April 2009 Archives

Tonight, Steve Case was on twitter tweeting, "Sad AOL went from being Internet pioneer/leader to also-ran. But still more there then most understand; hopeful can return to greatness." My replies were as follows: what they need are some young, hungry start-up execs, but what they will get is a stodgy exec that wants to cost cut and ride it out.

Why do I say that? Look at Embarq. Hesse had a couple months to pick a team and formulate a plan for the soon-to-be spun off Embarq. What did he do? Let's go with DSL and cost cutting. Blah! They needed that at Sprint not at Embarq. The next guy, Gerke, who took over last March, has been trying to be innovative with the eGo home phone. But EMBQ was already up for sale just trying to find a match.

Then you have EarthLink. Under Barry, it was trying everything: Muni Wi-Fi, BPL, MVNO, etc. He dies. The balls drop to the ground. The Board hires Rolla Hoff to come in, cost cut and try to find a buyer. No go. Just ride it out.

AOL has a wealth of brand recognition and content. It has active email accounts and IM users. My thoughts: go mobile with mobile IM app, definitely make the website and its content WAP based. Create MyAOL for the smartphone for $9.95 per month.

Also, I would have a premium email service that has extra value like saved address book, calendar and mobile access.

AOL has an advertising platform that I am not certain would spin-off, but if it did, there's cash and potential there, just like with the dial-up silo. And ADN, which it the AOL backbone is also something that could be leveraged.

I would even partner with ISP's to be the portal and content partner. Maybe the cable guys would like a deal like Yahoo! has with AT&T.

Anyway, there's plenty there to be worked (a social network too I think), but it wouldn't be that hard to find someone creative and passionate enough to run it. (Hey, Steve, my CV is on LinkedIn!)

What's the perfect VoIP Service?

I have seen so many VoIP Providers, I can't keep track. But that also means that the VoIP providers are not doing a very good job of Messaging, Positioning and Differentiating their offerings.

The only VoIP provider I know that has married Hosted Exchange with Broadsoft is Simple Signal. It makes to me because what is UM (unified messaging) but voicemail to email - everything in one box.

Unison Offers VoIP, E-Mail, IM to SMBs in New York City

Google Voice does it as well. One inbox for Gmail and Google Voice. And GV has some nice features like a transcript of your voicemail; recording calls;

Recently, I read that a company had instituted a who-is-calling-please response into every call before th ephone rings. I love this! No more dumb dialers. No more UNKNOWN or OUT OF AREA on the Caller ID.

Quick rant: I pay Verizon $22.35 for Worksmart which includes Caller ID, but most of the time it is Unknown. WTH? How does it not even known when AT&T calls me? Or almost any other CLEC? Lazy. That's why you are losing customers.

Presence (not to be confused with tele-presence) was supposed to integrate IM/chat, email, mobile and desktop phone. I haven't seen much of that in real world implementation. (I understand why, but I'm just pointing it out).  Skype does a decent job of video, voice or chat - plus recording.

Broadsoft has allowed many ITSP's to hook to SalesForce.com. Why not offer a hosted CRM software that is married to your PBX and email offering? VoIP is just one application.

• HD Voice
• conference-on-demand (web and video)
• call blocking
• Portal as easy as AT&T CallVantage
• call logs that can match up caller ID

Obvously, the usual features are still a must-have, including:

• simultaneous ring
• find-me-follow-me
• 3-way calling
• caller ID
• voicemail
• vm-to-email
• call forwarding
• Do Not Disturb

Chime in. I would love to hear from you:

• what you are doing
• who has the best message
• are you a cutting edge ITSP

UPDATE:
M5 announced that the marriage of the M5 Genband-based Hosted PBX with SalesForce.com and Call Metrics has been a hit.

Speaking with some industry channel folks today, we got to discussing Level3. Rob Powell says it best, "The Economy Takes a Big Bite Out of Level 3". This is a company with $6B in debt compared to $4B in revenue and negative free cash flow. Everyone wondered when the BK filing woud happen.

