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

April 2017

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Cloud, IOT and DC Tidbits (Part 2454)

April 28, 2017

Tidbits of surveys from the 451 Research and other studies.

Cloud

Cloud adoption remains strong, with 60% of respondents indicating either Initial Implementation (31%) or Broad Implementation (29%) of production applications. Just over a quarter of the respondents are either Running Trials/Pilot Projects (15%) or Discovery and Evaluation (12%).

LEOSAT Building MPLS Satellite Network

April 26, 2017

Ronald van der Breggen, Chief Commercial Officer at LEOSAT, agreed to an interview after WAN Summit NYC that we both attended.

RAD: What does LEOSAT do?

Ronald van der Breggen: LEOSAT is launching an MPLS network in space at 1440 km altitude. Once accessing this constellation of MPLS routers (mounted on satellites), we can carry traffic from anywhere to everywhere with lower latency than fiber and with capacities in the Gigabit range.

How Broken is Telecom? (This is a Rant)

April 26, 2017

It started as just 1 problem, but I ended up writing about 3 messes.

I try really hard to avoid cablecos. They don't like the Channel; they don't like wholesale. It seems that direct sales reps can get pricing much faster.

The State of the Master Agency with COLOTRAQ's CEO

April 26, 2017

What Makes Amazon Tick

April 21, 2017

CB Insights did a break down of Amazon. It's interesting that it looks like: "Amazon is doubling down on AWS and its AI assistant, Alexa. It's seeking to become the central provider for AI-as-a-service."

"AWS is the biggest area Amazon is scaling up with more than 5600 jobs, which translates to about 33% of all the open listings." Hey, kids, here's where future jobs lie!

Where's the Margin? (Part 1)

April 21, 2017

As much as I grumble often about the VoIP/UC providers and their lack of differentiation, SD-WAN is going to be just as bad. It is almost a commodity out of the gate.

Since most product markets are flat (think broadband, cellular, voice, TV), the race is on to take customers away. Without a better mouse trap, it is all about price.

Will Broadview Help Windstream?

April 17, 2017

In this CRN interview** with Austin Herrington, senior director of product management at Windstream, the strategy is laid out.

Was it just October that Windstream let its small business customers go? At that time didn't they tell the partner community that they only wanted deals $1250 and above? Didn't they cut commissions on Paetec customers?

Windstream Bites Again

April 14, 2017

Windstream just finished the paperwork on closing EarthLink. Now they are buying Broadview Networks in an all cash deal for $227M, of which $161M is to pay debt. [WIND gets $183M in NOLs though and 4.6x 2016 OIBDA, for you accounting geeks.] This will be WIND's 6th UC platform - Broadsoft, Metaswitch, Allworx, Avaya, Mitel. Broadview's OfficeSuiteUC is home built, just like Fuze, 8x8, RC, Broadvoice, Jive and many others.

The surprise was that Broadview only had 20K business customers, of which 7,300 utilize their cloud based services!

After Show Tidbits (Part 2453)

April 14, 2017

Item 1:

Deloitte acquired most of the assets of Day1 Solutions Inc., a cloud consulting firm to provide deeper cloud expertise. CIO Magazine explains, "Deloitte needs Day1 for the same reason Accenture needs Genfour, Genpact needs Rage Frameworks and Infosys needs Panaya. The problem for Deloitte and for every traditional services company is that their clients do not believe they have the digital skills to lead the digital transformation journey the clients want their business to undertake."

The Quota-Price Collision

April 12, 2017

The one question that keeps coming up: How do you hit quota (which incidentally never goes down) when the pricing is declining?

What do you do when a $60K MPLS network is replaced with a $40K SD-WAN network? And when some of those Internet links are not even on the carrier's network?

What do you do when 10GB trans-continental private lines are so ridiculously low?

Telecom Tidbits (Part 2452)

April 11, 2017

Coming at you from the Channel show in Vegas, where TelePacific reveals its new brand as TPX Communications. Tele and Pacific didn't fit a managed services provider with a nationwide reach. TPX is more interested in selling UCaaS, managed IT, SD-WAN and managed security these days. The name change is to reflect that.

3 Studies You Might Find Interesting

April 3, 2017

SpiceWorks study on IT buyers: "The survey results show nearly 90 percent of IT decision makers evaluate and recommend technology solutions while less than 50 percent of business decision makers do the same."

In the SpiceWorks IT Buyer guide, "IT pros at small companies are often both the business and IT decision makers." And no one reads your brochures. Interesting that IT buyers don't trust social media.

A CompTIA SMB study "identified the "sweet spot" of the SMB market to be companies with 10 to 99 employees.

Attention and Demand Deficit

April 3, 2017

Birch laid off its direct sales force, proclaiming they are going all channel. The number of channel only companies is growing. Unfortunately it isn't as easy as that. The channel lost 30% of its partners over the last 3 years, while gaining 600+ new vendors.

Is Amazon Going to Buy Vonage?

April 3, 2017

Amazon rolled out Chime, a Webex and GoToMeeting knock-off with Vonage as its partner for consumers and small biz. It turns out that Level3 is the partner for enterprise.

At EC17, Amazon launched a self-serve cloud contact center. (Once again Amazon took software it created and used internally and made it a commercial product like S3 and AWS.) The partner for this was Twilio.

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