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And Start the New Year Now (Tidbits # 2427)

ITEXPO is in Ft Lauderdale in 20 days. Will you be there?

Our ITEXPO panel on Open Source for Service Providers will be using Dialogic’s study, which is examined in this blog post by Jim Machi of Dialogic.

Some good reads to start off the new year.

AVC’s Fred Wilson on What Is Going To Happen In 2016

Alianza has a good read about Disruption to the cable industry HERE. It is based on an Accenture study about the top line growth of cable and the factors that may affect it.

Apparently, the cost to acquire a cellular customer is at least $650, as VZW is now poaching AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile Customers With a $650 Credit. How profitable can that be? In 2 years, that is $27 per month and ARPU is about $54 per month. Margins of 50% on cellular? This is what happens when the metrics are ARPU and new adds. Must get more customers (even unprofitable ones).

Five cloud experts give their predictions around cloud and security for 2016

Comcast gets more consumer complaints than any ISP. “The deluge of angry customers is so big that the FCC gets more Internet service complaints about Comcast than it does for AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable (TWC) combined.” [ARS]

Level3 would like inter-connection congestion to be reported to the FCC as part of the “FCC’s new rules requiring ISPs to supply more information on their management of networks to consumers.” NCTA says Heck No! And they would because they don’t want transparency on their artificial congestion (aka squeezing the tube that connects consumers to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other OTT content that they want to watch.)

Remember CarrierIQ? They were the company adding rootkit for monitoring smartphone usage for the cellcos. After scrutiny, they went belly up. AT&T bought the assets. Probably a joint venture with the NSA.

Tags: att, cable, cellular, cloud computing, disrupt, FCC, internet, isp, security
Related tags: cable, customers

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At the FCC – Feb 24, 2015

The Mobile Ecosystem Battle – Sep 28, 2010

TV is Moving to the Internet – Oct 27, 2015

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Phone Companies, Channel and Other News – May 29, 2015

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The Load on Cable – Jun 12, 2014

More Big M&A Deals Announced – May 19, 2014

Net Neutrality Loses – Jan 14, 2014

The FCC is Busy (Part 2) – Sep 25, 2013

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January 4, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

Saying No and Quitting Stuff

Women in the Channel is sharing an article about under-scheduling. My CMO friend in the Great Northwest has been overwhelmed with work, wedding, family and life. Being pulled in too many directions is a common problem.

Over-scheduling is a common problem. A client this morning asked me what she could take off her to-do list. That is a GREAT question! What can you get rid? What can you outsource? What can you stop doing? (I need to give some credit to Keith Rosen for this idea.)

I used to be an active organizer of the Tampa Bay tech community. I quit it all over 2 years ago (after an 8 year run). It was scary and refreshing at the same time. I was recently asked to help out with Startup Week — and realized that I was not going to be able to be impactful. By impactful I mean: given my available time and participation, I wouldn’t provide enough to make an impact and the group wouldn’t get enough of me to be effective. I bowed out. It was not easy to say No. In fact, I struggle with it. As a consultant, I have to learn to say No to giving free consulting. You do too.

Seth Godin wrote a 92 page book on quitting called The Dip. A good read.

We live in a very cluttered, always on time. Either you manage your time – or it manages you to a result that you will not like.

All the success stories have one thing in common: time management.

Tom Peters says, “Show me your schedule and I will show you your priorities.” He’s right.

All the talk of habits is really about structure. Schedules are just putting structure around your day. And those appointments don’t have to 30 minutes or even specific. It could be 3 hours for reading. Time for the gym. Time to leave the office. A 15 minute reminder to get up, stretch and drink a glass of water.

New year. Good time to get that schedule (calendar) off to a good start. See you at ITEXPO later this month. (And get on my calendar for coffee!)

