Email went out yesterday to all the partners from XO Channel head, Shane

“I want to inform you that Tom Gorey, Vice President Strategic Alliances and Business Development, will be leaving XO on November 1st. Since joining XO in 2005, Tom developed new go-to-market strategies and contributed to building significant growth within the Channel at XO. Tom has been instrumental in driving the development of the foundation and programs that led to the award winning XO Business Partner Channel in place today. I would like to personally thank Tom for his contributions and wish him success in the future. Please join me in thanking Tom and wishing him well.”

I worked with Tom when we were forming TCA. He really believes in the Channel. I hope he gets scooped up by someone looking to build a channel friendly program.

Word on the street is that changes are afoot at XO. Not just letting Gorey go, but also getting a new CEO while shifting the indirect channel sales support. From what I hear, more direct folks will be supporting partners.

It is a company that has struggled for years under the ownership of Carl Icahn. So many rounds of layoffs, I am surprised anyone would want to work under those circumstances. It has to be stressful – waiting for a pink slip or an S-1 filing that an LOI has been signed (then a pink slip). Just drifting along. It doesn’t make for a confident choice for a partner to put a big customer in.

Tags: change, channel partners, xo
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A Brief Talk with XO’s Tom Gorey – Dec 27, 2010

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As the one year anniversary of Super Storm Sandy that rocked the Greater NY/NJ area last year passes, many articles have been written, but not much has changed.

83% of Organizations Lack a Business Continuity Plan 1 Year After Hurricane Sandy. But then most people (A) don’t think it can happen to them; (B) didn’t learn from 9/11 and Katrina either (including our government and FEMA); and (C) people generally do not think climate change is real.

from Verizon’s twitter. flood wall testing in Battery Park, NYC

You aren’t alone as a business owner or exec for not doing anything. “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced action to strengthen the reliability and resiliency of 911 communication network during major disasters. Widespread outages and disruptions to 911 services in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions impacted more than 3.6 million people,” writes Appy Geek. And this after an extensive study of 911 comms after both 9/11 AND Katrina. We study it, but don’t execute on the improvements. What does that say?

Why do you need a disaster recovery plan or business continuity planning? Because when your customer files get destroyed by water and wind, what is left of your business? Not much.

“Hurricanes are, at minimum, a triple threat, and can damage lives and property through rainfall, through storm surge, and due to their powerful winds,” writes Mother Jones. “Sandy is just the beginning.”

An exhibit called Rising Waters uses snapshots by ordinary New Yorkers to illustrate the wrath of Superstorm Sandy (via Fast Company).

First tip for Disaster Preparedness: Expect the Unexpected. Ever data centers – designed to withstand hurricanes – couldn’t prepare for the flooding caused by storm surges on Oct. 29, 2012. (See stories at DCK).

These 19 Shocking Images Show Hurricane Sandy’s Devastating Impact On The Northeast. A year later with a federal budget of almost $10 billion dollars and most areas are not yet recovered. A year! Could your business survive a year of uncertainty?

Interesting Businessweek headline: “Main Street Isn’t Investing Much in Post-Sandy Upgrades”. Could it be that the insurance money hasn’t come in yet? Or as Businesweek writes: “Following Hurricane Sandy’s more than $50 billion in damages (pdf) to U.S. businesses, homes, and public infrastructure, more business might be expected to follow suit. But the scale of the problems are often too big for business owners and require government planning.”

At any rate, as a business owner or top executive, you have to do some planning in case this happens again. At the very least, backup as much customer and business critical data as possible offsite and far away.

Next put a communications plan in place. The Red Cross used twitter. The NJ 911 center used Five9. Let people know how to contact the execs in the case of an emergency.

The federal government has business continuity planning guides. A really good telecom consultant can help you design a BC plan. Every plane ride you listen to the safety instructions despite how few crashes there are. Every hotel room has a fire escape route map on the door. In school, we had fire drills. There is nothing wrong with planning for a disaster. You may in fact learn a few things while in the planning stages.

tw telecom fared pretty well during the storm, but even twt took lessons away. “being aware of where our equipment is being placed in buildings, how best to bring fuel into the city in the case of a disaster, and ideas on even better preparing for the next time; getting to that next level. Because, as much as we don’t like to think about it, an event like this will happen again.”

