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

July 2016

You are browsing the archive for July 2016.

Nothing But Vanilla Pudding

July 29, 2016

Do you remember playing musical chairs in school? The music begins a chair is removed and you circle around until the music stops. When the music stops, you try to sit in a chair and not be left standing. Channel positions seem a lot like that right now.

Selling SD-WAN as a Trusted Adviser

July 29, 2016

Talking API and UC with Zilkr

July 28, 2016

What It Means to Master an Agency

July 25, 2016

After rumors swirled at CP Expo in Vegas in March, the announcement is finally here: Sandler Partners is acquiring X4. This will create an entity that is doing $65M in revenue, referenced as second only to one master agency.

It is interested that some media call it a master agency, when in the press release, Sandler Partners described themselves as America's Fastest Growing Distributor Of Connectivity & Cloud Services. X4 is called a master agency though.

Why You?

July 22, 2016

This was another Me-too week in press releases. It was ILEC SD-WAN week with announcements from AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon. It was another handful of VoIP product launches. It was a handful of notifications that various master agencies inked agreements with UCaaS and other vendors.

PlumUC Pipes in on Skype4B for Partners

July 19, 2016

On Microcorp's weekly agent call, the first topic was the Office365 opportunity for channel partners. (One slide from that call shows the size of the opportunity is on twitter.)

I wasn't aware of how many vendors were pushing Office365. These include Level3, Sprint, Arkadin, CallTower, TelePacific, Velis4, BitTitan, Rackspace, Tierpoint, CenturyLink, Evolve IP, NeoNova, even GoDaddy.

Business Continuity is a Conversation

July 19, 2016

I think about Business Continuity all the time. In the past two months, my cable service has gone out 3 times and I have 2 power outages here in Tampa. When the Internet is down, there isn't much I can do since everything is Internet.

Do business consider this?

The Last CLEC Pivot

July 14, 2016

There were a number of big CLECs (over $500M in revenue) just 6 years ago - PAETEC, Windstream, Qwest, Cbeyond, XO, Level3, Global Crossing, TW Telecom, EarthLink, AboveNet, Zayo, and TelePacific.

By 2012, half were gone, swallowed up by acquisitions. [CBEY-Birch, Qwest-CLink, Paetec-WIND, L3-GX, L3-twt, Zayo-ABoveNet]. Today, with XO going to Verizon next year, there are really only a handful left.

The SPIFF War

July 12, 2016

Money is practically free, so why not use it for a land grab? This is the premise behind the industry consolidation. It is hard to grow organically, so grow inorganically by buying competitors or new markets (like Vonage and Nexmo).

But eventually you think out the herd of competitors that you can afford to buy and now you have the real revenue growth numbers staring at your face.

CompTIA's 2016 MSP Study

July 11, 2016

In CompTIA's 2016 MSP study, the take-away is that MSPs expect to make more revenue, but they don't know how that will be. "Their optimism is countered by continuing worries about their role in a market increasingly dominated by cloud computing solutions and by a persistent problem with employee retention," reports the CompTIA press release.

"But bullishness on future business is tempered by worries about margin erosion. Just over half of the firms cite margin erosion as a factor that keeps them awake at night." Every sector of telecom and IT is seeing price pressure.

Cable Customer Service Examined

July 6, 2016

Comcast and its cable brethren already have a bad customer service reputation. In fact, Congess held hearings with cable execs! What did they find?

Cable is over-charging customers and training agents to avoid accepting cancellations (following the AOL procedural manual probably).

UC Tidbits #2441

July 5, 2016

So many pieces of news about the UCaaS and UC&C segment that I just wanted to cover the highlights (with links) for your perusal.

New ReportsWeb Global UC&C study:

"The global market is gradually experiencing the transition from legacy telephony services and messaging platforms to new UC&C services and platforms. We expect more number of global deployments of UC&C in coming years, driven by growing popularity of applications, such as rich collaboration, mobility, video conferencing, and telepresence." Key word is gradually.

A Big Shift Coming to Telecom

July 5, 2016

Our sector of the marketplace - telecommunications - is about to undergo a change. Yeah, we have been in a shift for a good while, but more is coming.

We went from TDM to VoIP to Hosted PBX to UCaaS to UC&C.

We went from T1 to cable broadband to Gigabit.

UCaaS Tidbits #2440

July 5, 2016

SkySwitch has launched contact center-as-a-service (CCaSS) for its white-label resellers. [channel vision mag]

RingCentral Enterprise with Google for Work is a new partnership. It will chase (far) behind the Microsoft suite.

Talking to Channel Managers

July 1, 2016

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