Last week I reported some M&A here. The M&A Train keeps running.

Broadsoft has bought another company. No more internal innovation (still no Slack or Skype integration either!), just inorganic moves – Transera, Lenoid and PBXL. This time BSFT buys “Intellinote, an enterprise messaging-based team communication and collaboration software application built for the increasingly mobile and millennial workforce,” says the press release. I am guessing this is their answer to Slack.

Or to put int another way: All your mobility and collab in one place idea. It might work, but playing catch up to Slack (like Microsoft is doing by re-vamping Sharepoint) is so telecom! Me-too! Me-too! Me-too! No one innovates.

“According to the latest market report published by Persistence Market Research, the global VoIP services market was valued at US$ 85.9 Bn in 2015 and is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 9.5% over 2016 – 2024, to reach US$ 194.5 Bn by 2024,” per the press release.

Maybe the inorganic growth will spur organic growth. Maybe at some point VoIP growth will actually catch up to predictions, but if you take out SIP Trunking, does it?

Adoption is the key. User experience. Productivity. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, hardware PBXs are still be installed.

8×8 is working on world domination plans, which is great except they haven’t really taken a bite out of the Apple (NYC) let alone most of America yet. At 600K devices, there are 25 million businesses in the US. With even 80K billing businesses, that isn’t even cracking 1%. Take into account 325K from RC and another 80K from VB is about 2% of the addressable SMB market space. Yeah, I guess you should go global.

Adoption is a far cry from what was predicted. The smart home space is seeing the same issue.

“Despite the hype growing around smart homes – from fridges that can tell you what items you’ve run out of, to controlling your lights from a smartphone – the majority of people don’t have much interest in the new technology, new research reveals.” [source]

Consolidation and Adoption are just two issues to overcome.

Carbonite buys Seagate EVault cloud backup, DR for $14M, which is a deal, but even this little bit of consolidation does add up to much of the market – against Google Drive, MS Onedrive, Apple iCloud, Amazon S3, Dropbox and Box. Ransonware esurance is what this sector needs. Or some other way to tell the story of lost files, photos, etc.

While talking about needing a better story, here are 2 Slack commercials (one-zoo and two-spaceship) that are off-beat to say the least.

Tags: backup, hosted pbx, IOT, mergers, UC
Related tags: press release, market, another, slack, adoption, growth

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Since 2004 when I started blogging, I have blogged about a hardware solution less than 2 dozen times – and not one product review. I have talked with OneAccess, a hardware company that was launching a new line of IAD’s that was aimed at my clients, but no product review. I have mentioned other IAD vendors, like Edgewater, and even mentioned PBX vendors in passing (Avaya, Shoretel, 3CX, etc) when discussion premise versus hosted.

Lately, the PBX manufacturers have contacted me. Honestly, I don’t think the future of telecom is the premise PBX. In too many cases, companies are trying to get rid of real estate and the associated costs. BYOD, virtual employees and other trends have actually shifted costs from the company to the employee, while shifting the company from a brick-and-mortar office to a distributed virtual environment. More than 35% of the US are freelancers. More and more people are cellular only. So where does a premise PBX fit into that model?

The small business, single location business with less than 99 employees is a large market place and many of them still want a key system, so that is the fit. But as voice declines and people communicate with social media and texts/SMS, how does the key system or SMB PBX help?

Two thousand providers are betting on Hosted VoIP solutions as the answer. AT&T and Verizon are betting on UC&C and cellular.

VARs certainly wish nothing would change, since their business model revolves around box purchases and installs. In addition, quite a few VARs and Inter-connects have the mindset that the SMB is better off economically buying a premise PBX.

Yeastar released a new line of PBX based on Asterisk. I did receive an interesting answer to one question from Yeastar.

Me: With cloud, NFV and SDN, why bring a premise based line of PBX to the market now?

Yeastar’s reply: “Although NFV and SDN are very laudable and interesting technologies for the enterprise, they do not fit with 90% of the market, in my view. My experience has been that they either do not have the cash to invest, the expertise to implement, the infrastructure to implement, or a combination of those factors.”

“The SME wants an affordable, dependable system that offers advanced features and easy setup.” [Yeastar means small business under 99 employees not SME.]

Yeastar continues with, “Cloud is the Emperor’s New Clothes! With hosted providers it’s smoke and mirrors, like the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. The Emperor had two tailors, had wonderful cloth, but was told that only intelligent people could see the cloth. The king could not see the cloth, because there was in fact no cloth, but did not want to appear ignorant, and as he’s walking out among these people he’s of course naked, and everyone who sees him can clearly see whether the Emperor has clothes on or not, but they also believe that everyone else must be ignorant and that they are not, until a child states the obvious.”

