On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 63 of 376

Telecom Disruption

You read about disruption in other industries with household names like Dropbox, Uber, AirBnb and Netflix. Telecom is being picked apart the same way Craigslist started the revenue decline for newspapers.

No one makes voice calls any more. It is all text and chat. These simple communications have been enhanced to include peer-to-peer video calls in the same vein as Facetime and Skype. WebRTC has allowed WhatsApp and Facebook to add calling features to their messaging apps, pulling even more minutes from carriers. (Most of this revenue is now in mobile data buckets, which means just 2 carriers get most of the money.)

The real disruption in business communications, the last bastion of good revenue for carriers, is being done by non-telcos. Twilio is just one example of elastic communications from a non-telco. The bigger news was the Slack-Skype integration.

I saw a list of forward thinkers of VoIP and it was a list of CEOs. Only one company on that list is making any noise at all. The rest are just staying the course, while the course is changing around them.

If comms is all about mobile, shouldn’t the forward thinkers being making a dent in mobile, SMS, chat, IM, presence?

Video, security, analytics, APIs – see the lies of Highfive, Redbooth, Ringio, RogerVoice and Sinch – are the key components to be adding to the standard UC product offering.

In CIO magazine, “Given the cost and complexity of implementing UC&C …. When making those decisions, CIOs and other IT leaders listed these factors as the most important when selecting a UC&C vendor:”

Ability to meet security requirements: 58 percent
Ease of use: 46 percent
Low total cost of ownership: 45 percent
Integration into existing architecture: 40 percent

Nice infographic about the CIO UC&C study.

Reviewing those 4 factors, forward thinkers would be looking at encrypted chat, better deployment, improved user and admin portals, and APIs / integration.

There are apps that you can add to your offering for encrypted chat, like Wickr or Signal or OpenFire server or Pidgin. For API, you could utilize a service like Zapier to help your users mashup tasks for productivity.

Or on the small business side, the rise of Personal Assistant apps in the past two years along with the tsunami of information, means that a better unified inbox, search, curation, prioritization are all things that users are looking for.

Have you looked at Cloze, billed as a relationship management software that “keeps track of your email, phone calls, meetings, documents, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. And everything from dozens of other services.” Unified messaging beyond just the concept.

I’m not saying if you have to do this stuff, but I am saying that you should be trying new stuff. New ways to deploy, to remove friction in the sales side or the implement side or the admin track. Analytics to the call logs. Endpoint management. Business Process Improvement. Security for no other reason than terms like HIPAA, PCI and Sox. Encryption of data at rest whether that is call recordings, vociemail, faxes to enable peace of mind for the HIPAA/HITECH admins. (Rackspace has a way to encrypt databases here.)

Otherwise you will be selling cheap voice against a real disruptor.

Another reason to add something to your product offering is to have an upsell opportunity with your current clients to make them stickier, more productive and add some ARPU.

Tags: analytics, API, apps, BPI, chat, deployment, disrupt, security, sms, UC, unified messaging
Related tags: product offering, percent, business, security, mobile, being

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

Unified Hope for UCaaS – Dec 16, 2015

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

And Start the New Year Now (Tidbits # 2427) – Jan 04, 2016

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January 24, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

The Storming of Canada

Last week, Zayo bought Allstream from MTS. Allstream was a Canadian B2B telecom with a lot of fiber.

Shaw Communications in 2014 bought data center company, ViaWest. There has been a few large transaction across the northern border in the last two years.

Birch is making a move into Canada too. Primus Telecommunications went into creditor protection. Primus has had a wild ride from the 1990s when it was a global long distance company. I was an agent of theirs and a beta tester for their Enterprise VoIP product that became Lingo. After some re-organization and selling off assets around the globe including in the US, Primus Canada was the last standing company.

Primus is a national CLEC in Canada, selling network services across the country to both residential (Internet, Voice, LD and wireless) and business (Internet, Hosted PBX, voice and data) customers. Primus “entered into an agreement to be acquired by Birch Communications. In order to complete the sale of our business and assets to Birch, we’ve commenced a restructuring process that must be approved by the courts over the coming weeks,” per the company website.

It is another asset sale for BIrch and a new country. I guess the grass is greener (under the snow) in Canada.

Tags: birch, canada, clec, mergers
Related tags: canada, primus, birch, company

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

Telco Troubles, Clec Version – Jan 06, 2016

Sliding into 2016 – Dec 22, 2015

Mergers, Acquisitions and Moves – Nov 09, 2015

The Cable Dominance Push – Sep 19, 2015

6 Companies to Watch in 2015 – Jan 05, 2015

What Will Consolidation Mean in 2015 – Dec 11, 2014

Comcast Merger Will Pressure CLECs – Nov 19, 2014

Agent and Reseller M&A – Oct 01, 2014

Birch Buys Cbeyond – Apr 21, 2014

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January 22, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Broadsoft’s UCaaS Predictions

Broadsoft did a global survey of UCaaS penetration.

“The survey of 129 global service provider and industry leader respondents revealed cloud UC market penetration could grow 3x in the large enterprise segment, 7x in the mid-market segment and almost 5x in the small business segment by 2020.”

Globally they surveyed 129 providers, which is less than half of just its base of US customers, about a third of its global clientele and about 5% of Hosted VoIP providers in North America. A small sample.

“For small businesses–those with fewer than 100 employees–UCaaS will make up 48 percent of the market by 2020, up from 10 percent currently. For mid-market businesses (100 to 999 employees), market penetration will grow from 5 percent in 2015 to 37 percent in 2020, and in the enterprise segment, it will be 20 percent by the end of the decade, up from 6 percent today.” [eweek]

I wonder if defines UCaaS. Because to some, Office365 with Skype for Business is UCaaS – and that has more than 50 million users. Slack presents quite a few components of UC and now that SfB enables calling on Slack, will that count as UCaaS?