Level3 is as much at fault as Cogent and Hurricane Electric in leading the way to pricing underwater. Plus with operational challenges they aren't creating happy customers or agents. And with the new round of layoffs, not making happy employees either.

Level 3 has posted a profit only once since 1999. With pricing dropping and economy stalled, should Jim Crowe consider filing for bankruptcy? How do they even put a dent in the debt load with revenues dropping? Operational issues are still a factor which also act as a hurdle to sales. 

As an agent, I would lose revenue if they do file BK, but the truth is, I don't see how they get out from under the mountain of debt. 

I think that broadband has made some people "too connected". Between twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, text messages, etc. When do you get a recess? But for those that can in fact walk away from the tech and live a normal life, broadband allows for increased productivity.

If you think I am making this up, Broadband Properties magazine has a nice article with supporting facts. BBP wrote about a study done in Iowa between one city that built out a FTTx network and the neighboring town that did not.  Fiber city wins in taxes, jobs, and home values in 3 years. Now, BBP is disclosing that, "A 2005 study in rural West Virginia found that firms with broadband were 14 to 17 percent more productive than firms of the same age without access to broadband."  (I guess you would have to define productive.)

We hear a lot about Virtual Office. But tele-work saves companies money.  BBP writes, "IBM, a third of whose employees work from home, reports annual savings of $110 million from telework. AT&T estimated $180 million yearly savings with about 30 percent of managers in virtual offices." Furthermore, "Study after study shows that telework saves money for the corporation. A survey last year by the Yankee Group found that "employees rated working from home the number one thing their employers could do to make them more productive."  Why? "About one-fifth of AT&T's documented savings came from reduced real estate costs. But beyond reducing the need for office space, telecommuting also reduces losses from employee absenteeism. With a telecommuting setup, employees can still do some work while they are at home sick or caring for a sick child. More importantly, they aren't tempted to come to the office while they are ill and spread germs to their coworkers."  Which, during a pandemic scare like swine and bird flus, would seem like Reason # 1 for Virtual Offices.  However, not every employee will flourish at home full-time. There is a social aspect to going to the office that many thrive on. Others need the supervision and the environmental pressure to get work done. Many managers do not have the skills to supervise virtual workers.

"Telecommuting is also an important part of a business continuity strategy." A distributed workforce means that your business can continue. And many employees stoire files locally not on the server, so you will have incidental back-ups. But if designed correctly with redundant data centers and full back-ups, your business would continue unabated in a disaster or pandemic.

Then there's the word that always comes up in a productivity talk: Collaboration. "Workers must now be prepared to collaborate with remote offices, suppliers and customers all across the globe."  Web 2.0, broadband, social networks, and VoIP have enabled this nexus point for businesses. America has a service economy, which means bricks-and-mortar offices aren't needed. This also means that even small businesses can compete for top talent anywhere in the world.

The final piece of the puzzle is Tele-Presence. "A new report by the Aberdeen Group, "Being in Two Places at Once," advises enterprises to look at video as a business tool, not just a communications tool." The BBP sidebar continues, "The collaboration promoted by telepresence makes companies more agile in the marketplace.....  Telepresence doesn't automatically lead to these kinds of productivity enhancements. Aberdeen found that companies were more likely to reap the benefits of telepresence when it became a prominent feature of their corporate culture." In other words, the technology is just a tool. It will be used or ignored depending on its availability, ease of use, and corporate role.

I'm seeing a lot of news in our space but not enough time to cover it all or analyze it, so here's just the headlines:

DPI (deep packet inspection) by cable being investigated by Congress. It scares the crap out of Boucher (ARS). Cox, Comcast, NebuAd  = new privacy law being debated (NYTimes).

Broadband download caps: in the news all week because apparently TWC said that without caps, they won't upgrade any more. Well, I have news for them: if they don't upgrade they will lose customers. Can you say FiOS, WiMAX, U-Verse, and now Wildblue is testing 18MB service.  ARS notes there are caps even when not explicit like TWC.  VZW and others have usage limits built into the acceptable usage policy.

