On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 13 of 376

Telecom Tidbits #2446

According to Lookout Security, “More than six million user accounts and personal records were breached in January alone. Nine major companies were compromised, including Sanrio, the owners of the Hello Kitty brand; Supercell, a popular mobile gaming company; and Popeyes Louisiana Chicken, a well-known fast food chain. And 44 percent of the January breaches included stolen passwords, Social Security numbers or dates of birth. These pieces of personal information are valuable to criminals, since they may be able to sell it online to identity thieves.” Maybe change your password from password or your child’s DOB to something a little secure.

Just as they are getting acquired by Windstream, EarthLink finally gets its stuff together. ELNK announced that in six months they have deployed SD-WAN functionality to about 1700 offices for 41 customers. That is pretty impressive but the technology (SD-WAN) is best deployed at small offices, rural and branch locations. It is where the tech gets the best ROI.

FYI… SD-WAN, like WebRTC, is a technology NOT a product. Stop trying to sell the tech!!!

IPO’s are on the horizon. Fuze got another bag of VC cash and hired a CEO to take them to the public land. I hear that Star2Sar is thinking the same thing.

Speaking of cashing out, my client, Hunt Telecom in Louisiana, got acquired by CS&L aka Uniti Fiber. Congrats to Jason, Kevin, Robert and Troy!!!

LUMOS Networks got grabbed by investment firm EQT for $950 million cash.

One weird acquisition: Atlassian spent $425 million on task management provider, Trello. Altassian owns Hipchat (a Slack competitor) and JIRA. It seems like a good combo.

A head scratcher: Fonality got bought by Netfortis. Asterisk and Genband.

ARRIS is buying Ruckus from Brocade because “Every carrier will need to be in wireless.”

TelePacific is coming into 2017 with its acquisition of UC provider DSCI. They will be re-branding the new nationwide managed services provider at the Vegas CP show. Yesterday at a partner event, TelePacific CEO Dick Jalkut told the room that they had spent $500K on ITx and UCx demo centers around the country as well as building out a SOC (security operations center) in St. Louis. Any current TelePacific partner can visit the SOC. You might want to ask if they will pick up the airfare. TelePacific isn’t giving up on network – it is what made them the regional giant that they are – but all bets for the future of the company lie with the strategic products – like security, managed IT, Office365 and a Broadsoft UCaaS offering – that DSCI strengthens with their own experience and products in those areas..

OTT UCaaS provider, Panterra, has inked another distribution deal; this time with VoIP Supply.

Tags: earthlink, managed it, mergers, SDN, security, telepacific, UC, WAN, wireless
Related tags: provider, security, telepacific, million

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National Harbor: In the Bubble – Aug 17, 2016

A Look Back at 2016 News – Dec 14, 2016

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

The Last CLEC Pivot – Jul 14, 2016

Tidbits # 2436 – May 18, 2016

Is SD-WAN the new UC? – Dec 19, 2016

Talking Channel and Opportunity with TelAdvocate – Nov 11, 2016

As the Telecom World Spins – Nov 04, 2016

Nothing But Vanilla Pudding – Jul 29, 2016

Business Continuity is a Conversation – Jul 19, 2016

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February 23, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Is that Commission Pass Through Killing Your Business?

Master Agencies are under the same pressure as the carriers: pricing depression is making it tough to hit quota. More and more deals are needed each year.

That typically means that more agents are needed each year to bring in those deals. Unfortunately, the channel is aging. Many are nearing retirement. And about one-third of the VAR crowd pivoted to other tech business models (like coding).

Master agencies have a habit of doing 100% pass through of commission between themselves. That worked when the carriers were paying an override for hitting bronze, silver or gold level (as in the BellSouth program). Then the masters were running off of the override.

Today, we have MDF and co-marketing funds, but mostly these are used to finance road shows and events. These events are for recruiting and vendor awareness, but also face time, training and fun. But there are more and more of them. And carriers have a set budget for marketing dollars. That budget runs out fast!

Those MDF monies are NOT used to float the business.

Let’s do the math on a pass through. It takes at least an hour to collect commission from one carrier. That person is making, say, $16 per hour, which is $24 per hour after taxes and benefits, etc. It costs about $2 to cut a check to the other agency. So a 100% pass through is actually costing your business $26! And that is despite the size of the deal.

If it is a cable deal (ARPU of $350) or a OTT VoIP deal (ARPU of $400), the commission is $35 and $100, respectively because commission rates for VoIP are higher. Even if you keep 5%, that is $17 and $20 respectively. You still lose on a 95% pass through.

There are a number of pass through deals. So many that it is hard to track who the underlying contract resides with.

That is also a lot of W-9 IRS forms to track!

Tags: commissions, master agency
Related tags: master agencies, commission, business, carriers, deals

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Cologix and Equinix Make Moves – Dec 05, 2016

The Sub-Agent Dilemma – Sep 20, 2016

The Struggle of the Channel Managers – Jun 23, 2016

True Ups Kill the Partner – Mar 20, 2014

The Power of Cable – Aug 29, 2013

How Many VARs Are There Anyway – Jul 31, 2013

Everything is Changing, No One is Happy – Jan 25, 2013

Agent Exclusivity – Jun 26, 2012

Is the Transactional Agent Model Sustainable? – Sep 01, 2011

What is a Master Agent? – Mar 30, 2011

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Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

February 22, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Downhill Sledding

For Agents especially, our business has been downhill sledding, much the way Calvin and Hobbes did it (see HERE).

Price compression on network, bandwidth and voice has become so bad that it prompted all of the consolidation. Cogent and HE certainly fuel the price erosion but agents selling the lowest price all the time on everything is only speeding it along.

