On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 162 of 376

Another Event

It seems that more and more companies are holding events. We have plenty of trade shows, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Now master agencies have shows (some have more than one). One PR firm became an event planning company.

I think there are just too many shows. I mean that in that most are just networking and don’t offer much in the way of valuable content. Listening to the channel head give his canned remarks isn’t any better in a convention center than it is in a downtown hotel. Plus those same remarks were probably in the newsletter.

I just saw the TELX Marketplace Live sponsorship guide for the December event in San Fran. Jeepers! How do carriers do 2 Channel Partners, 2 Comptel, 2 ITEXPO, 6 or 7 master agency shows, road shows, ITW, and then this one in the 4th quarter? At $6K per show plus personnel, hotels, meals, shipping, etc. that amounts to 15 shows per year minimum – at a cost of at least $150,000. I would rather see that money put in my SPIFF check.

I hear carriers say that agents need to add value. I’d like to say the same thing to the people running these events: where’s the value?

Tags: conference, expo
Related tags: shows, event

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October 24, 2013 , On Rad's Radar

Character Above All

Thanks to Bright House Networks for the invite to lunch today to listen to former Colts and Bucs coach, Tony Dungy. It was my first time getting to hear him speak. It was an informal talk.

Dungy spent 10 years in Pittsburgh – 2 years as a player (Super Bowl win) and 8 years as an assistant coach under Chuck Knoll. He became head coach of the Tampa Bay Bucs in 1996. He mentioned that he didn’t get hired earlier as a head coach because he didn’t yell or scream or cuss. General managers didn’t know how he would motivate players without those antics. He said he would do it by Respect.

He promised the Glazers (owners of the Bucs) that he would put a good product on the field but also off the field as he thought players and the team had a responsibility to lead in the community. He thought the team could make Tampa a better place to live.

Derrick Brooks was one of the first players to step up. The banners surrounding the stadium now but in 1996 (in the new stadium), Number 55 was the first with Brooks Bunch. He was followed by Mike Alstott and Warrick Dunn (who just gave his 100th home to a signle mom!) This is the lasting impact of the Super Bowl Bucs – what they did for the community.

Dungy said that you needed the right type of players. “Talent will win you games, but Character will win you championships.” Players had talent, but they had to have Character if they played for him. They would do background checks all the way to high school to find out about a player before draft.

Besides talent and character, Dungy asked if the player would fit well in the current locker room. Teamwork was the key to success. He also wanted self-starters. It isn’t so different for businesses: a company needs talent, character, culture and teamwork – everyone striving for the same vision.

Our current Bucs team are OH-fer. Fans stopped watching – some of it due to TV blackouts for two seasons and some of it because the product wasn’t good – on or off the field. Too many players only made the papers when they were being arrested. We have 3 Pro Bowl players and many didn’t know that! The players and the team aren’t getting much press – and no TV time with few fans in the stadium. It amounts to not a lot of revenue for the Glazers. Where are the Role Models and Community Leaders on this team?

Some other noteworthy thoughts:

Dungy remembers how important his barber was during his childhood. The barber would ask him about his life; give him nuggets about life. Another guest that works with the Boys and Girls Club in Pinellas County mentioned that the barber is also where he learns about what is going on in the community – from the people at the barber shop. The barber shop, like neighbors, were where role models could be found to talk about Life a little bit more.

Dungy said that Bright House Sports Network has raised the level on high school sports by televising them, especially the live broadcasts.

Dungy mentioned that his father taught him many lessons, including to become an Uncommon Person. It is difficult to Step Out and walk away from the crowd. Dungy said that doing what is right is hard, but kids today should be taught that if the crowd is running in the wrong direction, they should go the other way and make the crowd follow you. Be the Uncommon Man. Be Who You Are. He retired from coaching because he has 6 kids left at home and he wants to be more available to them as that was an important part of parenting.

