’m not against Cloud Farming. I think that agents have to practice going deep to get more wallet share from the customer. Not just get the network and the voice, but the email, the backup, the SaaS, etc. To do that takes some skill and training, being deliberate and confident.

I just don’t know how that works with reality (in scale). The shortage of qualified Architects and talent to assist in planning and assessment are just the first bottleneck. The lack of a PMO department from most partners and providers to steer the migration and deployments will create some messy implementations as well as unhappy customers and partners. Lastly, we come to the compensation. When the sales cycle coupled with the deployment timeline is more than two years, how will that excite partners to sell it?

Certainly, there is a move to cloud occurring. It is NOT happening at the rate of change that analysts or cheerleaders are predicting or broadcasting. Most computing environments will remain Hybrid – some SaaS, some colo, some other. Much of the decisions on this matter consider such factors as flexibility, ROI, TCO and internal IT skills.

People forget that Hosted PBX/UCaaS deployments still suck. That LNP still takes up to 14 days (or longer with Birch!). That Internet pipes are on a 120 day construction delay. That even something as minor as turning up a port and a circuit between two lit data centers can fast approach 90 days longer than the two week install interval quoted. If we can’t get these relatively simple things to work, you want to jump on Complex stuff?!! [This is me LMAO!]

NOTE:

There are experts out there. COLOTRAQ has partnered with some smart people for Cyber-Security and Cloud Readiness Assessments. Certainly, Microcorp has leveraged its TAP Program to put experts at the ready for partners. Acuity in Tampa has started building up its own managed services portfolio including wireless management and VoIP deployment testing. Other master agencies have brought on some cloud talent. They had to. It will be the engineers, the talent that can break it down and talk plainly about it one minute and delve into I/Os the next that win deals. Look for those.

Tags: cloud computing, cloud services broker, collocation, deployment, hosted pbx, TEM
Related tags: cloud farming, cloud, partners, migration, years, talent

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