On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 41 of 376

UCaaS Tidbits #2440

SkySwitch has launched contact center-as-a-service (CCaSS) for its white-label resellers. [channel vision mag]

RingCentral Enterprise with Google for Work is a new partnership. It will chase (far) behind the Microsoft suite. As expressed here, “Take Skype for Business, Cortana, and Yammer to name just three, held together by Office 365 and the Azure cloud platform, while not forgetting the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), as well as the recent acquisition of LinkedIn.” RC has had partnerships with AT&T, BT, Telus and others. These partnerships have not moved the needle. This one likely won’t either.

A survey from BetterCloud finds a trend developing: ‘Office 365-based organisations are more than four times larger and five years older on average, while companies who run Office 365 have IT teams five times the size of their Google counterparts.” Looks to me that if you have a big IT department, you have a likelihood of more Microsoft certified staff (and Cisco certs as well). The one thing Google needs is a certification program. No better salesperson than someone that invested time and money on a certification.

magicJack is rolling out its magicJack for business to the SMB market. No idea why they claim so much success with the magicJack device, since that clearly was a fad – and what does that have to do with the SMB market? magicJack acquired Broadsmart for $42M. Why would it want to associate Broadsoft UCaaS with that device?

Finally the VoIP hardware vendors are stepping it up.

“Edgewater Networks’ hybrid cloud to edge, end-to-end approach to security, service management and analytics is an ideal complement to net2phone’s white glove business communications delivery platform.” [pr] So net2phone is deploying the Edgewater IAD and management suite. The next evolution for Edgewater is SD-WAN, an orchestration layer that will overlay last mile to provide packet shaping, failover, analytics and more. Vonage Business and a few former CLECs (like ELNK and TPAC) have added SD-WAN as a managed service.

CenturyLink chose Versa as its SDN partner. Versa has been the “lead virtualization partner for the SD-WAN and SD-Security services launched last week.”

CenturyLink beefed up its SDN and NFV strategy by buying the assets of Active Broadband Networks. “CenturyLink says it purchased ABN’s edge platform assets, designed to enable service providers to deliver cloud-based services. The company said its purchase would help automate its network, move network functions into the cloud, and deliver SDN and NFV services.”

Lastly, hardware vendor, PATTON, has launched a new VoIP CPE that integrate FXS, BRI with UCC and All-IP Communications. The SmartNode VoIP Gateways and eSBCs are designed for small offices that need legacy-device integration with All-IP business communications and UC&C.

Avant Joins Telarus, TBI as RingCentral Master Agents. I find it interesting how so many VoIP providers follow the same channel go to market strategy of chasing the master agencies, who already have 20+ vendors in that space. VoIP shouldn’t be a commodity, but I guess that is just what it will be relegated to be.

Tags: call center, centurylink, CPE, hardware, master agency, microsoft, NFV, SDN, UC, unified messaging, voip, WAN
Related tags: business communications, business, magicjack, cloud, service, google

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July 5, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Talking to Channel Managers

Michael Bremmer of TelecomQuotes.com stops by the podcast to discuss – from an agent or partner viewpoint – what we look for from channel managers. It is 24 minutes but a great listen for anyone in the channel, We start with a great question: What is a strategic channel manager? Thanks, Mike!

If you can’t see the podcast player, you can listen on Soundcloud or you can download the mp3 here.

Tags: agents, channel managers, channel partners, podcast
Related tags: channel managers, channel

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July 1, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Change: Musical Chairs

This has to be the busiest year ever for musical chairs. People are company hopping like crazy. And companies have been chopping people like crazy.

The Conference Group laid off channel people. NgenX discontinued their agent program (and laid off channel personnel.)

Broadsoft lost Jeffrey Pearl and Mike Wilkinson.

Frontier and Charter are laying off as they work through integrations.

Some of the job loss is Synergy – that marketing term for redundant jobs after mergers and acquisitions.

