On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 35 of 376

Studying UCaaS

UC is a bucket of ways to communicate – voice, video, conferencing, messaging (SMS, text, IM, chat), presence and more. Some of those buckets are shifting. Voice calls can be made through many apps (like Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc. and I am amazed NOT through LinkedIn). Chat is taking over for SMS/text, but the app for chat keeps evolving. Desk phones are going away for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the office is going away – and employees are declining. Where does that leave the average UCaaS provider?

A survey from BroadSoft found, “one in three small businesses expects to have mobile-only UCaaS solutions in place by 2020.” I guess Verizon decided to jump to the future with its One Talk Mobile service (powered by BSFT). (I wonder how Mast Mobile is doing?)

Same BSFT study found “more than four in five (82%) expect OTT messaging and collaboration software to be the mainstay of communication by 2020, with the remaining 18% saying email will still be the primary messaging tool.” Now they always say email is going away, but Slack does replace internal email to relieve that inbox load. The volume of comms is not going away, it is just shifting to other buckets. But will one of those buckets be yours?

“A report from Osterman Research in November found that two in five business decision makers were either ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ fearful about moving to unified comms (UC). Reasons given for not making the jump include not fully understanding the impact UC would have on their business, as well as various investments in legacy phone systems.” Selling Change is Hard. Selling UCaas on features is harder. Deployment is frightening. User adoption is slow. These issues need to be addressed in the sales process. (It’s called building Trust.)

Businesses buy Microsoft and Cisco for a few reasons: (1) never get fired buying these brands; (2) so many certified people working in enterprise act as brand ambassadors plus trust the brand; and (3) marketing/branding.

There are many studies on UCaaS. Are you reading them? Applying that info to your bundle or sales techniques?

It isn’t that you don’t have a good service (hopefully), it is that you don’t message it; target it; and market it. And you better hurry because the market is quickly being dominated by about 15 companies of the 2000+.

Tags: broadsoft, cisco, conferencing, hosted pbx, microsoft, UC
Related tags: those buckets, ucaas, going, email, reasons, mobile

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UC Tidbits #2441 – Jul 05, 2016

Cisco to Spark Some BroadCloud Competition – Dec 28, 2015

UCaaS: It isn’t All Bad News – Aug 25, 2016

What Pain Does UCaaS Solve? – Aug 22, 2016

Selling UCaaS as a Solution with Velis4 – Jun 17, 2016

It Will Be an Outsider That Kicks Your Butt – Feb 22, 2016

Uh Oh, Microsoft is Closing the Gaps – Jan 15, 2016

PlumUC Pipes in on Skype4B for Partners – Jul 19, 2016

Most Businesses Fear Change – May 19, 2016

Musings on the Polycom Deal – Apr 18, 2016

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August 29, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

UCaaS: It isn’t All Bad News

Okay, I will stop picking on UCaaS like I did HERE and HERE and tell you about some good stuff.

VOSS Solutions has been a Cisco shop for many years. Now they are launching VOSS-4-UC, a management platform for the hybrid Cisco and Microsoft environment, which I would imagine is how many Fortune 5000 companies operate. VOSS also hired a Skype for Biz Chief, in a nod to the growth of Office365+Skype4B.

Meanwhile another Cisco shop launched a UCaaS service for small business. Verizon One Talk is a BroadSoft based, mobile first offering for small business. As Verizon wrote me, “It is selling well out of the gate because it is simple, easy to buy, only the key features, and the sales channel that incented to sell it at scale.” At this time, I don’t know the difference between One Talk and VCE, the other BroadSoft offering that VZ sells, but I will look into it.

Meanwhile, Gary Kim has a good write-up on One Talk; so does Telecompetitor. The VZ commercial is a little over the top but it gets the point across. The key is that small businesses that One Talk targets are going all mobile anyway. This offers them some PBX functionality on top of that — to look “bigger”. See the video here.

Intelepeer added some channel help and re-organized to support their Cloud Advantage Partner Program. Intelepeer is a SIP provider with close ties t o Cisco platforms including Spark. They partnered with Chinook on a hosted Lync/SIP bundle. More and more providers have to embrace both Cisco and Microsoft, who hold 55% of the UC market.