Clearwire is being sued - class action status - for ETF (early termination fees) and network quality issues (can you say: false advertising on network performance?). (see here and my twitter pal @morisy).

And speaking of Caps (no, not hockey, how about Comcast battling it out with the former FCC chief's ruling that cable companies can only have a maximum of 30% of the entire market? If we applied that to telecom - and why shouldn't we? - we would have to break up Ma and Pa Bell (Verizon and AT&T). Please note: I am all for that.  Meanwhile Comcast's defense is Freedom of Speech.

Lastly, Facebook exec becomes new CEO at MySpace. Too little, too late? And Yahoo! is closing down GeoCities free hosting services, which it bought in 1999 for $3.5B. The analysis of the deal is on Fred Wilson's blog. Worthwhile read for start-ups about what VC deals look like.

In case you didn't hear Oracle bought Sun. Open Source folks are worried and so are Sun customers.

Nuvox opened a new 5,000 square foot data center at 421 West Church Street in Jacksonville FL, which is THE telecom hotel in that city.

Rackspace hired Robert Scoble.

Data Vault in Miami was flooded last night according to a telecom source in South Florida.

Host.net/WV Fiber is opening a new data center in Nashville. It was announced yet but I ended up with a spec sheet in my email -- not from the company though.
This is the second data center that I have heard of being built in Nashville (I can't remember who the other is).

DataSite in Orlando signed a 15-rack first client in February. It was opened just after Progress Energy raised power rates by more than a third.

According to Jeff Hinkle at Atlanta NAP, most of the transactions are medium sized businesses and larger looking for rack space.

I am told that Terramark is doing well selling virtualization. WBS Connect is launching a virtualization service soon.

Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Managed Servers, Collocation, and Dedicated Servers are all the rage because the workforce is mobile (or distributed as in virtual office and tele-workers) and businesses have to do more with less staff - so outsource, SAAS, hosted email, hosted apps, and managed services to  leverage available skills.

If you Google VoIP save money, there are a million hits. There is the article, "How to Save Money with VoIP Service" with 5 lame tips. VoIP News has one titled, "15 Ways to Use VoIP to Save Money During the Downturn", that lists ways to use different vendors for differing free services based on VoIP. VoIP News has another one which asks, "Will VoIP Really Save You Money?" The answer of course is yes.

Where does VoIP save you the most? Inter-office dialing, In-State calls which cost more than inter-state calls, and international dialing. But the key for Hosted PBX isn't about cost savings. It's about business productivity and efficiency.  It's about Business Continuity.

In a new article by FreedomVOICE, "9 Ways to Slash Phone Costs and Increase Productivity", the push is to a distributed workforce via tele-commuting, tele-work, or virtual office space. And that doesn't mean permanently. What if the receptionist has a sick kid? If you had a Hosted PBX set-up, in many cases, she could still work from home and the office does not experience a disruption. That's a productivity gain. Isn't that better than saving money?

There are only 3 RBOC's left: AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. In the new Fortune 500 listing, telecom has 21 companies listed. The top 2: Ma and Pa Bell. AT&T has revenue of $124B. VZ is $97B. Profit for AT&T is $12.9B, and only $6.4B for VZ. I say only because the profit is half that of AT&T. I guess building out FiOS and buying Alltel costs a few bucks. And I bet it adds a huge amount of debt. Factor in the LTE buildout (after the 2.5G and 3G upgrades) along with rumor that VZ wants to buy out Vodafone's 45% stake in Verizon Wireless. I guess the New England landline sale to Fairpoint only gave them a tax credit and less debt, no real profit.

Notice that Sprint is # 3 on the F500 list but lost $2.8B on $35B.

Qwest is #6 after Comcast and DirecTV! Qwest's $13.5 billion in revenue result in less than $1B in profit -- just $681M.  But they did better than Charter which lost $2.5B; Virgin Media that lost $1.7B; and Cablevision which lost $228M on $7.2B.