Finally, a good read about the aftermath and resettlement.

Tags: business continuity, disaster recovery, strategy
Related tags: hurricane sandy, business continuity, super storm, continuity planning, business owner, business

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Cloudy Math – Dec 10, 2012

Do They Even Know Their Business? – Sep 20, 2013

Shiny Object Syndrome – Aug 21, 2013

What to Do About Barnes & Noble? – Jul 09, 2013

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If you have been reading my blog long, you know that I find it amazing how many telecom companies have little real cash flow, income or profits. Well, Fred Wilson gave me a lesson in company value:

“The lesson here is that you can’t just value a company by taking its current performance into account. You really need to have a view towards its future performance. And you need to understand why the company is not currently profitable.”

Where does the money go? Is the money invested in sales and marketing? R&D? Is the money that would be profit or income being invested wisely? Those are good points. (And the comments section talk some things too.)

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A Look at Some Numbers – Aug 07, 2013

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Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

Yesterday there was an article in The Atlantic about a global wine shortage. Apparently, we have had smaller grape harvests in the last couple of years. When you consider that wine consumption is up (and so many new winemakers including Dave Matthews and other celebs have entered the market), it isn’t surprising. Plus add Climate Change, which has to affect not just grape harvests but all crops globally.

But this reminds me of the chocolate scare of a few years ago when cocoa crops were declining. Chocolate was in danger. Cue price hike!

What a great way to raise prices and in turn profits – cry shortage. No real way to do that in telecom despite the fact that most markets are flat or shrinking. Fiber, especially rural fiber, is probably the only scarce resource in telecom now. (Believe me, try to get 10MB x 10MB with SIP trunking into some parts of Texas!)

AT&T just tried to raise special access rates but there was a backlash.

Scarcity is the value. Scarcity in skills or bundle or integration or deployment or features is the way to go. Following the crowd, doing what everyone else is doing, and misunderstanding supply and demand are ways to lose in the marketplace.

Right now, I think UC is the exact opposite of wine or chocolate — there isn’t much demand for it. “Hosted PBX/UC grew the most of any VoIP service in 1H13 as businesses, particularly larger enterprises, continue to turn to hosted services as a viable alternative to premises-based solutions,” according to Infonetics. The demand is in the Enterprise space. Most of the SMB market just wants cheap, reliable VoIP. Or there dealer still has them hooked up to a premise PBX. SIP trunking is growing – “Driven by activity in North America, SIP trunking spiked 23% in 1H13 over 2H12” – due to the fact that cablecos sell SIP trunks and PRIs are fading away.

Another example: web conferencing. This is a great review of 3: Webex versus GoToMeeting versus MyTrueCloud.

It is unfortunate that telecom doesn’t have a scarcity issue or prices could be going up instead of down.

I am going to close on a quote from Nicholas Bate: “A competitor is not a threat so long as it is observed in a calm and detached manner: what can we learn from them and their successes? It is a threat when we become fearful, slash prices and try and ride in the wake they cause in the market. That’s when we drown.”

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Related tags: grape harvests, raise prices, prices, chocolate, trunking, market

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Masergy Buys Broadcore – Jul 10, 2012

Net-Head Talking Coming Up – Sep 07, 2010

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I get asked often how a data backup will work when it is Terabytes. Even on a 10MB x 10MB pipe, 2 TB of data is going to take some time. It takes 16 hours on USB 2.0 which is about 53MBps throughput.

Green Cloud Technologies will ship you a NAS and secure hard drives. First, you attach the NAS to your LAN where it will backup the data (or hard drives) that you need backed up. Once the NAS is set, the secure drives are attached to duplicate the NAS. Then the drives are sent to the data center, where it will be hooked up and used as the backup drive for the seed for the service.

After de-duplication and compression, only incremental backups from there.

That’s the easy way to do the big backups.

Tags: backup, data center
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It Had to Happen – Sep 18, 2013

A Little Bit of Tuesday News – Dec 18, 2012

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