On Rad's Radar Archives - Page 64 of 376

How Do You Choose a Marketing Firm?

I find it interesting that most service providers treat marketing as separate from the business as a shed in the backyard is separate from the house. Service providers would not hire someone off fiverr or elance to configure routers or phones, but would use any platform like that to hire people to manage their brand or marketing.

At the very least, when hiring a marketing firm, check their track record. Do they have any home runs?

Check to see if they even understand your product or marketplace. If not, you better be able to educate them on the buyers, the benefits, the why someone buys it and what they do with your technology or services.

And if you are hiring a consultant, be certain that they want to consult and not get hired for a job. It will affect not only the results but the cost of the project.

A brand can be a significant asset – think P&G, Coca-Cola or Ford. It is a significant asset of your business. Many telcos and MSOs are refreshing their brands today to demonstrate the transition from TDM to IP, from T1 to Ethernet to cloud to next gen. I am not saying you need to re-brand. You do need to refresh your marketing though.

Tags: marketing
Related tags: service providers, significant asset, marketing, brand

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The B&N Lesson – Dec 15, 2015

RAD Rant on Channel Marketing – Dec 01, 2015

Why Your Marketing is Hurting Your Sales – Oct 18, 2015

Is There Any Telecom Disruption? – Sep 22, 2015

What the Studies About UC Say – Aug 25, 2015

On Content for Lead Gen – Aug 24, 2015

One Picture – Aug 11, 2015

CMO Council Study on Content Marketing – Jul 28, 2015

One Way to Privately Differentiate – Jun 29, 2015

Marketing is the Difference – May 18, 2015

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January 18, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

2000 Blog Posts!!!!!

The last blog post – Uh Oh, Microsoft is Closing the Gaps – was my blog post # 2000!

I started blogging here at TMC on March 25, 2008 after a year at Virgo. It took almost 7 years to reach 2000 posts.

Just had to take a minute to recognize that — and to say thanks for reading!!!!

Tags: radizeski
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Thank You – Dec 22, 2015

Europe Invades American Cable – May 21, 2015

Why Aren’t You My Customer? – Apr 17, 2015

Channel Manager Training – Mar 20, 2015

Don’t Get Trapped – Dec 31, 2014

Gratitude – Nov 27, 2013

What the heck is Channel Sales Enablement? – Jun 17, 2013

I Want to be the FCC Chairman – Mar 25, 2013

One Promotional Minute – Aug 15, 2012

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January 15, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Uh Oh, Microsoft is Closing the Gaps

Some folks think I am picking on the VoIP space (see this post). Maybe I am. Hosted PBX started for me in 2003 when Broadsoft’s second customer rolled out its platform and signed me up as their first agent. It has been a struggle ever since.

Broadsoft has 400+ customers worldwide and you would think it just have 4 in the US. Windstream and XO getting props for 1 and 2 million SIP trunks respectively. (Comcast probably has more SIP trunks than the 2 combined). BSFT bends over backwards for Verizon and its VCE offering. Vonage just got a seat at BSFT, which really ticked off all the other customers who have been flying the BSFT flag for a lot longer.

Needlless to say, the big boys lean on BSFT for the whole bundle, which means that they have no IP (intellectual property) in the game and it comes down to (a) who gets in front of the customer first; and then (b) price.

Where will CLECs fit in the new world order?

Fone.do, Switch.co, Panterra and a few others have tried to do some innovative things with the Hosted PBX. Not enough marketing budget to get through all the noise though. Also, the channel partners really don’t want to SELL Hosted PBX; they want to take orders for dial-tone replacement. It is a problem.

Microsoft Office365 with Lync/Skype for Business has really sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for Hosted PBX/UCaaS players. Lots of media. Fastest product ever for MS. It was cheap, then cheaper. It has even muffled any talk from Cisco about Spark or Google. It is crazy.

Now it just got crazier. You can now make Skype voice and video calls from Slack. Skype added the feature officially (see here).