Some of it is due to companies just not marketing clearly or correctly.

Who is your target customer?
How do they benefit from your services?
Why should they buy from you and not someone else?

These are basic questions that many companies just can’t answer.

And while they flounder to figure it out, there are companies buying market share and taking mind share (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Slack to name a few).

And admittedly some of it is that people just have not gained any extra skills. With all the books, blogs, online courses, even taking in just one of those per quarter will help you improve and grow. And when that happens you get more valuable. You should be investing in yourself.

Do you have the skills necessary for 2020?

Today, the average Person watches 5 hours of TV Each Day! My friend pointed out: “If you live to 96 and watch 4 hours of tv a day, that is 16 years watching TV … 16 years of your life!” Think what you could learn or change if you just took 30 minutes a day for reading, learning or volunteering or whatever.

I saw this article today in the Telegraph: The importance of job satisfaction. “The work you do impacts everything else you do in life. Not only does it enable you to earn the money you need to provide for yourself and your family, take a holiday, buy a house… a job also allows you to feel you are part of something.”

For some you just need the paycheck, but if you treat the job search like a marketing campaign, you can win a job you want. BTW, it isn’t the company, so much it is the boss you are working for that is the chief factor.

If you haven’t done so, connect with me on LinkedIn. And check their job board regularly, while also reaching out to your network. But please don’t say you are looking. Be specific. What job titles will apply, what size company, geography, etc. The more specific you are, the more salience happens. (That means that when I hear it, I will immediately think of your name!)

Tags: education, jobs, linkedin
Related tags: musical chairs, people, companies, marketing, company

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June 28, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

The Struggle of the Channel Managers

One big struggle of the channel managers is to get agents to sell deeper into accounts. The providers would like more than Internet and Voice to be sold.

If you have been at a master agent roadshow or conference, you know that what we will call fringe or non-mainstream vendors are looking for attention. Also, the most popular brands are looking to push new product lines. [In this picture, Dave Montgomery of Level3 is at a Microcorp road show to discuss Level’s security services. Jay McClure is discussing BCN’s position. MicroCorp’s Chris O’Brien moderates.]

In the current SPIFF war, it is an escalation of the cost of customer acquisition (basically providers are buying market share, not mind share) for Hosted VoIP customers. It really has become a commodity now. Telarus has added UCto GeoQuote, so now the only distinction will be price. [see VoIP price comparison here]

As an aside here, UCaaS providers were already having a problem with both differentiation AND Positioning (where they fit best in the marketplace). Now any special benefits of a platform will be lost in the quoting process. Customers won’t be too happy unless all they want is POTS replacement or something basic. Quoting out UCaaS like network is going to create a lot of extra work and lower closing ratios. But this way anyone can sell UCaaS like it was a PRI replacement, which it is not.

In the UC pricing comparison chart, 5 out of 6 are proprietary systems – home brewed VoIP platforms. (Nextiva is Broadsoft.) Hard to know what the feature differences will be. At least, if they were all one platform – Metaswitch, Netsapiens or Broadsoft, the price comparison would make a little more sense. Yet then you would be discounting mobility, portals, analytics and other deployment differences. It reminds me of shopping for a new smartphone last week at a Sprint store. That store didn’t have a feature list for each phone, so I had to either buy it on price or rely on the salesperson (who was clueless). Not the best way to buy a business tool that you are stuck using daily for two years.

Anyway…
Carriers would be wise to use SPIFFs to get partners to first notice other types of services (and hopefully sell them). Some newer services are gateway drugs for more services, more ARPU, more commissions via upsell and cross-sell. Bandwidth is a replacement product that is a transaction. Email, conferencing and backup are low churn but sticky sales that are small with seemingly low risk. However, they are the lever towards building trust and getting in the door to build an account up.

