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Marriott Disrupted

Marriott announced that they are buying Starwoods for $12.2 Billion. CNBC thinks it is about China or the combo of the largest 2 loyalty programs. However, the Marriott president says something different on LinkedIn. Yes, LI! Today, social networks are news outlets, too.

“The hospitality industry today is filled with new and emerging options.” AirBnB, VRBO and other sites are changing the landscape. Ubiquitous broadband coupled with smartphones and easy to make websites means that every industry gets disrupted.

Price is transparent. Mega-search sites are driving prices down. Consumers have choices — more than ever before. And frequent travelers want experiences, not hotel rooms with a view. Disruption.

And when an industry gets disrupted, it just looks for scale. Not innovation, scale. Get bigger. Wrong answer, but whatever.

Telecom is already getting disrupted by apps like messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. WebRTC is going to disrupt it some more. It doesn’t look like it did in 2000. Everything is device driven right now. It was always telco-driven before.

As we discussed on a recent podcast and ITEXPO session, you need an open source mentality. You have to be a Net-Head, not a Bell-Head.

Tags: disrupt, mergers, net-head
Related tags: disrupted, marriott, industry

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HT Picks Off Big Competitor – Jul 12, 2012

Fuze Joins ThinkingPhones – Nov 16, 2015

UNIFY Gets Acquired – Nov 09, 2015

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

Mergers, Acquisitions and Moves – Nov 09, 2015

Telecom Tidbits (Part 2921) – Oct 20, 2015

3 Big Changes Today – Oct 19, 2015

Really Big Mergers – Oct 16, 2015

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November 16, 2015 , On Rad's Radar

UNIFY Gets Acquired

Two years ago, Siemens Enterprise Communications re-branded as UNIFY. “Unify, is a joint venture between the American private equity firm The Gores Group and German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG,” according to Wikipedia. It is a premise-based comms platform. Now, Atos is buying Unify from Gores and Seimens.

Gores is a a global investment firm. “Together we invested in innovation, rebranded the company, recruited an impressive management team, and transitioned the business to a channel-driven, software-first company.” Gores added.

Atos is a global Managed IT consulting firm with 11 billion Euro in revenue. Atos has its hand in all things IT: “provides Consulting & Systems Integration services, Managed Services & BPO, Cloud operations, Big Data & Cyber-security solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry.”

I am told that “a very large portion of ATOS is the former Siemens Information Systems group.”

Interesting to see what happens next.

Tags: mergers, pbx, UC
Related tags: transactional services, services, gores, unify, siemens

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November 9, 2015 , On Rad's Radar

HP, The Idea Economy and You!

HP is re-organizing. It was quite the behemoth: “a $110 billion company that operated in 120 countries with more than 700 legal entities, and an IT infrastructure that spanned three data centers.” Meg Whitman penned a look at HP and the Idea Economy on LinkedIn.

I tend to agree with many of her points.

We live in an age of disruption. “Companies today can turn ideas into reality in a fraction of the time it took just five or 10 years ago.”

“In order to thrive in this new era, enterprises must build flexible IT infrastructures, find valuable insights in data, proactively deal with cyber threats, and provide rich digital experiences anytime, anywhere and on any device.”

We are caught in a world of apps that resemble the days of AOL and Prodigy, online services that were walled gardens. That evolved with the advent of Netscape and the world wide web to a richer experience that only grew when the connection speed grew. Then we simplified it back to apps. It is always a pendulum swinging.

Mainframe computing and dumb terminals gave way to smart terminals called PC’s. Now the smart devices are back to talking to the mainframes (cloud computing). Pendulum swings.

The next evolution will be integration of these apps with other stuff. I don’t mean bloatware. I mean like the way Uber connects all the pieces together for taxi service, but also for delivery and courier service. I am guessing that Amazon and grocery stores – andDrizley – are looking for ways to leverage UPS, Fedex, Postal Service and Uber to deliver same day and cost effectively. Scale it and stack it.

We were promised single sign-on in the 1990s. With Google/Facebook sign-on, it is getting closer, but it would be nice at work to log into one browser window and have most of your work environment and apps right there. It is coming… slowly.

Today, we are trapped in a world of desk phones pulling us one way and cloud pulling us another. This is just one hurdle.

Most businesses are living with just one foot in the cloud world. Change is a challenge for all businesses – and people. However, cloud is about change. It is about flexibility, opportunity, productivity and even some negativity, like breaches, down-time, and learning new procedures.

Master Agents talk about “being born to cloud”. I wrote about Net-Head versus Bell-Head in 2011. It took the industry four years to catch on.

Seth Godin talks about the Connection Economy. “The internet is a connection machine. Virtually every single popular web project (eBay, Facebook, chat, email, forums, etc.) exists to create connections between humans that were difficult or impossible to do before the web.,” writes Godin.

We sell that connection, that platform for connection.