Tags: seth, time management
Related tags: common problem, common

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HP, The Idea Economy and You! – Nov 09, 2015

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

Is There Any Telecom Disruption? – Sep 22, 2015

On Content for Lead Gen – Aug 24, 2015

What Are You Learning Today? – Jul 29, 2015

The Dip for Channel Partners – Jul 08, 2015

Sales Math and Measuring What Matters – Feb 18, 2015

The Culture of Complacency – Feb 14, 2015

The Job Jumper and His Rolodex – Jan 09, 2015

A Clean Sheet of Paper – Dec 29, 2014

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January 4, 2016 , On Rad's Radar

End of Year Summary (Tidbits part 2426)

Lots of lists and best of posts out there. I am just going to run through the tidbits that I thought were interesting.

Citrix bought the auto-attendant in the cloud company, Grasshopper, earlier this year for about $161.5 M per 10Q filing. Grasshopper revenue was about $50M if you consider ARPU of $11 and about 350K users. That is like 3.2x revenue. Not bad for the boys in Boston. Now of course Citrix is in the midst of a huge re-org. Good luck with that in 2016.

A good read on cyber-security and strategy in this article.

Additional material from Jon Arnold to accompany the Open Source podcast we did and the Open Source for SP ITEXPO session coming up in January.

The Motley Fool spends a lot of time analyzing telcos for stock reasons (like in this one about AT&T’s prospects in 2016). I am unsure if they actually understand the business though. Gary Kim explained that IoT hype has more to do a must-have revenue stream for the cellcos. Then Gary takes a dive into the change in revenue for the US carriers in the last dozen years. VZ, AT&T, Frontier and C-Link all have different growth strategies, notwithstanding the fact that all these pies are flat or shrinking – and with increasing competition which means price pressure.

In the UCaaS space, despite the competition, there hasn’t been a price war. It could be because there just are any clear winners – and less than 15% of the market has gone to UCaaS so far. Maybe once it hits 40% penetration, it will become like SIP Trunking.

Canadian carrier, Allstream, is coming to the US with a UC&C offering from Cisco. Allstream is being acquired by Zayo. Onvoy is a subsidiary of Zayo.

Of all the UC lists, the only take-away is that there is a distinct line between buyers wanting UC&C and dial-tone. The key is to distinguish, but of course we don’t. Most businesses just want key system replacement or cheap voice, but we shovel a UC solution at them HOPING they will adopt it. That is like someone wanted a smartphone and you sell them a laptop with UC-One installed.

The UC&C crowd will need to pivot to Workflow or some other name that represents something like the Office365/Lync/SfB that it will be competing against. Packaging conferencing with Hosted PBX is just not going to work.

The interesting thing is that no one talks about the effect that Twilio and Flowroute are having on some carriers.

This was the year that was supposed to be WebRTC, instead it was API, because again innovation in our space is anorexic.

There was a lot of consolidation in UC from ThinkingPhones, Vonage, Onvoy. There were other deals, the strangest being Alteva-Momentum due to the RLEC piece. Birch and TNCI made inorganic growth moves (that likely won’t amount to much of anything). The biggest problem — as so many know — isn’t the buying, it is the integrating. It is being able to execute on an order from quote to billing. And most of the companies that done acquisitions have done a piss poor job of integrating anything and being able to execute on much. Cable would have eaten their lunch with pricing and capital any way, but these carriers made it easier by screwing up so many things that no one wants to use them any more.

The poor folks at TWC and BHN have spent another year in limbo waiting to be bought. That sucks!

AT&T took over DTV now what?

What happens with XO, ELNK, Integra? CLECs aren’t exactly killing it these days.

Windstream will still struggle. All year in 2016. Cable pressure will ease up a little while the acquisitions of Cablevision, Suddenlink and Charter-TWC-BHN happen. But Mediacom, Cox, WOW! and others will make it difficult for CLECs through 2016. That in turn will make it difficult for the Channel.

BTW, Voxbone quietly got Acquired by Vitruvian Partners on August 20, 2015 according to Crunchbase.