Yeastar: “If we go back to the 1980’s we used to have something called Centrex. What happened is that AT&T, at the time, had just one mission: they bring a POTS line and stick a phone on the end of it. If you want another extension, add another pots line, add another phone… all the PBX functionality is held in the exchange…that sounds like cloud doesn’t it?”

Me: It was the first version of Hosted PBX, hence why it was called IP-PBX at first.

Yeastar goes on, “Okay the technology is different, we are not using POTS lines anymore, we’re using IP, but conceptually the model is the same: per extension, per service, per month. Sounds familiar?”

“Then there was an explosion of PBX systems, why? People looked at the model: $20 per user, 100 users, $2,000.00 per month, $24,000.00 a year, and not only did they have cause to push to cheaper on-premise solutions, they also gained control over their communications systems. The Yeastar PBX’s aren’t even 5% of that, and though I might be standing against the tide at the moment, all of this seems familiar to me, and that things are coming around full circle again. The Yeastar PBX’s offer a much more affordable, and power over their communication systems. We wear these lovely clothes that did not come from the tailor.”

Of course, the world view of a hardware manufacturer is going to be … hardware is the answer. Even Cisco believed that hardware was the answer, until the ground shifted under them and they went Hosted then cloud (HCS and Spark).

Shoretel went cloud by first buying M5, then re-vamping everything to Shoretel Connect. Mitel went hosted. There isn’t one right answer right now. Some reasons for that are as follows:

• Current Decision makers and their world view.
• Fear of Change.
• No one gets fired for buying AT&T, Cisco or IBM, right?
• Confusion in the marketplace – who do you go with?
• No clear leader.
• Microsoft Office365/Skype added uncertainty.
• Implementations suck!
• User adoption isn’t where it should be.

Maybe business owners will wake up and decide to buy the latest version of Office, download SugarCRM and put that server back in the closet. Cheaper, more control, etc. As Slack reaches 3 million daily users, it will start to decline, fast — like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, and other Unicorns. Maybe that will happen, but Google, Apple, Salesforce, Dell, IBM and Amazon bet otherwise to the tune of a trillion dollars.

Tags: cisco, cloud computing, hardware, hosted pbx, pbx, VAR, var
Related tags: hardware answer, product review, yeastar, hosted, premise, business

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Broadview Networks started in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Telecom Act of 1996, which launched a trillion dollar raid on the profits of the Baby Bells. Brian Crotty, Broadview’s COO, presented a webinar about their OfficeSuite UC product and agent portal. Here are 4 points made.

You can’t sell UC with 3 or more quotes. There has to be a Discovery phase; then a phase where you, the partner, have to match up pain points against vendors to present the best fit. Do a demo (aimed at the prospect’s pain points) and closing goes up to 70%. Also, if you get the vendor channel manager, SE or other rep involved in the sale, closing goes up to almost 80%.

Point 1: Leverage your channel team in discovery, demo and defining desired outcomes.

Labor is a company’s greatest expense. UCaaS is about allowing that company to be flexible, nimble, mobile and virtual. It is about making technology effective for the business. It is about enhancing the BYOD (bring your own device) trend that has been going on for five years.

Point 2: Go beyond dial-tone and features to talk about workflow and mobility – and about the managed service and ease of use. (To do that you either have to eat that dog food – or leverage the provider’s channel team.)

UCaaS can be sticky IF the users use it! Without adoption, the investment is useless – and they might as well have picked the commodity VoIP service. Adoption is the tough part. Not sure which provider has that figured out yet. Although RC does monitor your portal login during the first month to see if you are using it. (If not, they email and call you.)

Crotty mentioned that industry churn for network sales is between 1.7% to 2.5%. But when a company adopts UCaaS, churn drops below 1%.

Point 3: UCaaS is selling Change. If they are unwilling or unable to take advantage of a new way of communicating and collaborating, perhaps they are better served with a SIP trunk.

Broadview stated that OfficeSuite provided disaster avoidance as a true cloud service, implying that it was better than other cloud UCaaS and better than Disaster Recovery. All about the words.

Point 4: Discuss Uptime, reliability, security to comfort the prospect’s lizard brain.

Broadview own the code that OfficeSuite was built on. It doesn’t use SIP (they use SilNet). It is an encrypted call signal. The handsets are dummies; all intelligence sits in the cloud. They can re-use Polycom and Mitel handsets but it will be stripped down. They have a portal – Control all of your comms in a single pane of glass .

Tags: byod, channel managers, hosted pbx, mobility, sales, sellecom, selling, sip, UC
Related tags: ucaas, broadview, points, officesuite, point, better

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