Next, we are selling the Idea Machine. The platform for integration, for idea generation, for turning those ideas into reality.

“We’re now living in an Idea Economy where success is defined by the ability to turn ideas into value faster than your competition.” – Meg Whitman, Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

What are you selling when you are in front of a business talking about cloud? You are selling the promise of competitiveness. That the platform allows for communication with employees, customers, partners — and it allows for collaboration. The platform should help the HR department hire; the sales teams to sell; the customer care team to service.

You can’t do that having a conversation about the number of phone lines and the number of desk phones. The conversation has to get smarter for change to happen.

Tags: cloud communications, cloud computing, collaboration, economy, net-head, seth
Related tags: ideas reality, cloud, connection, platform, economy, service

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The Dip for Channel Partners – Jul 08, 2015

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November 9, 2015 , On Rad's Radar

Mergers, Acquisitions and Moves

There has been a lot of activity in the last couple of weeks in the telecom sector. Here are the highlights.

Verizon decided to put its Enterprise business up for sale for $10B. Rumor has it that the data center business (formerly known as Terremark) has been up for sale for a while. Fortune is reporting that the $10B gets you Terremark and MCI.
This makes VZ look more like Windstream. Yet with $118B in debt, you have to start thinking about paying some of it down. Seeking Alpha worries about VZ’s future. The $495mill that IOT pulled in does not move the needle against the debt.

Let’s not forget that Sprint has a wireline business just flapping in the breeze that they would like to monetize with a sale as well. Just the price may be too high — as the case with a $10B price tag on MCI-Terremark.

In an unexpected move,Impact Telecom and TNCI have merged. Earlier this year, TNCI had told me to watch out for a re-branding effort after a debacle couple of years for the former rebiller (that sued agents). I didn’t see the new brand; maybe this is it. ” The newly formed organization, under the brand Impact Telecom, will provide innovative cloud and voice telecommunications solutions to businesses and consumers in the United States and Canada and wholesale carrier customers around the world.” In other words, we will sell everything we can to anyone we can in North America. Please make checks payable to Impact Telecom. I will say that the strategy of the combined company continues the TNCI strategy.

Both companies are a mash-up of CLECs. “Blue Casa bought the TNCI business back in 2013 after it emerged from Chapter 11, and soon thereafter bought Pac-West to go with it. Meanwhile, also in 2013, Impact Telecom acquired Matrix, which itself had acquired Excel, Trinsic, and the SMB business of Global Crossing.” [Ramblings] I guess it resembles a Birch playbook.

One company that does have a plan is GTT. “The year-over-year increases in revenue, gross margin, adjusted EBITDA and unlevered free cash flow are due primarily to the acquisitions of UNSi on October 1, 2014 and MegaPath’s managed services business on April 1, 2015…On October 22, 2015, subsequent to quarter-end, GTT completed the acquisition of One Source Networks (OSN), a provider of global data, Internet, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking and managed services to Fortune 1000 companies. GTT paid $175 million for OSN…,” according to GTT report.

“Having achieved our previously announced financial objectives of $400 million in revenue and $100 million in Adjusted EBITDA, I am pleased to announce that [GTThas] established our next set of financial objectives to reach $1 billion in revenue and $250 million in Adjusted EBITDA within the next five years.” It’s possible, but hitting a billion has not helped any CLEC – ask Intermendia or Paetec.

Jive bought Easy Office Phone. EOP is based in Ontario Canada – and Jive will use that as its base for Canadian operations. Jive gets a little help in portal and call center from this acquisition.

This is the second Canadian Hosted VoIP announcement. Shaw – a large MSO in Canada – rolled out a Broadsoft service last month. Canada’s Hosted PBX space is getting as crowded as the USA.

ShoreTel bought another M5. In 2012, ShoreTel bought NYC based M5 Networks. This past week, “ShoreTel has snapped up Australian hosted VoIP specialist M5 Networks” in order to accelerate their go-to-market Down Under.

“Last week, the FCC proposed a $718,000 fine against M.C. Dean, the company that provides Internet services at the Baltimore Convention Center, over accusations that the company blocked Wi-Fi hot spots, as well as a $25,000 fine against Hilton Worldwide Holdings for what the agency called “apparent obstruction of an investigation” into Wi-Fi blocking.” [NYT]

RingCentral had a good quarter. “The business had revenue of $76.80 million for the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $74.73 million. The business’s revenue was up 35.0% on a year-over-year basis.”

In Texas and Oklahoma, “LOGIX Communications has agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by Astra Capital Management,” according to TelecomRamblings. Rumor has it that Alpheus will be next, maybe by the same PE firm.

Final note: Hargray, an indie telco in SC, bought an indie cableco in Georgia. Consolidation is everywhere.

Tags: canada, data center, FCC, fiber, hosted pbx, mergers, voip, vz, wireline
Related tags: impact telecom, revenue million, adjusted ebitda, million adjusted, managed services, business