“According to the survey, 26% of IT decision makers and 39% of business decision makers are either “somewhat” or “very” fearful about migrating to UC with nearly half (48%) of those surveyed admitting that they don’t fully understand the full impact UC would have on their organizations.”

Verizon kind of tackled this, right? By getting simple AND by targeting a segment of the marketplace (not the WHOLE marketplace of 1-1000), their UCaaS offering will sell. Skinny bundles will help or highly targeted packages make it easier to message to the prospect.

On the enterprise front, it will be a hybrid world going forward. We see more providers embracing Office365 (especially when so many ran from it at launch). Others have come to realize that it will be a Cisco+Microsoft world, so adjust to it.

Tags: broadsoft, cisco, microsoft, UC, voip, vz
Related tags: cisco microsoft, business verizon, decision makers, cisco, ucaas, business

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What Pain Does UCaaS Solve? – Aug 22, 2016

UC Tidbits #2441 – Jul 05, 2016

Musings on the Polycom Deal – Apr 18, 2016

Uh Oh, Microsoft is Closing the Gaps – Jan 15, 2016

Cisco to Spark Some BroadCloud Competition – Dec 28, 2015

IT versus PBX – Apr 20, 2009

A Big Shift Coming to Telecom – Jul 05, 2016

UCaaS Tidbits #2440 – Jul 05, 2016

Selling UCaaS as a Solution with Velis4 – Jun 17, 2016

Why Do You Look at an iPhone That Way? – Apr 07, 2016

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August 25, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Research Firms Missed Again on UC

MarketsandMarkets states that the UCaaS market size is expected to grow from USD 17.35 Billion in 2016 to USD 28.69 Billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.6% during the forecast period.

In contrast, Transparency Research claims, “The opportunity in the global UCaaS market was pegged at US$8.23 bn in 2015 and is projected to be worth US$79.3 bn by 2024. The market is likely to expand at a remarkable CAGR of 29.4% during the forecast period.” [TMR]

Last year, TMR predicted, “The global unified communications as a service market is poised for staggering growth, and will be worth US$37.85 billion by 2022, finds Transparency Market Research’s latest report. The market will expand at a CAGR of 23.4% between 2014 and 2022 upon its 2013 valuation of US$5.68 billion.” So it went from $5.7B to $8.2B in a year . WOW!

How are they both so far off? Wait, there’s more. “Gartner predicts that the UC market will grow slightly from $41 billion in 2014 to $42.4 billion by 2019,” according to a CRN article.

Where Gartner did get it right is here: “The stakes are high for vendors in the enterprise unified communications space as the market is now mature while overall growth has slowed. Under-performing UC providers will be forced to exit the market with vendor consolidation expected, according to Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications.”

Transparency noted, “The lack of awareness regarding UCaaS solutions and the benefits they offer threatens to hamper the adoption rate of UCaaS by SMEs.” In other words, the marketing sucks in UCaaS. But when you want to be everything to everybody and grow up to be a unicorn that is what happens.

“The top five companies in the Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) market together accounted for a share of just under 57% in 2015. Transparency Market Research observes that the key opportunity for these players – 8X8 Inc., West Corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and Fuze Inc. – lies in the integration of business processes and applications. This is expected to further the adoption of UCaaS solutions across the globe.” I think they forgot Vonage at 600K seats but whatever. No one has any idea how big the UC business line is at West. And where does slack fit in? WIth video and voice calling added to Slack plus slackbots and the integrations, 3 million users makes them bigger than many of the top 5.

I will say that it is slowing – otherwise the SPIFF war wouldn’t be needed.

Some of it is UCaaS isn’t easy to sell – or even fun to sell. Some of it is that the marketing sucks. The software is bloated with too many features aimed at everyone instead of someone.

Other factors:

Deployment – when you suck at deploying it, partners stop selling it. So does direct sales!
User Adoption – if the users don’t use it, it goes away. Training, ease of use and a good GUI/UX design is needed so people use the system!!
Replaced by others – Office365 with Skype4B, Slack, Google for Work and smartphones.

Seth Godin writes 4 simple marketing steps: make it worth talking about; design it so people use it; tell the story to people who will benefit the most; and grind it out daily.

Now go sell something.