This is an edit I did on TelePacific’s SPIFF flyer this month. These are some of the sticky services. These are different conversations, but they also lead to more conversations with the client. And right now you can take advantage of all the noise and hype around Microsoft. Leverage that brand and press to get meetings, get a small sale, prove yourself.

Yet getting partners to sell services like hosted email, cloud, conferencing, backup and SAAS is the struggle. I have written before why partners are reluctant to sell these services. Chief reason is that they are heads done just trying to sell enough to stay afloat. Price compression on DIA, T1, broadband and voice means that you have to sell two or three times as many deals to make the same as you did a few years ago.

This same price pressure will slow cook some master agents and quota.

I have noticed that deals under $500 are SPIFF free. Providers are pushing sales up-market. Oh, they will take deals under $500, they just won’t compensate the partner the same way.

Everyone is heading up-market. It will be a bigger struggle to get attention, to change partner behavior. It might get costly too.

Tags: agents, channel managers, channel partners, commissions, master agency, microsoft, SAAS, telepacific, UC
Related tags: struggle channel, price comparison, conferencing backup, deals under, channel managers, services

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The Power of Cable – Aug 29, 2013

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Channel Ethics: Part V – Nov 01, 2011

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

A Failure to Communicate – Apr 06, 2011

What is a Master Agent? – Mar 30, 2011

2011 Will Be Tough – Feb 07, 2011

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June 23, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

OMG! More M&A

As if we have already digested the Microsoft-LinkedIn $26B deal, there is more activity. BTW, one thing noted about the MS-LI deal is that: “LinkedIn was way cheaper at $59 per registered member than buying Facebook for $329+ per member.” Saw an advert today for Office365. Get Off365 across every device for $70 per year. Not a lot of profit there.

Chipmaker deal: Cavium buys QLogic in $1.36 billion data center processor deal.

Former Acme Packet folks went out and raised $36M to bring new router technology to the marketplace as @128technology .

After raising $100 million in investment, Tower Cloud sells to CS&L, the REIT that spun out of Windstream’s network assets. Earlier this year, CS&L acquired PEG Bandwidth. According to Rob Powell, “The acquisition will cost CS&L some $230M, with $180M of that in cash and the balance in stock. CS&L expects to achieve $6M in annualized synergies over the next three years via the integration with PEG Bandwidth.” TC’s 2014 revenue was $33.4M up from $27.2M in 2013via INC5000. “Over 90% of Tower Cloud’s revenues are from national wireless carriers.” Cell tower fiber backhaul (aka FTT) is what PEG was doing and I guess what CS&L value.

In a bigger deal: “Francisco Partners, a leading technology-focused private equity firm, Elliott Management Corporation, and Dell today announced they have signed a definitive agreement for Francisco Partners and Elliott to acquire the Dell Software Group.” The Dell Software Group includes Quest Software and SonicWALL. Dell needed this money in order to buy EMC.

BTW, Elliott Mgmt is the same investor that pushed Polycom and Mitel together.

Carousel Industries announced its intent to acquire Atrion, Inc., a leading IT services firm specializing in security, productivity and collaboration, unified communications, networking, applications and integrations and data center solutions in Rhode Island. … The transaction will create a combined entity of more than 1,300 professionals located nationwide. The company will have approximately $525 million in annual revenue, creating one of the largest and fastest-growing privately-held IT services firms in the U.S. [pr]

In the realm of HUH?! What?! “Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:ARW) announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the global internet media portfolio focused on technology and electronic design from UBM, including EE Times, EDN, ESM, Embedded, EBN, TechONline, and Datasheets.com. Arrow is a global leader in technology design, manufacturing support, and supply-chain services. Last year, Arrow acquired the United Technical Publishing arm of Hearst Media. With this agreement with UBM, Arrow strengthens its position as a foremost thought leader and trusted advisor in IoT and technology design trends.” [PR]

Tags: dell, fiber, mergers, SDN, vc
Related tags: technology design, tower cloud, software group, francisco partners, definitive agreement, technology