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

January 2010

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Latisys Lands a Rockstar

January 29, 2010

Latisys is a VC backed data center solutions company. Latisys was formerly Managed Data Holdings, a company founded in 1994, that was transformed and renamed in 2007 by a group of venture capital firms.

Latisys is a leading provider of colocation, managed hosting, managed services and disaster recovery solutions. Latisys runs multiple SAS70 Type II certified data centers across the United States.

SayHired at Startup Telephony Camp

January 29, 2010

Screening candidates that send in resumes is a tedious task. I get to do that when my clients are hiring new salespeople. It's a time-consuming task. Really,  resumes don't mean anything because how many aren't embellished?

Anyway, at the 1st Startup Telephony Camp which Larry Lisser ran, we had a chance to hear from 4 start-ups - SayHired, Close Haul Communications, Fonolo, and Pebb.ly

So I know of a few companies looking for marketing, sales and channel people.



iEXPO

January 29, 2010

XO Channel Exec Changes

January 27, 2010

Wow Mobile: Another Scheme

January 26, 2010

Why is it that everyone thinks that there are quick ways to make money? The only way to make quick money is to steal it. 

The new MLM scheme is Wow Mobile. Although the Wow reps state it is not a multi-level marketing plan. Really?

Shouldn't It Be Profitable

January 25, 2010

During my interview with PAETEC's COO, E.J. Butler, at ITEXPO East last week, some of what we talked about was the Profitability Proforma. The Profitability Proforma is a toolkit for the PAETEC sales force to use to provide a price quote to the prospective customer while still being a profitable circuit sale for the carrier.

Most telecom sales people sell on price - agents too.

Bandwidth is Finite

January 25, 2010

I hear lots of cheering for WiMax, 3G, 4G, broadband, etc. HD Voice and all these mobile apps. Video calls and Internet TV. All that over a set of pipes that the owners have been unwilling to upgrade.

So we have all this promise with mobility and video.

Cloudy Thought

January 25, 2010

Winning the Battle for SMB VoIP

January 25, 2010

The Social Media Panel Wrap Up

January 25, 2010

In a follow up to the Social media panel write up, here are the slides (and a few extra thoughts from yours truly)

Blogging, LinkedIn, forums, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave, YouTube, podcast, etc. Each is a tool for your communication.

Each is different and reaches a varied audience.

How to Leverage Social Media for a Marketing Campaign

January 20, 2010

At TMC's ITEXPO, I moderated a panel after lunch titled How to Leverage Social Media for a Successful Marketing Campaign. Both panelists - Isaac Hazard, Director of Strategic Consulting, Mzinga; and Suzanne Bowen, VP Marketing & Business Development, Super Technologies, Inc. & DIDX - delivered case studies. 

What was the goal? 
How was it executed? 
What was the results/metrics/ROI?

How to Think about Social Media

You need to think about social media platforms as additional tools for the marketing toolbox.





Making Money in IP Communications

January 20, 2010

In a room filled with VAR's, inter-connects and VoIP resellers (and one investor), our ITEXPO panel this morning discussed making money from IP communications.

How does the indirect channel make money from IP? It is SO different from TDM. This isn't really plug-and-play services.

Mzima and PacketExchange Merge

January 18, 2010

New Edge Drops Wholesale

January 18, 2010

New Edge Networks, an EarthLink company, cut their wholesale division this month. While volumes were good, especially with wholesale clients like Verizon, the margins were too thin for the NEN corporate strategy. That strategy would be to milk as much money as possible while this company remains afloat.

The new strategy is to double down on retail. Hire more channel managers and more direct sales people, so they can compete with each other on DSL sales.

Broadband is Flattening

January 12, 2010

Pike & Fischer survey shows that broadband is flattening. (I wrote a little about this yesterday). This means a couple of things:

One, customer acquisition costs of broadband is going to increase AND margins will shrink, because it also means short term pricing will drop. (Price war coming ...

Linchpins

January 11, 2010

Will Reliability Be a Factor?

January 11, 2010

I see many folks asking if SAAS (software-as-a-service) will be hurt by data center outages. So I figured I would take a shot at it.

Anything over the IP network is going to be slightly less reliable than the TDM network. The TDM network had 100 years to create the 5 nines reliability that customers have come to expect. IP networks have not had that long - 15 years max to design some kind of reliability.

One big difference is that IP networks have more points of failure. Routers and switches on each end.



Stalled Stimulus of Broadband

January 8, 2010

It was July of 2009 when the applications for BTOP and BIB awards were due. It's January 2010 and shovel ready awards have been granted mainly for middle mile projects. Where are the rest of the awards?

We can look at the failure of Muni Wi-Fi (last mentioned when EarthLink's wi-fi network in Phillie was acquired by the city for $2M).

Applying Gary Vee

January 7, 2010

Last night I got to listen to Gary Vaynerchuk speaking about Crush It (Amazon affilaite link), his new book. He talked about branding your business via online marketing, which is what has made him famous (via video blogging about wine on Wine Library TV). [You can see a 15 minute talk of his on YouTube].

His primary thought is that Content is King. So if you run a company and your company isn't blogging, shame on you.

Google VoIP

January 4, 2010

Tom Keating has a blog post about Google's VoIP Plans. (Cue the Dr. Evil laugh). What Google is trying to do, according to Google VP of Product Management, Bradly Horowitz's hints at their future roadmap when he said, "What we're trying to do with telephony is give people a seamless experience that frees up their telephony communication from the silos where it's lived for the last decade. Voicemail, my contacts, all of those things have been segregated from the rest of my Web experience.

Setting the Sail for Service Providers

January 4, 2010

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