CenturyLink sold its data center business (57 sites) to a consortium of PE firms fronted by Medina Capital Advisors for $2.3B end of last year. Details were sketchy for agents who had clients in those data centers. And we are still waiting. At least now we know that the spin-off will do business as Cyxtera. [Colorado Buyer Inc. d/b/a Cyxtera Technologies].

Level3 CEO and President Jeff Storey is poised to get a huge prize for selling the company off. Isn’t that great? For him, yes. He gets a “$1.2 million bonus after the Broomfield-based telecom’s $24 billion acquisition by CenturyLink Inc. closes. In addition to the $1.2 million bonus payout, Storey is slated to receive an accelerated stock grant worth $3 million after the transaction with Monroe, Louisiana-based CenturyLink.” Agents, meanwhile, get to wonder what happens post merger. How messed up will the networks be? How convoluted will ordering and quoting be?

After both Transbeam and NITEL announced that they are adding SD-WAN, MegaPath launches SD-WAN aimed at the SMB. That is the same place that SimpleWAN plays. SimpleWAN is up for the 2017 Venture Madness business competition in Arizona.

Velocloud raised a series D round for $35M. Many startups will look at this (and the SNAP IPO yesterday at $26B) and think that doing a startup is like buying a lottery ticket. In a sense it is, but building a business — even to sell it quick — still requires hard work, execution of an idea AND a plan, and sales. Velocloud is signing up partner providers faster than a PR firm can add them, but that doesn’t result in meaningful sales for a long while!

You can learn from failure. #startup stories.

In the heat of SD-WAN, I wonder if people realize how shaky Cisco (and other router manufacturers like Juniper and ADTRAN) are? The SD-WAN white box is not a Cisco. It is an OEM that can be a router, a firewall, an access point, a Cradlepoint, darn near anything because we just push the software update to the box and either install the card/WIC or activate the card/WIC. The white box is replacing the traditional gear. Cisco and ADTRAN are in the box business. So are VARs. What happens next? Pay close attention – it will be a lot like the PBX Business, but decline a little faster.

Satellite ISPs OneWeb and Intelsat are merging. Consolidation in every sector of the ISP market – MSO, ILEC and now sateliite.

Verizon wins top honors from Frost & Sullivan for capturing more than a quarter of the North American VoIP and SIP Trunking Services Market.

CenturyLink makes changes to its Alliances and Strategic Partnerships programs.

In the EarthLink-Windstream merger, the ELNK channel chief, Olen Scott. emerges as the new channel head. “Jason Dishon, Windstream’s former channel chief, has left the company to pursue other opportunities.” It is a constant state of musical chairs in telecom.

Tags: ADTRAN, centurylink, channel managers, channel partners, cisco, data center, earthlink, SDN, sip trunking, vz
Related tags: million bonus, channel chief, business, centurylink, million, telecom

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A few sales reminders from sales training I performed yesterday.

It is all about the Daily Activity. Your routines and habits determine your level of success. Tom Peters says, “Show me your calendar. I’ll show you your priorities.”/p>

Sales Math is real. It takes X number of calls and Y number of emails plus Z number of other types of contacts (trade show, LinkedIn, lists) to fill a partner funnel. It takes Creative follow up to turn that into sales activity for channel managers. It takes J number of quotes to get K number of closed deals. Figure out those numbers and either increase traffic or increase conversion.

Sales is Helping. Period.

Most salespeople know what they have to do to be successful. Most won’t put in that much effort. Sure sales is hard, but that’s what you signed up for.

Sales Reluctance is real. Sales involves lots of rejection and losses. It is a huge bummer. Realize all of that is not them rejecting you. That fear of rejection is why people don’t like to cold call.

Reminder from GapingVoid.

Tags: sales, sellecom, selling
Related tags: sales, number, takes

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On a LinkedIn blog, Telarus co-founder Patrick Oborn writes about the fact that 72% of businesses have not transitioned to cloud communications. 72%!!!

After 15 years, 2000+ providers can only take a 28% handhold in the market?