Broadsoft is 17 years old this week. Penetration in mid-market is 5%. But in just 5 more years that number will increase sevenfold? It might. But it will likely be due to factors that are not being considered right now. Cisco Spark, HCS, Microsoft, Slack, Google for Work, Citrix, Switch.co, and Dell are just a few players that jump out at me as being able to take market share in the UCaaS space.

How hard would it be for Freeconference.com to start offing a freemium UCaaS service that Dave Michels is talking about here?

These predictions over the years have proved fruitless. It’s almost like the UCaaS space has a product that doesn’t have a market yet. You have to explain to people that they are thirsty and that this is the answer.

The stats on mobile only are huge. “42 percent of respondents said they believe that more than half of UC interactions for businesses of all sizes will occur via mobile devices by 2020, while one-third of small businesses will opt for mobile-only UCaaS/Hosted PBX solutions, eliminating their need for desk phones.” [channelvision]

So if mobile is big and getting bigger, why are most ITSPs still pushing desk phones? This interaction actually stalls sales.

Do ITSPs have to be MVNOs as well? Do they have to create their own mobile apps? Or co-op one that already has sharel, ike WhatsApp or Snapchat?

Selling UCaaS is tough. You have to educate the prospect. You have identify business process pain points. You have to define work flow. It is not like selling telecom at all.

If these predictions are going to come true, UCaaS will end up defined by a non-telecom entity I think. It won’t be the Hosted PBX that we have seen for the last 10+ years. Especially if it has to be mobile-centric.

Will it be browser based like Panterra? or will it be an app on the phone, tablet and desktop? Will it be just an integration between apps that lets users share one address book, one call log, one history, one inbox?

Will phone numbers even be used? Or will it all be email addresses and profiles? This BI article, regurgitates what “Facebook Messenger boss David Marcus wrote that 2016 will be the year when phone numbers show real signs of death.” Yeah, I guess he missed the memo when SIP was going to replace phone numbers too. I was promised tat ENUM would have mapped telephone numbers to SIP or e-mail addresses in DNS by now, which would solve some HD Voice issues. But like the flying car, not just yet.

It will be a hodge podge. If WebRTC comes through, every app can be voice and video enabled. With Chrome and Netscape plug-ins doing everything from UC-One to wiping out any mention of Trump or all ads, it will be a plug-in that gives us UC on the desktop. Just how will that correlate to a mobile device? We’ll see. With Twilio offering such an elastic platform for voice and the way AWS is being used as a computing platform for Hosted PBX, we are just getting started.

Tags: broadsoft, hosted pbx, UC
Related tags: phone numbers, market penetration, enterprise segment, ucaas space, ucaas, market

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

Cisco to Spark Some BroadCloud Competition – Dec 28, 2015

What Happened to Alteva? – Sep 04, 2015

Vonage Picks Up Another One – Aug 20, 2015

Vonage Buys Simple Signal – Mar 17, 2015

Two UC Providers Cash Out – Nov 05, 2014

Notes from Connections 2014 Part Deux – Oct 13, 2014

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January 21, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Competing in SaaS or VoIP

In this growth hack article, there a number of good points about SaaS companies that can be extended to the VoIP space as well. (Voice is just an app today, right?)

“SaaS is getting increasingly competitive.” You think? Look at all of these marketing apps. How many CRM platforms are there? There are 2000+ Hosted VoIP providers. Teah, you can say it is hyper-competitive. (Partly do to a low barrier to entry today.)

Key: “Make a product customers are always in love with that also gets high retention from them.” If users are not playing with your features or portal, then they are likely not a good fit for your product. It is like selling Hosted UC to a business that just wanted cheap dial-tone or a key system replacement with door buzzer. Not a good fit = churn (or at best low margin to no margin customer.

You have 3 things working against profit: (1) the cost of customer acquisition increasing; (2) the cost of support is not cheap; (3) price compression. You need targeted customers who engage with your product.

“You’ve got to constantly build the best possible solution that ever existed for your customers.” With the rapid adoption of Lync (now SfB) and now the integration of SfB and Slack, VoIP providers cannot stay static in what they are offering. The product bundle has to go beyond just a managed Voice service — or you need to re-brand as just a voice replacement company, an alternative phone company.

The article had a link to this story about the 2016 Sales Stack – and the challenges facing salespeople. One of the challenges is the prospecting and lead generation — and the technology around it. Today, there are web conferences, video calls, email automation, MasterStream, portals and other software that you need to spend time with in order to do the job. That is a lot more than the days of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Want some helping Competing? Join the webinar.

Tags: hosted pbx, SAAS, saas, sellecom, selling, UC, voip
Related tags: product, voice, today, customers

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Cloud Comms On the Rise – Dec 28, 2015

Utility VoIP – Oct 01, 2015

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

The Trouble with UC Sales – Jan 23, 2012

What Do You Do When Gigabit is $70? – Jun 30, 2015

Notes from Connections 2014 Part Deux – Oct 13, 2014

Notes from Metaswitch Forum – May 13, 2014

Open Note to the Hosted PBX Crowd – Feb 27, 2014

Don’t Be Lazy in VoIP Sales – Jan 15, 2014

Sales Tip: Focus on Outcomes – Dec 19, 2013

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January 19, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Competing in SaaS or VoIP

In this growth hack article, there a number of good points about SaaS companies that can be extended to the VoIP space as well. (Voice is just an app today, right?)

Want some helping Competing? Join the webinar.

Tags: hosted pbx, SAAS, saas, sellecom, selling, UC, voip
Related tags: product, voice, today, customers