The Latest Buzz(words) to Offer

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

The Latest Buzz(words) to Offer

The CLEC crowd is trying to move beyond the legacy services of network and minutes. Hard to do when customers still want to buy it. In much of the marketing, the services with the most buzz are: Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Managed WiFi and mobility.

Under UCaaS I will include Collaboration, so Lync, Office 365, Sharepoint, Dropbox, conferencing flavors (audio, web, video), contact centers and the like. Most just sell the voice piece. Some of it has to do with the buyer. Most buyers only know what they know (see further down in this post). Do they have the time (and patience) to learn what they don't know? How UC can make the business flexible and competitive? In my experience, not always.

Managed WiFi is getting a push from Cisco, ADTRAN, EarthLink (and their partner Airtight). Technically, this is just another network play; but it also has to do with mobility. That's the problem: no one has responsibility for it in the organization. It makes for a good managed servcie to offer. Add some analytics and it can sell itself.

Mobility is by far the biggest. If you had the Internet of Things (IoT) to that tent, the circus is huge. Remember BYOD and the issues that corporations faced? Still going on, but now more companies are looking for MDM (mobile device management). A couple of CLECs - Mettel and TelePacific have nice bundles with MDM. You should look at them.

Rumor has Google launching an MVNO in the middle of a heated price war from the cellcos (that is killing the MVNO business). AT&T has mobility in the APEX wholesale platform. Tech Data has its TDmobility which sells all 4 cellcos and nearly every device. If you like selling replacement stuff, get a piece of this business. there is a lot more to it than just handsets, since there are solutions wrapped around verticals. Take transportation for example. Vehicles are tracked via GPS. Those devices that UPS and Fedex use to track packages (made by Zebra) are computers with 3G connectivity. Think Kindle with a scanner for ideas on how almost any business might use GPS tracking, object tracking, person (employee or customer) tracking. well, it is mostly tracking. We went from inventory control to people control. And IoT and wearables will be more intrusive. But the applications are wide ranging. "IoT is like the Internet in the 1990s"

Side Note: Google launched wi-fi service FI with Nexus 6.

"Executives at organizations of all sizes and across countless industries experience many of the same challenges - from improving customer experience to staying ahead of the technology curve to cutting costs. One common challenge many executives face is avoiding the stigma of being seen as "out of touch" with what is going on from a day-to-day perspective in their organizations. Unfortunately for them, that's exactly what a recent Evolve IP survey exposed." A survey from Evolve IP shows that many executives -- your buyers - are not informed about the latest tech. It is your job to educate them. Otherwise we replace you with a kiosk.

So what are you going to offer your customers today?

SIDEBAR

Arrow is getting into IOT. See this review by Sandhill.



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