“Autotask Corporation has agreed to acquire Soonr, a provider of enterprise secure file sharing and collaboration services for IT business managers,” per Channel Vision mag as we close out 2016.

Happy New Year!

Tags: att, collaboration, hosted pbx, mergers, security, UC, voip, windstream
Related tags: being, revenue, carriers

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Smoothstone Gets Bought – Apr 20, 2011

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December 31, 2015 , On Rad's Radar

Cisco to Spark Some BroadCloud Competition

As if it weren’t bad enough that Microsoft was forcing its tech partners to become salespeople, and Broadsoft was nudging its white-label partners to the curb, now Cisco is hosting a unified comms platform.

“Hosted by Cisco and sold by partners, Spark is a “complete business collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables customers to message, meet or call anyone, anywhere and anytime.” The new Cisco Spark service provides a single user experience, delivered through the cloud, enabling users’ Cisco phones and videoconferencing devices to connect directly to the cloud.” [source]

The competition for mid-market and enterprise clients is heating up. Maybe the predictions about UCaaS growth in the cloud comes from the fact that the vendors have stepped into the service provider space, which will put added pressure on their customers/competitors to get out the selling.

With Microsoft in the mix, it makes for a crowded market. Add in Avaya, MITEL, ShoreTel, WEST, ThinkingPhones, Evolve IP — and it gets to be crowded in that waiting room at the enterprise buyer’s office. (Like a physician’s waiting room filled with patients and drug reps).

Cisco already has the HCS (Hosted Collaboration Solution) product, which Verizon is pimping heavily into the mid-market space (cue the video of Alex Doyle (of Broadsoft band fame)). Why add Spark? Likely because not everyone wants the HCS solution, which is built for bigger companies (more than 100 employees). A majority of North American businesses are less than 99 employees. You need to tackle that – Spark, Office365/Skype, VZ VCE, BroadCloud, and so on.

It is a big market. And most everyone wants to be all things to all people. (Wrong strategy!) It typically results in the mentality that we have one tool – a hammer – so everything is a nail, even when it isn’t.

Just another note about Microsoft from Seeking Alpha on MS’s acquisition of Talko: “Microsoft has made a string of productivity app purchases in recent years, as it tries to keep Google and upstarts such as Slack at bay. Past deals include Yammer (enterprise social networking), Sunrise (calendars), Acompli (e-mail), and Wunderlist (to-do lists).” No mention of Cisco in the analysis.

Tags: broadsoft, cisco, hosted pbx, microsoft, UC
Related tags: cisco spark, everyone wants, cisco, spark, microsoft, market

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What Happened to Alteva? – Sep 04, 2015

Vonage Picks Up Another One – Aug 20, 2015

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ITEXPO Update – Jan 30, 2014

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December 28, 2015 , On Rad's Radar

Cloud Comms On the Rise

Cloud based unified communications to increase by 466% in 2016 [source]

Share of cloud in unified communications to rise from 6% in 2015, to 28% in 2016 [source]

Interesting the news the rise in cloud communications. Actually the shocking part is how little penetration cloud comms has now- 6%!!!

PBX box sales have slowed, but that didn’t translate into more cloud UCaaS sales. I would imagine that a lot of the VoIP revenue is SIP trunks. That is what cable sells for voice. Many Hosted VoIP players are just selling cheap dial-tone replacement or key system emulation. Would you classify any of that as UC? Unlikely.

As the predictions go, the drivers are mobile (as always) and collaboration. If that is true, then to sell UC as voice is the wrong approach. UCaaS should be introduced as a comms and collab Platform for the business. A platform allowing for employees to communicate and collaborate with each other and customers.

How people communicate is changing. How people work is changing. How people buy is changing. So how we sell has to change too.

Tags: cloud communications, hosted pbx, sales, sellecom, selling, UC, unified messaging, voip
Related tags: cloud comms, unified communications, changing people, cloud, changing, people