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

December 2015

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End of Year Summary (Tidbits part 2426)

December 31, 2015

Lots of lists and best of posts out there. I am just going to run through the tidbits that I thought were interesting.

Citrix bought the auto-attendant in the cloud company, Grasshopper, earlier this year for about $161.5 M per 10Q filing. Grasshopper revenue was about $50M if you consider ARPU of $11 and about 350K users.

Cisco to Spark Some BroadCloud Competition

December 28, 2015

As if it weren't bad enough that Microsoft was forcing its tech partners to become salespeople, and Broadsoft was nudging its white-label partners to the curb, now Cisco is hosting a unified comms platform.

"Hosted by Cisco and sold by partners, Spark is a "complete business collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables customers to message, meet or call anyone, anywhere and anytime." The new Cisco Spark service provides a single user experience, delivered through the cloud, enabling users' Cisco phones and videoconferencing devices to connect directly to the cloud." [source]

The competition for mid-market and enterprise clients is heating up. Maybe the predictions about UCaaS growth in the cloud comes from the fact that the vendors have stepped into the service provider space, which will put added pressure on their customers/competitors to get out the selling.

Cloud Comms On the Rise

December 28, 2015

Cloud based unified communications to increase by 466% in 2016 [source]

Share of cloud in unified communications to rise from 6% in 2015, to 28% in 2016 [source]

Interesting the news the rise in cloud communications. Actually the shocking part is how little penetration cloud comms has now- 6%!!!

Data Centers are Hot

December 24, 2015

The Internet lives in a Hotel in NYC. Nice look at a carrier hotel.

"The third party data center market is in continual growth mode," JLL said in its 2015 report on data centers in North America. "Data centers are key economic drivers in markets within which they operate.

End of Year News Tidbits (Part 2425)

December 24, 2015

As we end this year, there has been a flurry of "news".

Sprint gave its employees layoffs for the holidays. Despite the cash from Softbank, Sprint is losing ground to T-Mobile and has little hope of catching up to Ma and Pa Bell (ATT and VZW). It isn't about price as much as it IS about a quality network.

Sliding into 2016

December 22, 2015

As we slide into 2016, the web is full of predictions. (Bill Miller's UC predictions are here.)

2015 consisted of M&A, musical chairs and hacks. Next year, more of the same.

Thank You

December 22, 2015

The Consumer Benefit of Mega-Mergers

December 17, 2015

"You may recall that AT&T justified their $69 billion acquisition of DirecTV by claiming their combined market power would result in more leverage in programming negotiations and lower costs. Cost savings that pretty clearly won't be getting passed on to consumers. Rate hikes for both AT&T U-Verse and DirecTV customers will take effect January 28." [DSLR]

AT&T saw a direct benefit of $15 per U-Verse subscriber with the DirecTV content contracts.

Unified Hope for UCaaS

December 16, 2015

End of year buzz around unified communications (UC, UCaaDS, Hostd PBX, Hosted UC) is ramping up. All part of the predictions and trend watching for 2016.

First, I have a shout out to my bud, Alex Doyle for this very nice video (commercial) for VZ UC&C. I have no idea if he is pitching the Cisco HCS platform or the Broadsoft VCE that he spent years sweating over.

The Commission Revenue Spiral

December 16, 2015

I received an email today about the channel strategy for 2016 for Windstream: WIND is NOT paying agents for any new order under $1500. I wrote about this when I first heard in October. No idea how this will work out, but train wreck comes to mind.

Windstream as a whole has had some much change - acquisitions, people, spin-offs - that I imagine there are no silly ideas in the conference room.

Merger Tidbits (Part 2924)

December 16, 2015

Sierra Wireless made those data cards that Sprint sold for laptops for 3G access. They still make Mi-Fi devices. Sierra is a Canadian firm that decided to buy a Tampa MVNO named Accel Networks for a managed connectivity offering. Accel has MVNO agreements with the Big 4 cellcos for 3G and 4G data access.

The B&N Lesson

December 15, 2015

Reading this blog post this morning from author and former Green Beret, Bob Mayer (who also teaches writers and publishes writers) about the troubles of B&N got me thinking - and writing this post.

It is interesting to me that music learned the lesson of digital disruption first but no one else even considered that it could happen to them. Next came movies, newspapers and the book industry.

The book publishing industry has been in a war with Amazon for the last three years.

Lessons from the NGC15

December 10, 2015

At the NextGen Cloud Expo yesterday, Tony Hawk was the featured keynote. Not exactly a prized speaker, he did have interesting vignettes about his life. He kept doing the skate-boarding thing even when he was broke and making no money at it. It was his passion - and he eventually made the big payday.

The Channel Nepotism

December 9, 2015

At NextGen Cloud Expo (what is the nextgen cloud?), we were talking about all of the musical chairs in the channel programs in 2015. So many. Maybe you noticed the changes, but more likely you probably noticed the pattern.

The pattern is that a channel executive moves to a new company and he takes his cronies with him.

Non-competitive Broadband

December 8, 2015

The FCC defines broadband at 25 Mbps by 3 Mbps. At that speed, most Americans have one choice: cable!

How funny is it that telcos had DSL in the Lab in the late 1960s and didn't roll it out until Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms basically forced their hand. They then pushed all 3 into bankruptcy to be the sole high speed Internet providers -- except for a smattering of independent ISPs that they would kill off later.

Host.Net CEO Retires

December 4, 2015

I remember back when it was BroadbandOne, founded in 1996 and mainly sold bandwidth nationally. Then the company bought WV Fiber. Then it became Host.Net with a pretty impressive data center in Boca Raton, Florida. A lot has happened - and now CEO Jeffrey Davis is retiring.

RAD Rant on Channel Marketing

December 1, 2015

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