We'll see how the pricing and marketing pressure affects these numbers in three quarters.

Well, AT&T is calling it game over on the VoIP game. I have been using CallVantage since 2004. It has worked very well with some pretty decent quality. It has an easy to use portal; call forwarding; simul ring; click-to-dial; voicemail-to-email; and more. Oh, yeah, the Simple Reach number so I can provide clients with a local number.

If you offer a similar service, start advertising to take over the 150K customers.

If a business is moving to UC, how does the decision get made on the platform?

In many cases, the IT Administrator has some responsibility for the phone system (even if that means he calls the PBX vendor). When the IT Admin is tasked with replacing the phone system, what goes into that decision?

Certainly, if the admin is Cisco certified, he will be leaning towards a move to Cisco Call Manager. You don't get fired for buying Cisco. You also go with what you know.  If the admin is an MCSE, he may lean towards an OCS solution.

My guess would be that it would be difficult for a PBX vendor like Shore-Tel or Avaya to pitch their box. It's too foreign. A PBX is an unknown black box. In a business IT department, you go with what you know.  It comes down to IT being familiar with IT vendors. PBX vendors just never bridged that gap. Likely that is why VAR's and MSP's (managed service providers) are having success selling Hosted PBX solutions. IT guy to IT guy. Trust is there because they speak the same language.  Hosted solutions are a concept that an IT guy (or gal) can fathom. After all, what is a server or Exchange or Novell or the mainframe?

Keep this menatlity in mind when heading out to pitch PBX. (Don't call it that!)

Talking to a channel exec this morning about UC. There isn't really a clear definition of UC. When you speak to UC companies like Altitude, the UC is about the contact center, first call resolution, and unified desktop. To me, first call resolution is a business process management (BPM) issue. And so is the concept of unified desktop.

"Routine customer-service interactions may require agents to interact with five, 10 or even 15 or more systems. Much of the time, these systems are ignorant of one another, requiring agents to log on each time they access a new system.... Unifying the agent experience into a single, consistent desktop takes the complexities out of the training process and job performance......  Management is also more clearly able to see the impact of call resolution because call closure procedures are uniform, no matter what back-end functionality comes into play during the course of the call..... The universal desktop view also makes it considerably easier for constituencies such as sales, marketing, and finance to understand the customer-service business processes at play and tailor their own activities accordingly." [from a Cincom guest column]

In my experience, this isn't an IT project, this is a COO or CEO project. I would also venture to guess that most back-end systems cannot be hooked together to provide the necessary data for Unified Desktop. Another guess would be that this type of venture would likely fall under the 70% of failed IT projects. Why? Unless the CIO is financially compensated for a project of this magnitude to be delivered, it will lose priority and die. A project this massive (actually any BPM project) requires inter-departmental cooperation, many meetings, a lot of man-hours, a strong project manager, the backing of the C-suite, and a 2-year timeline, where it stays in the spotlight.  UC becomes UD.

At medium sized businesses, UC can be defined as VoIP plus email plus collaboration and conferencing. For Cisco, this is the sweet spot: Call Manager with Webex. Unfortunately, Cisco doesn't have that email piece. That email piece is missing from most PBX and VoIP providers.  For Microsoft, this is exactly what they hope UC comes to stand for because that is what OCS is designed for. The downside to MS OCS is reliability, TCO, and E-911.

At the small business, I don't think they know what UC is at all. Why would they? UC is a term the industry can't define, so what would a small business owner know about it? The SB Owner is looking to cut costs, but even at 15% savings, is he going to move to a hosted PBX platform? Probably not because of the big changes that come with that migration. What changes? Blinking light syndrome for one. That being the changes the workers will deal with daily from the previous set-up. The blinking light is call park, which most PBX systems do not include. So immediately the workers have to make a big change in how they handle calls.

There is a capital expenditure (CAPEX) to move to VoIP in the LAN. Cabling, POE switches, battery back-ups, IP Phones, and a QOS Router. And now there is a very different looking phone on the employee's desk, so we have training and re-training.