The growth rate of Hosted PBX (HPBX/UC/UCaaS) has always been a hopeful bad guess. And it will continue to do so because too many people, companies and dollars have been invested thus far for any analyst to turn on the sector.

There are 4 major problems with the UC Market.

One, PBX sales have declined about 3% per year. Even Avaya going bankrupt isn’t going to speed that up. Not only do people trust boxes; they are cheaper in the long run. Single location businesses, which is most of them, don’t have a PBX problem that UC solves. There is a current Product/Market MisMatch that needs to be examined.

Mobile UC may get more traction. Or a simple PBX like Dialpad or Fone.do. Gary Kim writes that the market may be too small. At ARPU of $400, it takes a bunch of sales to move a needle for a company like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast or Charter.

Two, I wrote this last week. Any 15 year old product needs a re-fresh or re-think. We are overdue for a Re-Think. Slack was a re-think, but that strays to the edges of what UC is. So does Cloud Contact Center. And these companies want to be everything for 1-1000 employees. This isn’t Pasta or Rice. This is technology.

UC is Change. People hate change. The Channel doesn’t sell Change; we take orders on replacement services. Harsh but mainly true. There are exceptions of course, but the general rule is that agents are transactional. Even Inter-Connects aren’t excited to go sell a cloud service. MSPs will if it is white-label and can be bundled into their package, but that falls into POTS Replacement more than a full-blown UC deployment.

Three, HPBX has 2 camps of buyers: POTS replacement sold as cheap as possible and actual UCaaS. Where do you think most of the market is? Right, cheap VoIP.

Now if I am buying cheap VoIP, am I also going to pay for a backup circuit or SD-WAN or any other service enhancement or assurance? Unlikely — or I wouldn’t be buying cheap cable broadband and the cheapest OTT voice!!!

If the buyer spends more on bandwidth, has a backup circuit, they are likely going to buy UC as BC/DR and that isn’t cheap VoIP.

The fourth Big Problem: There are far too many providers! Telarus represents at least 37 HPBX vendors. Other masters have at least 25. How does anyone differentiate/ stand out/ position in a marketplace where the cloud broker has a choice of 2000+ providers?

This becomes a problem for the providers who enter into a Price War (seats cratering to below $15 each) and a SPIFF War, where providers are literally buying sales.

One of the most successful HPBX providers, 8×8, is up for sale. This move comes after a recent re-branding as a Global UCaaS provider.

Are the owners (the 8×8 founders still own most of the voting stock) looking to exit? Or is it that the machine to keep bringing in 20% growth quarter after quarter is grinding down? I just don’t know who would pay $1.5 Billion for 8×8. VZ payed $1.8 for XO which owned fiber assets. WIND payed $1.1B in an all stock deal for EarthLink, who also had a bunch of fiber. Fiber gets a bigger multiple than VoIP.

The other thought is that what if $300M is about all the B2B annual revenue you can get?

From a recent discussion about Amazon Chime: there are approximately 100 million phone/conferencing lines in North America. If Amazon Chime with Vonage can hit a 5% share of this market, that equates to 5 million subs. At $5/seat/month, that is $300M incremental revenue opportunity for Vonage. That would be a needle mover for most UC Provider, considering 8×8 is at $225M in annual revenue now.

The emphasis has always been on multi-location and mid-market. That’s why “41% of larger enterprises are using cloud UC services.” Now everyone is focused there (upmarket). However, the bulk of the businesses are single location small business (20 million of them). That means a new product bundle is needed to attract this crowd. Many thing that this sector will be mobile only with an auto-attendant in the cloud.

When you look at the large number of messaging apps, at some point, one of them – Slack, Messenger, WeChat, HipChat – will hit the right bundle of functions to steal mass appeal. Not yet, but maybe soon.

Tags: 8×8, agents, amazon, bundle, change, channel partners, earthlink, hosted pbx, UC, voip, windstream
Related tags: backup circuit, annual revenue, amazon chime, single location, buying cheap, market

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