Tags: coaching, hiring
Related tags: talent character, bright house, players talent, dungy, players, barber

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Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

October 23, 2013 , On Rad's Radar

Will UC Work or Is It a Question of Money?

I see this often enough: UC firm nabs funding. In this case, Thinking Phone Networks got $10M in funding to bring the total to $31M. Thinking Phones has been around since 2006. Maybe UC just isn’t going to work. Maybe the independent UC providers like TPN, Panterra, Simple Signal, Telesphere and others errored.

Most UC providers try to sell nationally, instead of regionally. Regional CLECs do better in my experience than national players (see exhibits: XO, L3, Sprint versus TelePacific, Integra, US Signal). That is far more costly than being regional. Running a nationwide MPLS network is added costs as well.

I compare the UC market to the DSL market in 1999. All the DLECs – Rhythms, Northpoint and Covad – had big IPO’s, all went nationwide – and all collapsed.

I had advised most of the cloud comm community to get their sales & marketing machine in gear before Comcast rolled its Broadsoft-based Hosted PBX service out to the channel, which it did last month. To have the might of Comcast chasing after your mid-sized deals will not be fun. Comcast has too many advantages:

brand name
Capital
pricing power
other services to leverage
one of the smartest people in HPBX works at Comcast

Verizon hasn’t even started its VCE marketing machine yet. (It’s been too busy marketing cable services; earning $2.23 billion this quarter, on $30.28 billion in quarterly revenue; and “added 1.1 million net retail wireless connections during the quarter”). What then?

Most businesses don’t see or buy the many advantages of UC. Many just want a replacement for their old key system. Period. A good amount of SMBs just want cheap, reliable voice. It is this that the cablecos – Cox, TWC, Comcast, Charter, Bright House – prey on. And then there is the bundle advantage – cheap, fast Internet with TV for your lobby to go with your hosted voice.

I do understand that cloud services is CAPEX intensive for the provider. Yet if you started in 2006, shouldn’t you be cash flowing some of that instead of taking seed rounds two years in a row? It’s not like TPN has the Broadsoft penalty to pay; they are based off Asterisk.

I think the UC providers that are regional will do far better than the national players. I also think that some of these UC providers need to pivot to verticals. I don’t foresee the Duopoly – VZ, C-Link, TDS, WIND, and Cablecos – leaving much room for the national players. For one, the brand leverage is too big. EarthLink is capitalizing on its name recognition in the cloud space. Brands build trust. trust is needed for sales. Most CLECs and VoIP providers never bothered to brand or position their company. Big error.

Back to the question: Will UC work? Maybe on the Fortune 10,000 but I’m not so sure that the rest of the marketplace cares about unified communications. Texts, mobile phones, email, social media are all new avenues of communication that have marginalized the business phone line. Integrating all of those silos of communication – emails, texts, IM/chat, SM, voice, video – into one seamless, easy to use system is a must. How do you do that when you drop ship the phones?

That integration is expensive, time consuming and requires some specialized software programming skills. I’m not saying that the Duopoly will do it, but if the indie UC companies are NOT doing it, they are fighting in the dirt with the Duopoly.

One other analogies: the ISP industry was huge until DSL took a foothold in about 2003. Up till then, EarthLink, AOL, NetZero and hundreds of independent ISP’s sold most of the Internet access (in the form of dial-up and DSL). The ILECs loved dial-up since it caused the sale of more POTS lines. BRI (ISDN) didn’t take off like the AT&T Lab coats thought, so the ILECs got into dial-up and DSL – undercut everyone with a single bill, telemarketing powerhouse, brand advantage, and lobbying power.

Masergy, which owns UC provider Broadcore, announced that it will be making some acquisitions for growth.

Simple Signal announced that they rolled out gUnify to allow integration with Google Apps.