I mentioned that Slack needed this. Can’t believe MS got their first. I thought BSFT was an engineering firm?

I have also mentioned numerous times that it will be the integration that will be the difference maker — moreso than price.

In fact, I have 2 panels at ITEXPO on the Age of the API and Business process as a Service. And the ITEXPO West has been replaced with “All About the API Conf“

Businesses buy Outcomes. That’s why SAAS will transform to Business Functionality as a service instead. Who will get there first?

As everyone looks to go up market to mid-market or enterprise or whatever you call 250+ seats these days, it gets crowded. Thinking Phones just announced they hit 1000 customers and that their latest contracts are all for 1000+ seats. That seems great, except that West lost a huge contract last year – $15 million UC&C customer – who decided to go single source. That single source was likely Microsoft or Cisco. That vendor was likely Verizon, AT&T or Dimension Data/NTT.

I hear talk of global all the time. From Masergy, Aryaka and others, that they have a global network ready for the Global Fortune 5000 firms. Yeah,how many of them are going to waive their MARCON contracts with BT, AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica or Telstra? How many are going to give up their Office365 installment? There are only 5000 in that group. They make for nice whales, but watch out you aren’t hunting Moby Dick in a row boat.

The market is getting carved out. The UCaaS players need to carve out a niche that they can excel at and own it. Going head to head in the 50-500 seat space with the same product as everyone else is not going to be pretty.

To the consumer, UCaaS and Hosted PBX isn’t about the softswitch. They don’t care about the technology. They care that it works. That it is implemented properly without disruption to their business. They want efficiency and productivity, which is why Slack and O365 and Skype in all its forms is adopted and used. That is important: adoption and use. RC tracks usage, because if you don’t ever log in, you will turf.

Back to the CLECs. They made their money in the real SMB space. They still can if they could forget about competing head-to-head with their vendors (the Duopoly) and launch a few product bundles that are theirs exclusively. Until then, it is a declining future.

You can ignore this as the rant of a cynic, but Slack has 2 million daily users and growing after less than 2 years from launch. Integrated with MS already. Office 365 has nearly 50 million monthly active users, according to BI. If they all get voice enabled by MS, where does that leave you?

Where does that a channel partner selling dial-tone replacement? OUCH!

BTW, Skype celebrates 2 trillion minutes of video with mobile group video calling.

SIDE NOTE:

Both Zane Long and Michael Sterl have left Vonage Business, where they were leading the channel sales division.

CallTower, a UC provider that sells a Lync integration service, is merging with SoundConnect.

Tags: BPaaS, BPI, broadsoft, channel partners, clec, hosted pbx, mergers, microsoft, slack, UC, voip, vonage
Related tags: ucaas players, single source, business, skype, hosted, million

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Vonage Picks Up Another One – Aug 20, 2015

Vonage Buys Simple Signal – Mar 17, 2015

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ITEXPO Update – Jan 30, 2014

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Broadvox Inks Deal to Acquire Cypress – Oct 13, 2010

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End of Year Summary (Tidbits part 2426) – Dec 31, 2015

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January 15, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Is There Anything Impressive About VoIP?

I am getting peppered with email invites to lunch-and-learns, webinars and other events to learn about “impressive” companies. Is there anything impressive about VoIP? Is anyone doing anything really unique? I am having a hard time thinking so.

Unique would be that you have a product set targeted at one sector of the marketplace, not all of them. Now some people will say that buyers don’t know what they want so you need a variety of solutions in your pocket. “It could be NetSapiens or Broadsoft or SIP or Skype for Business.” That selection is from 3 varying tool boxes.

I used to get that argument from PBX interconnects, who only wanted a Hosted PBX solution in their back pocket in case the client just wouldn’t take a PBX on premise. That doesn’t sound like it would work. “You want this box?” “No we don’t.” “How about this one?” No we want VoIP.” “Okay, we have this Hosted PBX option.” “Yeah that.” (It hardly ever works that way.)

