Open Note to the Hosted PBX Crowd

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Open Note to the Hosted PBX Crowd

I was asked yesterday why I don't like Alteva, by someone who just went to work there. I don't like or dislike Alteva or 8x8 or any other Hosted PBX company. Alteva is public - like 8x8, RC, CBEY and a few others - so I get to look at the numbers they post quarterly. It's a measuring stick. It's rope that they choose to put out there, so sometimes you hang by it.

It has been 10 years since Broadsoft's customer # 2 rolled out a hosted VoIP offering. Ten Years! Ten Years and the industry still has huge challenges selling this stuff!

I used to rip on the amount of money that 8x8 burned through without much sales. Then one day they decide to pivot - yes, PIVOT - from being a tech company (enamored with their patents, blinking lights and self) - and became a sales & marketing company. And BOOM!!!! See what happened. I don't rip them any more. (Ask Rich Tehrani).

ShoreTel is ruining a perfectly good company. M5 Networks was a Tesla factory with 2000 customers with an ARPU of $2000 per month. Now, ShoreTel wants that factory to pump out Chevy Volts!!! Those procedures were built to have a few large customers -- not a large number of small customers. (BTW, the larger guys have better WAN and IT staff, so less problems and calls = better).

The CCA has burned through hundreds of millions of VC dollars to what end??? They remind me of 1999 when Northpoint, Covad and Rhythms all IPO'ed and rolled out nationwide - to compete against each other. Why? They could have gone regional and locked up some regional market share. You know who did that originally? Cbeyond. At one point, other CLECs in Atlanta hated Cbeyond, who had taked about 10-15% of the business market in Atlanta. Smart. Go Deep. Don't be a puddle.

Oh, and remember that M5 started in NYC, then expanded to Boston and Chicago. They were in NYC!!! Go get 5% of that business market - 190K small businesses.

So it's Hosted PBX, then UC, then UCaaS -- it's all the same stuff!! And the customers don't care!

Launching nationwide, that's fine IF you know exactly who you are targeting. Oh, wait: everyone. I keep forgetting that you want to everyone to buy. But what are you positioned to sell? That's the real question.



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