Siris Capital sold Polycom to Plantronics for $2 Billion. Siris paid $1.7 Billion for Polycom in 2016. They just acquired Obihai for an undisclosed amount, but it had to be more than $300M. Basically, someone made an offer and Siris said “Take it!”

Windstream bought a NY CLEC, MASS Comm for $37.5 million in cash.

“Fuze and AppNeta are partnering on a real-time network monitoring service. The result: Fuze unified communications customers should gain visibility into network performance, and the ability to resolve performance issues before they affect the quality of communications.” [channele2e] Monitoring for VoIP/UC is becoming a necessary component.

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal is the tip of the iceberg. As Doc Searle writes Everyone is selling your information! Meanwhile NYU Professor Galloway and others (especially the EU) are calling for regulating GAFA – or even breaking up Google and Facebook. GDPR in Europe starts end of May. That will result in some changes.

In patent fights: Google losing to Oracle vis a vis Android and Metaswitch losing to GENBAND to the tune of $8.8M.

AppRiver has acquired Roaring Penguin Software.

Foxconn has acquired Belkin, Linksys for $866M.

Don’t fret all you channel heads: IBM Channel Executives Are Frustrated With The Pace Of Partners’ Transformation, too, according to Forrester. Meanwhile Vonage, Verizon, AT&T, TPx and others are changing their channel programs in order to be even more available to anyone who wants in. AT the same time, many programs are figuring out how to reach more ISVs and MSPs in order to sell and service to mid-market and above. Still the SMB world is being ignored.

Interesting read about AI by Set Godin HERE. But his 2017 keynote for IBM on Call Centers is a must watch. It is thought provoking.

Gary Kim has a series of posts about the fact that the incumbent voice provider in the US is now the cable company. Comcast is the fastest growing MVNO also.

Gary also writes that “Dumb Pipe” is Dangerous if You Want Your Telco Business to Survive. Most of the value in the Internet is at the App layer (OSI Layer 7). Just ask GAFA (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon).

Gary also has a post about “Who are Tomorrow’s Telcos?” The big consulting firms are becoming ISVs and MSPs. It will be interesting to see how the market gets served. Former CLECs are now network resellers and morphing into some kind of MSP.

Forrester’s McBain writes that IBM is frustrated with its channel partners. I think every vendor is but it is in some ways their own fault. Poor job of education and positioning (as I have written before).

StorageCraft Survey Reveals Big Gains for Channel Organizations Expanding into Cloud Services. “This survey highlights the richness of market demand and the undeniable business benefits that cloud services bring to channel organizations,” said Shridar Subramanian, vice president marketing and product management at StorageCraft. But I wonder if it was just a self-serving study by a cloud provider.

Corelea Group conducted a survey of 300 US and Canadian channel partners about cloud, but specifically UCaaS and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service).

The striking statistics for me are as follows:

• Many Agents still find Cloud business not cost-effective for themselves (40%).
• 80 percent of the respondents are selling UCaaS or CCaaS already.
• 60% said they were selling SD-WAN. It makes me wonder if they meant sold or offering.

No surprise that none are prepared to stop selling network and go 100% cloud.

Partners’ have a confidence issue in cloud providers delivering a good customer experience. That reiterates my claim that Service Delivery or Customer Experience has to become Job 1 for the service provider that wants to rise to the top.

Partners cannot clearly differentiate the cloud services. In other words, the service providers have done a poor job of messaging. Can you name the target buyer of any cloud service?

I understand why the message has been 1 to 1000 all these years: the Hosted VoIP space has not taken off like many predicted and revenue – any revenue – is acceptable to the providers even if they have to forego revenue or profits.
However, the pricing pressure that UC providers are feeling correlates to their inability to position themselves in the marketplace.