CoreDial Re-brands Unified Communications Platform as SwitchConnex

Siemens Enterprise Communications changed its name to Unify – to change the way enterprises Collaborate and Communicate. “Project Ansible is a new communications and collaboration platform that leverages secure, dynamic collaboration, universal content aggregation, and a consumer-like, single-pane-of-glass experience that drives adoption and seamless integration into business processes to enhance business performance,” according to the pr.

We’ll see.

Tags: cloud communications, comcast, duopoly, hosted pbx, UC
Related tags: national players, simple signal, marketing machine, unified communications, comcast, providers

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VoIP Consolidation Well Underway – Feb 22, 2011

Vocalocity Acquired by Vonage – Oct 10, 2013

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October 21, 2013 , On Rad's Radar

Broadsoft is Now a SP

Broadsoft Connections 2013 kicked off with the CEO keynote. The twitter stream for #BSFTconnections has been interesting. UC-One is the answer to BYOD and mobile. Telstra has been a customer for 10 years – with 250K seats. I know, right? That isn’t a lot for ten years worth of effort.

The big news though: Broadsoft will become a white-label service provider!

My guess is that growth is slowing down. Broadsoft has 400+ service providers globally. How many more are there that can spend a million to start providing VoIP?

When you look at the inner workings of VZ and VCE, it was going to come to this. If Broadsoft wants its service providers to run BroadWorks, BroadCloud and BroadEverything*, then it was going to have to start doing the platform delivery. Kind of like PAAS.

Also, to grow BSFT will want to chase smaller providers and enterprise, neither of whom want to run the system. It is similar to Microsoft’s OCS that became Lync. It was just too complex for most IT shops to run it themselves.

This isn’t that surprising of a move. Cisco, Dell, Microsoft and Mitel have all gone the route of vendor providing the whole service. It does present a problem for the Cloud Comm Alliance, since this will seem like a direct competition from the vendor. Well, ISPs have been experiencing that since 1999, so welcome to the party.

Interesting to watch for sure.

UPDATE / Correction

“User Experience: BroadWorks Collaborate To arm service providers with flexibility in how they acquire and deliver UC services, BroadSoft is introducing BroadWorks Collaborate — a new delivery model that makes UC services available through server software that resides within the service provider’s network. Service providers now have the ability to utilize BroadSoft’s UC capabilities via BroadWorks(R) server software or through BroadCloud(R), BroadSoft’s fully-hosted cloud platform.” [PR] Still sounds like a SAAS / PAAs model to me.

*BroadEverything is a joke of mine.

Tags: broadsoft
Related tags: service providers, broadworks collaborate, server software, service provider, broadsoft, service

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October 17, 2013 , On Rad's Radar

Broadsoft Alum Acquired by Fidelity

Now that it is out there I can report that cloud-based video conferencing service, Vidtel, was acquired by Fidelity. Wainhouse, a research house for the telepresence industry, let the news out yesterday.

Vidtel, based in Sunnyvale, CA., was founded by former Broadsoft CMO, Scott Wharton, in 2008. Alex Doyle, another Broadsoft alum, was Vidtel’s VP of Marketing.

Vidtel was a channel focused technology service provider. (I was working there this year on channel marketing). The Wainhouse report tells the story of how this startup took a different path from its bigger competitor, Blue Jeans, who was all about raising money. Vidtel was about raising revenue through strategic partnerships with ClaryIcon, InFocus, IntelePeer, Providea, ACT!, and others.

You know I like channel focused service providers, but even more I like a focused service provider. “Furthermore, the company avoided scope creep within its service offering.” That is a key takeaway for other SP’s or startups.

I agree with Wainhouse, ‘We view this acquisition as a real-world example of how hard work, perseverance, and intelligence can really pay off.”

Good luck to Scott, Dan, Dagan, Bruce and the rest of the staff at Vidtel on the next phase of the company’s growth with Fidelity.

Tags: broadsoft, mergers, startup, video conferencing, vidtel
Related tags: focused service, acquired fidelity, channel focused, service provider, vidtel, service