To move a small business over to UC, there has to be a sound business reason, which can only be uncovered if you spend the time to understand the prospect's business. (This is why working in a niche is most profitable).  You have to understand the call process at work in the business environment. That may have to start with "I'll-save-you-10%" but then needs to quickly move to a discussion about the business, its workforce, and its relationship to the phone system.

Overall, people do search for "unified messaging" and "unified communications" but I'm not clear on what the universal meaning of those terms are. We have a show (IT EXPO WEST 2009 in Sept.), but I think that the definition of the acronymn varies. Maybe we can discuss that in Sept.

Robert Half interviewed 1400 CIO's for a research study (press release here), It's not a surprising list: Security, VOIP, Virtualization, SAAS, and data center efficiency. Considering power costs much more than space, getting energy and hardware efficient means cost savings. Oh, wait, that's virtualization too. And Software as a service and VOIP. 

In summary, the top tech investments of CIO of companies with 100 or more employees is IT Security and cost cutting initiatives.

Do you know what twitter is? It's the text messaging to the masses application platform. Officially, I think it is described as a micro-blogging social networking platform, but huh? The idea with twitter is to update a group of folks about what is of interest to you.

I'm on twitter and so are many TMC folks, like Rich, Tom, and sales guy extraordinaire Anthony; so is the TMC news service.

There are some telcos on twitter like Embarq, CenturyTel, and Windstream. The two companies merging do nothing with there account; it's a place holder. Windstream however just started up and they are doing a good job of it as far as I can tell. It's about interaction and they are being interactive with their customers, which is the example set by companies like JetBlue and Zappos.

The cable company with a bad service reputation took to twitter months ago and has been winning back it scustomers One at a time. That's right, Comcast is doing it the old fashion way, reaching out to help customers one at a time.

TWCable has an account with protected updates. Bright House Networks has one employee who is just underway.

In the VoIP world, there are plenty of folks on twitter, including Dan York from Voxeo, Garrett Smith of VoIP Supply and FreedomVoice. Actually there are too many to mention in VoIP.

Is your company interacting with its clients and target marketplace? Take twitter out for a test drive -- or watch what other folks are doing and copy it.

As I skim the Verizon Business 2009 Data Breach Investigations Report (PDF) to find that "295 million records were compromised and there were 90 confirmed breaches last year", I think where is the security? The Intrusion Detection Systems, the firewalls, the vigilant admins. Oh, wait, most companies don't have that. What else is missing? A Password Policy and a skilled technician who doesn't use the default settings for gear.

I'm generalizing of course, but there wouldn't be so many breaches if systems, policies, and security was intact. Mind you, this is reported breaches; some known breaches do not get reported and probably a good many breaches are undetected.

As we move to cloud computing, virtualization, SAAS, Web 2.0 and other examples of applications and corresponding data located on an Internet connected server, security will become paramount. It will be too costly to lose data.

Mind you, it's not 16 year old hackers who are the issue. It's organized crime cartels internationally who make billions off stolen data. Yes, Billions.

Managed security services are available. Almost every telco and ISP sell some - from managed firewall to IDS to managed router. My recent experience with a managed AT&T router tells me that perhaps that's not the way to go, but certainly there are MSP's who specialize in network monitoring.

Another idea would be to sell MPLS in place of IP-VPN or Internet based VPN. Yes it costs more, but isn't the peace of mind worth it?

Businesses that accept credit cards also have to worry about security due to liability and punishment. The credit card companies have established guidelines for PCI Data Security.

As a business, if there is a breach, you will be fined, your reputation tarnished and you will be left holding the bag for damages as well. Ask TJX.

The FCC assesses the competition in the video market on the same day that the FCC approves the acquisition of a de facto controlling interest in DIRECTV by Liberty Media Corp. and Liberty Entertainment Inc. (DA No. 09-780)

The FCC adopted a supplemental Notice of Inquiry to Congress On Video Competition for Years 2008 and 2009. The docket 07-269 can be commented on until 5/20/2009 (FCC No. 09-32).