In the pharmaceutical world, once a drug comes off patent and the generic hits the market, everything changes for the brand manufacturer. The advertising tone changes, prices drop, coupons start, and other ways to hold market share while overall revenue from the off-patent drug plummets. It must feel like Broadsoft has come off patent for many UC providers. Only none of that have prepared the marketing for it. They all still act like they are patent protected and no one else has the active ingredient. They couldn’t be more wrong, since even the channel partners can’t differentiate!

That same pricing pressure means that many won’t/can’t change. They won’t invest in the product, in marketing, in training or in research. They will continue to do what they have done – the definition of insanity.

As an agent, I hear from VoIP/UC players all the time. (Quite a few are clients.) While I hear the SD-WAN hype loud and clear, cloud backup and security providers have not done a great job of getting the message out. Security messaging is usually tied to a product (secure Internet or secure SIP) unless it is a LEC pushing their latest product. “We got some DDoS here! Who wants some DDoS!” With about that much sophistication.

The partners in the study even remark that there is a lack of reliable SIP Providers. Technical challenges (like Fax over IP) and lack of end-user education are also factors as to why partners aren’t jumping into the VoIP game.

If we take UCaaS as being the largest cloud service actively being offered by channel partners, then the other providers can learn from this segment.

On the service delivery, providers must consider that post-ink there is a lot of work to be done (data to be gathered) in order for the customer to have a positive experience. User mapping is probably the largest puzzle piece, but hunt groups, ACD and IVR scripts are also important for UCaaS/CCaaS deployment. Number porting and toll-free are just one more moving part that must be included in the deployment checklist with the customer.

To be done properly, service delivery needs to be a PMO. “A PMO is a Project Management Office. It’s a function within an organization that defines the standards for project management. The main purpose of a PMO is to make sure that projects and programs are run in a repeatable, standardized way,” according to Ten Six Consulting and Wikipedia. Checklists and repeatable processes can go far to improve service delivery.

There are things that will improve reliability and call quality of SIP trunking and UC. One is the fact that ISPs are providing fatter Internet pipes to businesses. Many cablecos are rolling out DOCSIS 3 or higher. Meanwhile 4G has improved as well. These two pipes are utilized in several SD-WAN deployments in order to increase uptime, speed, reliability and packet delivery. This will make its way into a better service delivery (without a managed solution with MPLS or a dedicated drop just for voice).

Other parts of the survey, beg the question: what is the master agency doing to solve either the Service Delivery issue or the vendor positioning problem?

I have had discussions with master agencies about why they have so many vendors. There are numerous answers from agents ask for them to we needed to fill out our portfolio. Unfortunately, that means that there won’t be anyone who can explain the difference between the vendors. Therein lays one of the issues the channel is facing.

If you walked into a pharmacy aisle for over-the-counter cold medicine and the pharmacist couldn’t help you decide which one to buy, would you go back to that pharmacy?

There are already a few master agencies that have specialized. An example is COLOTRAQ in the data center space. Yes, they have 400+ vendors globally but they have subject matter experts to help agents choose a vendor. And they have placed that knowledge at your fingertips with DCITRAQ.

Another example is LANtelligence, who specializes in the design, deployment and support of UC and CCaaS. LANtelligence offers an expertise that covers solution design, implementation services and post-project support, as well as vendor selection and sales support. They don’t have a hundred vendors, just some of the best in the space like Mitel, Genesys, Lifesize and 8×8. Our industry is in need of Subject Matter Experts like LANtelligence. It seems to be what the channel is asking for.

The channel is in the middle of a transition. However, it is challenging to transition a business (like a MSP or an Agency) when the current revenue is in jeopardy. Also, change is uncomfortable; moreso when you don’t have confidence in the new line-up of vendors. Microsoft may have made mistakes, but it was fixable – and they weren’t going out of business and no one was getting fired for choosing Microsoft. That can’t be said for cloud communications or other cloud services just yet.

Until the cloud vendors become as stable as Cisco or Microsoft, the channel may need to lean on specialized agencies like LANtelligence and COLOTRAQ in order to better serve their customers.