Acredo Lays Off Staff

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| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Acredo Lays Off Staff

This morning on Twitter, it was announced that Hosted VoIP company, Acredo, had laid off all its staff. Acredo is the second Hosted PBX player in Orlando to axe its staff in the past few weeks. VOX also laid off most of its staff, while waiting for a big deal to close, which is supposed to be its savior.

We are entering the time when there will be a parring down of the 1000+ companies offering VoIP. The majority of users have migrated to cable digital voice service due mainly to the bundle, the price, the Quality of Service, the name brand, and the large advertising campaigns.

Acredo was Avaya based and not inexpensive. I have no further details about the company.

VOX had over 100 partners reselling their service including NCTA, WISPA and FISPA members. Most notably Junction Broadband was a reseller. The deal with UTGI was supposed to be the saving grace for VOX. The funding partners decided that they couldn't pour more money in while they waited to land the UTGI deal.

Certainly, we will be seeing more of this as VC and hedge funds have been hit by the financial crisis too and cannot continue to fund companies that have not hit a revenue and cash flow stance.

An UPDATE on this story: see Rich Tehrani's update. Acredo is in re-organization - not closed.

A correction: the VOX reseller is Junction Broadband, not Junction Networks as I wrote yesterday. (Please note that the linked press release clearly stated Junction Broadband.) I apologize for the typo.


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2 Comments

Hey -

Just want to clear up an error in your report. Junction Networks has nothing to do with VOX. All of our services, including www.onsip.com, are home grown.

Thanks,

Rob Wolpov

I think this is just the beginning. Even before the recent financial meltdown, Hosted VoIP was just something that looked great on paper, but was difficult or next to impossible to make any money with.

Way too much competition, as there was little barrier to entry. It got to the point that my kid sister and her friends were all starting hosted VoIP companies.

Seriously though, all it takes is a server, a bit of software, and some bandwidth, and you're a hosted VoIP company. And 99% of these bozos compete on having the lowest cost, etc... The sales process to win a client with 20 employees, is basically the same sales process it used to take to sell a $50,000 traditional PBX.
No matter how good this "gold rush" looked on paper, the margins are razor thin, the competition is insane, and winning clients is very, very difficult. I hate to be a nay-sayer, but I believe virtually all of the Hosted VoIP companies are going to crash and burn at some point.

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