Yesterday, I saw an ad for Broadview UC down to $17.95 per seat (lower if you have 75 seats or more). Folks, that is not a lot of money to do a lot of work.

There are over 2000 companies offering some version of Hosted VoIP/Hosted PBX or UC. There are companies selling it for less than $10 a line if that is what you want to do. Google it. You can find them. But 20 percent of $10 is not worth the cost of the time to sell it.

And all the calls you will get from the customer due to poor quality.

No one wants to walk away from an opportunity. Many provider vice presidents don’t know how to say NO to a crappy deal either, because they just want revenue — even crappy revenue.

I guess Windstream finally realizing that much of its small business revenue was unprofitable wasn’t enough of a wake up call for company execs and Agents.

Robotics and AI are coming. They will replace any transactional sales agent. Ordering on price: the customer could do that on Amazon — or on GeoQuote.

Agents have to re-think where they bring the value because like newspapers, taxi drivers, and a host of other jobs, AI is going to destroy it.

My slides from my talk yesterday at TelePacific, who will be announcing the new brand in Vegas at CP!

Tags: agents, bandwidth, commissions, price war, robotics
Related tags: downhill sledding, agents, price, revenue

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The WalMart Effect on the Duopoly – Jun 17, 2015

Transactional Agents Called Names – May 04, 2012

Is it Cloud versus Agents? – May 02, 2012

Cologix and Equinix Make Moves – Dec 05, 2016

Talking Channel and Opportunity with TelAdvocate – Nov 11, 2016

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

Can You Lower the Price? – Oct 19, 2016

Your Commissions Were Cut – Oct 04, 2016

The Sub-Agent Dilemma – Sep 20, 2016

The SPIFF War – Jul 12, 2016

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February 22, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Marketing is Falling By the Wayside

Company executive don’t want marketing; they want sales.

Or they want a twitter or Linkedin strategy.

Or they want to increase channel sales.

I get calls all the time asking for a “cheap website guy”. You realize that your website is supposed to be your online presence hub, right?

You realize that there is no “strategy” for a social network, right? You comprehend that twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, Pinterest, your blog – are all just publishing mediums that have replaced the billboard and the yellow page ad.

Mojo Marketing‘s CEO wrote a humorous take on this here.

All of this is tactics that comes under the umbrella of a marketing strategy. Who are you? Who buys from you? Product-Market fit. USP/Value Proposition. Why do they buy from you? Who is your ideal customer? These are the questions that create the foundation for that marketing strategy.

I know you want to sell to everyone, like you were Amazon or something. But that isn’t necessarily who will buy from you. (And you aren’t Amazon! And they started by just selling books.)

Partners have had to figure this out themselves. When you won’t explain who buys from you, they segment you. You hate it but it is your fault.

Microsoft chases everyone but they do it with segmentation in sales, marketing and license bundle. Do you? Or do you offer up the same product for 1-1000?

And before you say that seems to be working: even a broken watch is right twice a day.

You wouldn’t hire a software engineer the same way you go about hiring marketing.

I leave you with 3 Peter Drucker quotes:

“Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.”

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

Tags: amazon, drucker, marketing, usp, value
Related tags: twitter linkedin, marketing strategy, marketing, strategy, sales, something

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What Can You Learn from Target? – Mar 10, 2015

The Value of UC – Oct 08, 2013

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Are You a Red or Black Ant? – Aug 28, 2014

We Don’t Have a Polycom or Dropbox Problem – Feb 07, 2014

A Lesson in Value Proposition – May 23, 2012

It’s Not Just About Price – Apr 16, 2012

Telecom Tidbits (part # 2445) – Feb 14, 2017

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February 20, 2017 , On Rad's Radar

Telecom Tidbits (part # 2445)

An interesting find: There is a CIO survey which finds Microsoft Azure will overtake Amazon AWS for Infrastructure as a Service (from July 2016).

Microsoft has been far behind AWS but then they started later too. This study shows that AWS has 45% share of public cloud infrastructure market — more than Microsoft, Google, IBM combined.

Amazon launched a conferencing service called Chime.aws. They launched it with Vonage Business. Why? Unless the old Nexmo service is the back-end for the WebRTC voice and video and screen share. Vonage has 4 platforms – consumer VoIP; Vocalocity small biz; Broadsoft and Nexmo. I think they would have conferencing covered.

Amazon offers VPS and Hosting too. They also are a sales agent for Frontier and Comcast.

ABRY Partners owns StackPath which acquired Highwinds, a Florida based CDN company. StackPath will now offer secure CDN on top of firewall and DDoS mitigation services.

Dell announced that is unifying the Dell and EMC partner programs. Dell used partner feedback to make it simple, predictable and profitable. It is the best of both programs, says Dell. “It Preserves best of legacy Dell and EMC programs to reward partners who sell the full portfolio, including services, grow their business and win net new customers.” One characteristic: “One deal registration program and a Zero Tolerance policy for deal conflicts.”

Datto has acquired OpenMesh to further its pivot to be a premiere partner for MSPs. “The Open Mesh wireless access point and ethernet switching technologies will join the existing Datto Networking Appliance to create the Datto Networking line of products, optimized for small-to-medium sized businesses and delivered exclusively through Datto’s global network of Managed Service Provider partners.” I guess it will compete with Ruckus, Meraki (Cisco) and ADTRAn’s managed wi-fi solutions.

In an interesting vertical move, “Evolve IP has partnered with Nimble Storage to provide healthcare organizations with on-premises Nimble Storage flash arrays, supported by HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-audited hybrid cloud, cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions from Evolve IP.” [channelvision]

Tags: amazon, backup, cdn, channel partners, dell, hipaa, hosting, managed services, mergers, msp, wi-fi
Related tags: datto networking, nimble storage, datto, service, microsoft, programs