On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 48 of 376

3 Sales Strategies for UCaaS

With so many hosted VoIP companies out there — has to be over 3000 in US and Canada – there are three strategies that these service providers can choose to sell their products through.

One is to package your product the way we have traditional sold it. That is to say, on-premise PBX (like Sangoma, Fonality, Digium, S2S) as the made ingredient coupled with SIP trunks and some “cloud” elements. Another version of this is to offer Key System Emulation (KSE), which is an awful way to provide hosted VoIP. No one will be happy. Paging, door buzzers and other gotchas will result in a loss of money and a pissed off customer.

The other way is to go all in with UC&C. Integration, contact center, analytics, portal, softphones, collab — and have a good case study on how you deploy it and for whom you deploy it well.

The final away is to pivot to verticals. Integrate your communications platforms with vertical software systems, like dental office practice management or legal practice and case management software.

RingCentral just added Zapier to its list of integrations. The communications platform that was formerly known as Prince, I mean, Hosted PBX that became UCaaS, is slowly become a communications platform for work flow.

Why Zapier? Zapier takes some of the scripting away. It is pre-written code to use to add functions with a zap! There are other platforms like Zapier (like elastic.io, IFTTT and cloudwork.) These services utilize an open API on your comms platform to leverage APIs on many other software applications in order to help data flow and be efficient.

All About the API, a conference in Vegas in July to showcase the transition from Hosted PBX to enterprise comms platforms and how they are changing how businesses do business (like in tele-health, IoT and more!) Visit All About the API website for details.

By the way, real reasons people aren’t buying your stuff? “Real reasons: My boss won’t let me, I don’t trust you, I’m afraid of change.” Seth Godin.

Tags: API, BPaaS, BPI, hosted pbx, UC
Related tags: communications platform, hosted, apier, platform, platforms, software

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

The Gist of ITEXPO – Jan 29, 2016

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

Telecom Disruption – Jan 24, 2016

Is Mobile the Answer for UC? – Oct 09, 2015

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

Channel Strategy: A Quick Look – Mar 21, 2016

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

What Are They Feeding Enterprise? – Mar 09, 2016

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

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

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: 3 Sales Strategies for UCaaS

Sponsored by Apex Technology Services, a leading IT Services company

May 3, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Food for Thought (Tidbits #2434)

Tidbits today but not all of them are about telecom.

From James Altucher: “Automation is eating the world. Every time a line of software is written, a job is lost.” VR, 3D printing, AI and robotics will make us all unemployed soon. what then?

Sports Authority is closing all its stores. Macy’s, Sears, K-Mart and B&N have been closing stores for a couple of years now. Retail – even luxury retail – is declining. Not all of it is online shopping. In the future, what do malls look like? Basically entertainment and food courts.

Dollar stores are taking share away from even Wal-Mart.

The rise of the minimum wage is supposedly a problem for business owners, but all of the complainers have cash stockpiled and executive pay has flourished. Hmmmm… The amount of money available to keep the economy spinning is lagging.

We have an economy that runs on two elements: service (consumer spending) and technology/The Internet. [Good read here by Dixon on the Internet Economy]

As most businesses and consumers consume the Internet, the number of subscription services we pay for is increasing. Our monthly spends are going up with our bandwidth consumption.

The number of contractors or freelancers has increased to more than 35% in the US. As that keeps increasing imagine what happens to annual income, stability, savings, retirement…

I will just leave it there.

Research on the brain is cool. What words do to your brain HERE.

Two things that people talk about are ecosystems and blockchains. These are two systems that investors look for in startups.

“Consumers don’t hate advertising; they dislike how the advertising is distributed.” “According to an April 2016 report by Accenture, 84% of digital consumers complain that advertising too frequently interrupts their content consumption, 40% plan to remove these interruptions either via paid subscription or ad blocking software in the next twelve months.” from mynfo, a Tampa startup that just closed $6.8 million in Series A financing!

Most business models – newspapers, magazines, car companies, schools, VARs – have not changed much in the last 20 years. So as change comes (not IF, but WHEN that change comes) it will disrupt most of the players.

Rovi Buys TiVo in $1.1 Billion Deal. Is Roku next?

Verizon’s brand is taking big hits due to 3 things: (1) the strike; (2) vandalism of systems creating big outages; and (3) Frontier taking over a large chunk of FiOS customers. Frontier’s take over was a cluster, like every other take over has been. What shocked me the most is how few people outside the industry actually knew that Verizon had sold off its assets to Frontier. Even fewer knew that Bright House was being bought by Charter. Telecom is at the very bottom of what people think about.

Already seeing UC providers moving away from Polycom since the merger announcement with Mitel. Fuze/thinkingphones went with Yealink. Birch is hollering about Panasonic. A few smaller players are testing out Grandstream. The move away from Polycom has started. Add in a move to softphones and mobile apps and what is MITEL buying?

Sangoma launched a line of phones for FreePBX and its newly launched PBXact UC, a premise based UC&C appliance.

“I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does.” [The author is talking about Venezula] “Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again.” <- sound familiar?

Tags: branding, disrupt, economy, Internet, news, polycom, retail, UC, verizon
Related tags: closing stores, change comes, frontier, internet, people, advertising

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

Related Entries

Why Are You Calling Me? – Apr 21, 2016

Musings on the Polycom Deal – Apr 18, 2016

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

What Happens in Vegas – Mar 17, 2016

How To Win at UCaaS – Feb 03, 2016

Telecom Disruption – Jan 24, 2016

What Can You Learn from Target? – Mar 10, 2015

The IP Transformation Effect – Sep 12, 2014

And the BK Starts – Jul 30, 2008

What Channel Are You Watching? – Apr 25, 2016

TrackBacks
| Comments | Tag with del.icio.us | On Rad’s Radar? Home | Permalink: Food for Thought (Tidbits #2434)

May 2, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Are You a Good Fit?

This is a question you should be thinking about? Is this customer a good fit for Solution A?

Even better Channel Managers should be asking:

Is this Partner a good fit for our program and services?

Tags:
Related tags:

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

April 27, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Are You a Good Fit?

This is a question you should be thinking about? Is this customer a good fit for Solution A?

Even better Channel Managers should be asking:

Is this Partner a good fit for our program and services?

Tags:
Related tags:

Follow me:

Twitter Profile

April 27, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

SD-WAN: the Hype has yet to start

We aren’t really at the hype stage of SD-WAN yet, but the potential for this technology is pretty amazing. Right now it is early in the game. Companies are still buying PPC o SD-WAN. So real early.

IDC suggests that SD-WAN will be a $6B sector in 2020. Well, considering it will replace some MPLS networks, overlay some redundancy and failover on other networks, and even provide analytics for SLA monitoring, I’d say that is a good guess.

There aren’t even that many good articles yet about SD-WAN. I have collected a couple here:

I would like to see more case studies written in simple terms. An example is this SD-WAN case study by Escessa with partner, Clarus Communications for an airline.

This primer from 2012 on Business Insider is a good read.

Some facts and stats about SD-WAN by Tom HIll on LinkedIn.

SDN is re-defining self-healing networks on Ramblings.

I didn’t get to do podcasts with Aryaka, Viptela, Talari or Verizon. Perhaps some of them will join the Blab tomorrow (4/27/16) at Noon Eastern time for a discussion about SD-WAN.