What is “impressive” about two VoIP providers merger? It has been done before numerous times – and the sum of the parts is less than the parts. 1 + 1 = 1.1

“X Telecom offers an impressive voice product portfolio that includes Hosted PBX, SIP and Local services.” Ummm, so does literally every single other Hosted VoIP providerout there. In fact, the fastest selling product is SIP trunking because that is what voice is now, a SIP trunk for dial-tone.

And if you are going to lead with your “nationwide Feature Group D network” then you aren’t fully grasping why companies are migrating from old premise PBX to the cloud platforms of Broadsoft, Netsapiens, Cisco and Microsoft! And if you can’t grasp THAT, you are doomed.

Instant Messaging, external collaboration, decentralized Presence are reasons that Slack was adopted so fast. Not only do you have to understand that shift in comms, but you have to learn to leverage it and integrating it into your product set and messaging to survive.

No one talks about something like this: “We deploy a solution that the customer adopts and uses successfully 99% of the time.” It is never about the deployment, which is really where the whole customer experience takes shape. It is about products and features, which, by the way, the customers doesn’t care about. The customer also has no idea what your product name or product set is. UC? SIP? Yeah, they don’t know what that is.

How about the training? “We train our customers and their employees ever six months on ways to leverage the platform for success.” Productivity is about getting seconds back per task, being efficient, less swivel chair, fewer windows open, etc. How do you measure that? How do you demonstrate that?

One other lesson from Slack, an app that in just over two years has 2 million users daily. The market will swing fast — and it will be an upstart that takes market share, not someone in telecom. Beware of a mashup like Citrix GoTo with Grasshopper or worse Amazon’s WorkMail. Office365 is Microsoft’s fastest selling product, but that doesn’t mean much either because anything can take its place.

Tags: hosted pbx, strategy, UC, UX, voip
Related tags: anything impressive, selling product, fastest selling, product, impressive, anything

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Unified Hope for UCaaS – Dec 16, 2015

Should Hosted UC Providers Offer Network? – Jul 28, 2013

The US VoIP Market 2016 – Jan 06, 2016

End of Year Summary (Tidbits part 2426) – Dec 31, 2015

Cloud Comms On the Rise – Dec 28, 2015

Utility VoIP – Oct 01, 2015

A View of UC from Broadvoice – Sep 24, 2015

Is There Any Telecom Disruption? – Sep 22, 2015

What Happened to Alteva? – Sep 04, 2015

What the Studies About UC Say – Aug 25, 2015

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January 11, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Data Center M&A to Start off 2016

Verizon put its Terremark division up for auction. Windstream sold its data centers to TierPoint. Rumor has it that CenturyLink and AT&T are looking at selling their data centers.

The market for data centers is at a high – and the telcos need cash, so a sale makes sense. It might be why they are looking. If you can get a couple of billion, pay down debt, make the quarter look better, and as the CEO get some more money out of it. All upside.

In one of the LinkedIn groups, the discussion was about the telcos not having the right mentality to stay in the data center game. I don’t think it is that. C-Link isn’t having trouble selling old Savvis and Cyber Center space. It is that the cash out is available. And most of the CEOs of telcos are now just finance guys more worried about the Street and stock price than if the business is positioned correctly for the future.

Zacks is reporting that DuPont Fabros is putting its NJ1 Data Center up for sale. It was a pivot for DF to leave the wholesale data center space. They are pivoting back to wholesale.

TierPoint is on a roll. After buying Windstream’s data centers for $575M, it just bought AlteredScale Data Center in Chicago. TierPoint bought CxP Data Centers based in Jacksonville, Florida, last year. Lots of added space to go with its acquisition from ABRY of Xand, leading provider of colocation, cloud, disaster recovery and managed service with six data centers located in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Bulking up at TierPoint.

Cool look at Amazon’s first AWS data center in Northern VA’s Internet Alley where 70% of worldwide Internet traffic passes through!

Tags: collocation, data center, mergers
Related tags: center space, center, centers, tierpoint, telcos, space

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