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Broadsoft in Competition With its Clients

Interesting news from ADTRAN and Broadsoft: the launch of ADTRAN’s ProCloud UC powered by BroadSoft (BSFT). , so MSPs can white-label BSFT through ADTRAN.

“The addition of the BroadCloud call control platform to ADTRAN’s ProCloud Subscription Services Suite enables Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners to expand their cloud-based unified communications (UC) offerings.” Truth be told if they wanted to white label it, there are a dozen options including Coredial, Momentum, PBX-Change, et al.

It seems more and more BSFT is competing directly with its customers in much he same way that ILECs and cablecos do. That won’t be good long term for anyone. There are too many players in the UC game; most play the price game. Hard to compete with $15 per seat though from the manufacturer.

While I understand that BSFT has to sell seats to survive, doing it at the expense of its clients is crazy. Consider that there are about 2 million seats that are sitting out there unused and BSFT is NOT collecting maintenance on. Consider that as BSFT lowers the price to $15, its very own customers cannot compete so more seats end up unsold and maintenance payments slow down. Can BSFT make enough money selling directly to cover the losses soon to be suffered by its clients?

What type of VoIP is selling today? Most of the VoIP market is selling SIP trunks to replace PRIs and POTS lines. Hosted seats are tough to sell. Right now the UC market is shifting to Workflow and other siloed comms platforms like Slack or Skype4B. At Enterprise Connect, the keynotes were from Amazon (who launched a cloud contact center offering) and Twilio, not AT&T, not Avaya and not BSFT. What does that say about the future of UC?

One thing to think about is to “Give your employees less fragmented enterprise communications if you want them to collaborate better. Make the desktop more like the smartphone and enterprise experiences as good as consumer technology,” writes David Carr at Forbes. Users are self selecting apps for comms including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, twitter DM and more. Most of it is outside the corporate umbrella. Many reasons for that, including you communicate with people in the easiest manner possible to get a response.

We’ll see how this ends up.

____ Peter Radizeski is a telecommunications consultant and analyst with RAD-INFO INC. Service Providers have called on RAD-INFO INC for assistance improving sales, managing online marketing efforts, channel sales enablement and overall company strategy. Contact RAD-INFO INC at 813-963-5884 or https://rad-info.net

April 17, 2017 , NSP Strategist

After Show Tidbits (Part 2453)

Item1:

Deloitte acquired most of the assets of Day1 Solutions Inc., a cloud consulting firm to provide deeper cloud expertise. CIO Magazine explains, “Deloitte needs Day1 for the same reason Accenture needs Genfour, Genpact needs Rage Frameworks and Infosys needs Panaya. The problem for Deloitte and for every traditional services company is that their clients do not believe they have the digital skills to lead the digital transformation journey the clients want their business to undertake.”

Think about that yourself. Do you provide proof of your digital chops to your clients? Would they be comfortable coming to you for cloud migration plans or strategy or advice?

Item 2:

The Lookout Breach Report: “With over 1.45 billion compromised accounts, emails, social security numbers, dates of birth, and other data types, March was the biggest month for exposed data this year.” Yes Cyber-Security is indeed needed. I personally am tired of all my data being hacked from companies that don’t protect it.

A 451 Research survey on Security Pain Points and Concerns showed that “User Behavior is a top concern across companies of all sizes – while other issues such as Endpoint Security present a bigger problem for smaller companies. In contrast, Cloud Security and Data Loss/Theft pose a greater threat for very large organizations.”

Item 3 is SD-WAN announcements

Coredial and Cincinnati Bell are the latest Velocloud wins. I find it funny that Zero Outages re-branded as the first SD-WAN company at their mostly unmanned booth.

Windstream is wholesaling SD-WAN now. No idea who they are wholesaling, but at this rate SD-WAN is already a commodity and Cisco/ADTRAN need to be afraid, the CPE isn’t coming from them any more. It isn’t being distributed by Tech Data either!

Westcon-Comstor Adds Viptela’s SD-WAN Portfolio

Item 4: M&A:

After buying Hunt Telecom and , Uniti Fiber scoops up pure-play fiber company, Southern Light to move itself away from just being dependent on Windstream. UNITI also bought Tower Cloud and PEG. Maybe Alpheus or FiberLight will be next.

Item 5: More M&A:

Broadvoice bought a company to add in analytics and user experience. “XBP’s core strengths is in deep reporting and analytics integration, enabling customers to better understand user behavior. For example, tools like Advertising Analytics allow users to measure and follow through on outreach campaigns, from local to nationwide. Other tools like voice recording on-demand and voice-to-text conversion provide solid, searchable data that enhance successful client relationships.”

Tags: mergers, SDN, sdwan, security, windstream
Related tags: security, cloud, company, needs, being, provide

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Telecom Tidbits (Part 2452) – Apr 11, 2017

Telecom Tidbits #2446 – Feb 23, 2017

Channel Outlook in a Mega-Merger World – Nov 07, 2016

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Windstream Bites Again – Apr 14, 2017

The Quota-Price Collision – Apr 12, 2017

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April 14, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Windstream Bites Again

Windstream just finished the paperwork on closing EarthLink. Now they are buying Broadview Networks in an all cash deal for $227M, of which $161M is to pay debt. [WIND gets $183M in NOLs though and 4.6x 2016 OIBDA, for you accounting geeks.] This will be WIND’s 6th UC platform – Broadsoft, Metaswitch, Allworx, Avaya, Mitel. Broadview’s OfficeSuiteUC is home built, just like Fuze, 8×8, RC, Broadvoice, Jive and many others.