Tags: deployment, hosted pbx, marketing, numbers, sellecom, selling, UC
Related tags: ucaas market, unified communications, marketing sucks, transparency market, ucaas solutions, market

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2 Reasons It is Hard to Sell UC – Mar 14, 2016

Selling UCaaS as a Solution with Velis4 – Jun 17, 2016

4 Points on Selling Broadview OfficeSuite UC – May 26, 2016

Most Businesses Fear Change – May 19, 2016

Monday Morning Thoughts on Sales and Strategy – Feb 01, 2016

Competing in SaaS or VoIP – Jan 19, 2016

Cloud Comms On the Rise – Dec 28, 2015

Utility VoIP – Oct 01, 2015

What the Studies About UC Say – Aug 25, 2015

Where is the VoIP Market is Going? – May 11, 2015

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August 24, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

What Pain Does UCaaS Solve?

There is rarely actual discussion in LinkedIn Groups any more. If there are comments, they are undisguised pitches for companies. In this particular discussion, the reader can conclude that most people know very little about the market that they are in. Apparently, competitive analysis is not a high priority.

The article about Google partnering with RingCentral to add some additional UCaaS features to its Google for Work (GfW) suite was posted. This partnership is just noise really. RC has had integration with GfW for almost a year. The surprising thing is that no one realizes that Microsoft and Google have been battling it out for years. Google Docs versus Microsoft Office. Gmail versus Hotmail. Bing trying to compete with Google.

Office365 has over 50 million users. Skype has hundreds of millions users. Skype for Business is a merger of Lync and Skype that is now bundled with Office365 in various iterations.

I’d like to point out that 50 million users is more users than RC, 8×8 and all of Broadsoft combined (not including the BSFT users who are only on SIP trunking). So it might be significant. It would be more significant if the users of Office365 were trained on it – but you can say that about any platform including Broadsoft.

Slack got to 3 million daily users in three short years due to ease of use and functionality.

With WebRTC and so many apps adding video chat and voice calling functionality, UCaaS providers better figure this stuff out fast – adoption, ease of use, migration, integration, training and frictionless sales.

What real pain point does a UC&C Platform really solve?

If it was a problem that was more than voice, the UC providers would appear to be Polycom distributors. When it falls down the scope to just voice, you are either selling it wrong; you don’t know the benefits at all; or you are not hitting a target audience.

The SPIFF Wars of 2016 point to a problem with sales. Either there are too many Hosted VoIP provider in North America (there are!) or there are not enough businesses that see the need for this vaguely marketed comms platform.

Slack didn’t have a CMO (chief marketing officer) for two years!!! It grew by word of mouth. How come that hasn’t happened with a UCaaS platform? Even Hipchat grows via WOM.

WebRTC, APIs and integrations have us at a point where voice calls happen anywhere. That is bad news for VoIP companies who have sell as a voice replacement because there isn’t much voice to replace, so you better be cheap.

When a channel partner goes to a master agent for UCaaS, he has well over 20 VoIP providers to choose from. How does he choose? VoIP companies better get clear on that fast because it is getting expensive to get attention. 6X MRR anyone?

Google+RC isn’t going to work any better than AT&T @Home did. As for Google sticking to search, they have over 5 million businesses using it. And again that is more that most other companies have by a long shot!

Mitel is confused. Now that they can’t take Polycom off the plate, what now? Try to buy Shoretel again, since Shoretel announced they were looking to sell? What does that solve? Oh, right, nothing, It is about maximizing shareholder value, not about the customer.

When you look at the landscape, RC, 8×8 and others, especially Panterra, are jamming as much functionality into the product that they can. Conferencing, screen share, video chat, IM, presence, analytics, reporting, ad nauseum. What effect does that have? Think Microsoft Office 2013. Most people use about 3-7 features and the rest is beyond them. It is bloatware. And without constant training for users, what good is it?

It is to appeal to a broad audience, which is old market thinking. Mass products for the masses, like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Slack is for a limited audience. APIs, bots and integrations make it even more appealing to that same audience- and more useful It doesn’t result in market creep, just usefulness.

Microsoft, Cisco, Google and to some extent most companies are looking for broad appeal. Everyone is our market. That is such broken thinking that I can’t even wrap my head around it any more.

Even AT&T and Verizon have left that thinking in telecom.

