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

November 2015

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The Butterfly Effect of Cord Cutting

November 30, 2015

Cord cutting is real. It is affecting more than just the cablecos.

The cablecos realize that they have to switch to broadband, voice and other product lines to counter the revenue loss from TV. CableOne CEO, Tom Might, gave a presentation at Wells Fargo that follows a speech he gave a year prior.

News Tidbits Part 2923

November 30, 2015

A lot of lit tidbits popping up. If you follow me on twitter, then you may have seen some of this already.

Cyber Monday crashed Target.com, but Tom Peters' fans crashed dropbox. Tom Peters put out an email to subscribers this morning with links to 14 chapters of Tom's top topics including Excellence, Execution and more.

A Little Channel Conflict

November 24, 2015

I know this happens but I have never seen it in print. Channel Conflict is a big issue. It is basically the conflict between the direct sales team and the indirect sales team. This conflict is so bad that some programs allow for teaming - that is when the channel partner works with a direct salesperson of the carrier and they both get credit/compensated for a sale.

The Move Into Canada

November 24, 2015

RingCentral has a deal in place with TELUS, a telecom company like AT&T in Canada. 8x8 has had its Virtual Office suite in Canada since 2013. Today, Zayo announced that they were buying Allstream, a division of MTS in Canada. Allstream has a 35,000 km fibre-optic network and provides communications services to enterprise clients including the Canadian government.

Collision of Titans

November 23, 2015

As the hype would have you believe, the world is moving to the cloud. Well, it is happening, just not as fast as many say (or hope). For one thing, migrating software to the cloud is not as simple as some make it out to be. It takes planning, testing and executing.

The Monitoring Master Move

November 20, 2015

This week marks the second master agency that has decided to get into monitoring. It seems like a bold move to go from back office sales support to resemble a NOC (network operations center).

In the case of Telarus, they bought the company and are pushing it out to their partners. Telarus has some IT skills in the software space - building and running GeoQuote.

Open Source in the Service Provider

November 18, 2015

Fuze Joins ThinkingPhones

November 16, 2015

Announced on twitter probably before anywhere else: ThinkingPhones buys Fuze.

Formerly known as Thinking Phone Networks, ThinkingPhones is a Hosted UC company with $88 million in venture money. They used some of those funds to buy a video conferencing company, Fuze, to add video to their portfolio.

"Based in San Francisco with additional offices in Palo Alto and Seattle, Fuze helps distributed teams work across distances through HD-quality voice and video conferencing and content sharing across devices, desktops, and meeting rooms.

Marriott Disrupted

November 16, 2015

Marriott announced that they are buying Starwoods for $12.2 Billion. CNBC thinks it is about China or the combo of the largest 2 loyalty programs. However, the Marriott president says something different on LinkedIn. Yes, LI!

UNIFY Gets Acquired

November 9, 2015

Two years ago, Siemens Enterprise Communications re-branded as UNIFY. "Unify, is a joint venture between the American private equity firm The Gores Group and German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG," according to Wikipedia. It is a premise-based comms platform. Now, Atos is buying Unify from Gores and Seimens.

HP, The Idea Economy and You!

November 9, 2015

HP is re-organizing. It was quite the behemoth: "a $110 billion company that operated in 120 countries with more than 700 legal entities, and an IT infrastructure that spanned three data centers." Meg Whitman penned a look at HP and the Idea Economy on LinkedIn.

I tend to agree with many of her points.

We live in an age of disruption.

Mergers, Acquisitions and Moves

November 9, 2015

There has been a lot of activity in the last couple of weeks in the telecom sector. Here are the highlights.

Verizon decided to put its Enterprise business up for sale for $10B. Rumor has it that the data center business (formerly known as Terremark) has been up for sale for a while.

A Thought

November 5, 2015

Everyone Wants You to be an MSP

November 5, 2015

Whether it is the keynote at a channel conference or a master agency, everywhere you look the message seems to be: Yo Agent, become a MSP!

So for a few years now, the keynotes, most notably from a Gartner analyst, have been a singular message: become a cloud broker or service provider or die!

CLECs have been trying to transition to cloud - most notably TelePacific, EarthLink and Cbeyond (now Birch). As TBI's Ken Mercer writes, "We've been selling telecom services for years.

FTC Calls Out Data Brokers

November 3, 2015

The FTC did a report on 9 data brokers. Scary.

"Data Brokers Collect and Store Billions of Data Elements Covering Nearly Every U.S. Consumer: Data brokers collect and store a vast amount of data on almost every U.S.

Some Companies Are Doing Well, Some Not

November 3, 2015

The quarterly revenue numbers are coming in with some companies doing well, some notsomuch.

The cablecos are doing well. The top 4 (public) MSOs - Comcast, TWC, Charter, Cablevision - "these four companies alone accounted for about 22% ($8.8 billion) of the $40 billion annual special access market in 2014," according to a Forbes columnist.

"Comcast's business services revenue increased 21.9% in 2014 and 26.4% in 2013." Comcast Business does $1.2B per quarter - making them one of the largest CLECs!

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