The surprise was that Broadview only had 20K business customers, of which 7,300 utilize their cloud based services! The ARPU was about $1000. There is about $239M in revenue but not profitable revenue.

You can tell that most people have no idea about the channel at all. The investor deck says Broadview has 300+ master agents. RC had a slide that its 8 master agents provided access to 200K sub-agents. At best, this is naivete; at worst, it is lying to investors.

Tags: channel partners, mergers, UC, windstream
Related tags: master agents, broadview, agents

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4 Problems with the UC Market – Feb 27, 2017

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After Show Tidbits (Part 2453) – Apr 14, 2017

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April 14, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

The Quota-Price Collision

The one question that keeps coming up: How do you hit quota (which incidentally never goes down) when the pricing is declining?

What do you do when a $60K MPLS network is replaced with a $40K SD-WAN network? And when some of those Internet links are not even on the carrier’s network?

What do you do when 10GB trans-continental private lines are so ridiculously low?

Well, the management has to re-adjust their reality for the sales team. It isn’t the salespeople’s fault that price is eroding fast. That is an industry wide executive decision. There are no safe havens for high margin. Even SD-WAN which was hyped just a year ago has fallen under the I Will Save You Money banner (already).

Much of the merger mania is based on synergies – or that at scale the same amount of people can take care of more revenue, which adds margin. A few of the mergers are due to a debt burden that becomes due. That was Intermedia’s problem in 2001. No one learned that lesson. Avaya faces that problem today with a debt load that cannot be serviced by its revenue.

But direct sales, channel managers and partners face declining revenues across the board. This means less commissions, less margins, less profitable quarters.

When cablecos stop paying commissions on modems sales (like ILECs did with anything TDM or DSL), what will the channel do? I ask because all the SD-WAN hype is about a branch office utilizing broadband – DSL, cable modem, fixed wireless, 4G, satellite or a combination – for lowered costs but improved performance via that special little white box of SD-WAN.

Also with the shackles off at the FCC, we will see bigger mergers and most likely port blocking will become a thing again. OTT VoIP providers will have to figure out how to circumnavigate the waters pf port blocking on broadband circuits at SOHO, branches and rural locations. It will be interesting.

But that is all down the road. Right now we face consolidation of vendors but price erosion, which may be accelerated by the MPLS to SD-WAN transition. Oh, Goody!

I say this a lot but we have to sell a lot more, faster to maintain.

We need to Land and Expand. Get the pipe but start taking apps and voice, backup, DR, security. It will become imperative to take a chunk of the whole customer IT/telecom budget to survive.

Carriers can help by stopping pushing product and going to a holistic package approach of bundling products into a turn key solution like UC + 4G + Internet + POS + Compliance + backup.

Or savvy partners will start bundling multi-vendor solutions themselves to get more of the pie. The carrier will be stuck being a component.

Co-Selling will be a see-saw. The carriers will like it to protect their own offerings and sales numbers but will hate paying twice one the sales.

We are in for a ride about as smooth as dealing with the airlines! Happy Travels! Back to CP Expo 17 now.

Tags: channel managers, commissions, mpls, price war, SDN, sdwan, WAN
Related tags: sales, network, price

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Telecom Tidbits (Part 2452) – Apr 11, 2017

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Business Continuity is a Conversation – Jul 19, 2016

An SDN-WAN Primer for Channel Partners – Sep 01, 2015

Are You Frustrated With MPLS? – Jun 17, 2015

Jumping on the Cloud Bandwagon – Mar 07, 2017

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April 12, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Telecom Tidbits (Part 2452)

Coming at you from the Channel show in Vegas, where TTelePacific reveals its new brand as TPX Communications. Tele and Pacific didn’t fit a managed services provider with a nationwide reach. TPX is more interested in selling UCaaS, managed IT, SD-WAN and managed security these days. The name change is to reflect that.

This and some other moves clearly closes the book on the era of the CLEC.

Southern Light got acquired by UNITI Fiber (formerly CS&L which was the Windstream spin-off REIT) for $700M.

The Intelisys division of Scansource finally revealed that they acquired Kingcom, the exclusive Verizon partner that they run their VZ business through. Just bringing it all in house.

There were more announcements of companies picking a SD-WAN partner: OneStream picked Versa; Star2Star chose Velocloud; Nitel chose Versa, too. This is quickly becoming like Hosted VoIP/UC. It will quickly become a commodity, faster than any technology the channel has sold.

AT&T bought Straight Path for a billion dollars for the spectrum. Any spectrum is property with a water view right now.

Tags: branding, clec, master agency, mergers, pr, SDN, sdwan, security, telepacific, WAN
Related tags: managed