When you think about the most successful CLECs (almost an oxymoron, I know) they had no more than 65K customers. USLEC was at 30K. 8×8 is at almost 50K. Yes RC claims over 300K but most of those are paying about $38 per month, but count them if you want. There are 25 million SMB in the US. What percentage is that? The UC space has been spending money since 2003. And it has less customers than GfW. The biggest has 300K very small businesses. Sales are getting more expensive because your marketing sucks. Everything for Everybody means nothing to most everyone.

Tags: 8×8, branding, broadsoft, differentiation, google, hosted pbx, marketing, microsoft, skype, UC, voip
Related tags: million users, microsoft office, users skype, getting expensive, users, google

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Selling UCaaS as a Solution with Velis4 – Jun 17, 2016

Uh Oh, Microsoft is Closing the Gaps – Jan 15, 2016

Why You? – Jul 22, 2016

UC Tidbits #2441 – Jul 05, 2016

The Telecom Long Tails – Jun 07, 2016

Most Businesses Fear Change – May 19, 2016

Why Do You Look at an iPhone That Way? – Apr 07, 2016

What Happens in Vegas – Mar 17, 2016

2 Reasons It is Hard to Sell UC – Mar 14, 2016

How To Win at UCaaS – Feb 03, 2016

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August 22, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

The INC5000 is Out

I like the INC5000 list for 2016 because it is audited revenue, not the stuff of legend or press release.

Birch is on here with $591M in revenue in 2015, which looks like the lost about $100M of the Cbeyond revenue. In 2013, revenue was approximately $207M. In 2013, Birch acquired Covista, Ernest and Lightyear Network Solutions. They bought Cbeyond in 2014 plus the customer bases of Liberty-Bell Telecom, EveryCall, SelecTel, 5LYNX and Orbitcom. “In September 2014, Birch announced that they undergone 24 acquisitions overall, worth more than $500 million.” Apparently churn is a problem, because they should be at more than $700M. Then this year, Birch purchased Primus Canada. Maybe we will see next year if they are on the INC5000 – or if they go public.

Fatbeam in Idaho “won 11 FCC E-rate contracts, which will help fund the construction of an additional 200 miles of fiber.” [source] That should bump up their 2015 revenue of $2.8 million a bit.

Tower Cloud is a cell tower backhaul provider at $41.5M.

The list is mainly VoIP providers. Lightspeed Voice in Florida is just one of over 2000 Hosted VoIP companies operating in the US. They are at $2 million. In contrast, Clarity Voice is at $4M; NexVortex at $14M; Metaswitch powered CloudNet Group in Phoenix at $3.7M; and TeleBroad in Brooklyn at $3.4M. There are a lot of VoIP providers this size.

Star2Star was on the list for the sixth time. The 2013 revenue was $33M. 2015 was $52.7M. S2S states that they have “500,000 business users at tens of thousands of locations across the US and Canada,” which would put them near the same seat size as Vonage Business and 8×8 at about 500-600K.

In contrast, Broadvoice is at $42M and 8×8 has $162M in revenue with 41,621 business customers in 2015. [8×8 average monthly service revenue per business customer increased 11% year-over-year to a record $320.] Star2Star is looking for an IPO in 2017.

A few of my clients made the INC5000 list including Hunt Telecom for its second straight year; JMF Solutions; and IdeaTek.

Mammoth Networks at $21.5M!

A handful of channel partners are on the list.

SpyGlass Group at $14M
ATC in Cincinnati at $2.4M
Innovative Business Solutions at $4.4M
Portaro Group (AT&T SP) at $2.2M
cm2tech is more VAR but still at $12M (how much is Hardware/PBX sales?)
Data Hardware Depot is another VAR with h/w sales at $15.5M
PlanetOne at $23M!
GCN at $7.2M
TeleQuality at $17.7M
CarrierSales at $10M
Sandler Partners were at $40M last year but bought X4 to bulk up to $60+M.
MASS Comm is at $21.6M.
Intelisys would have been on with $120M except ScanSource.

You have to wonder where CSNG, WTG, Telarus, Microcorp, TBI and Avant are in revenue. I guess we will find out if any of them get picked off by (A) SYNNEX or another VAD; or (B) another master agent.

Tags: channel partners, clec, financials, master agency, voip
Related tags: revenue, business, birch, another, million, group