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

June 2017

You are browsing the archive for June 2017.

LANTelligence's CEO on Channel and Contact Center

June 30, 2017

After a short conversation with Martin Tracey, CEO of Unified Communications Solutions Provider, LANtelligence, we decided to do an interview to share some of the points we were discussing.

RAD: The Telecommunications/UC space is changing. It is a lot different than when we both got in during the heyday of the 90s. How will these changes affect channel partners?

Do You Have Any Marketing Firms or Banks as Clients?

June 27, 2017

It was a rough day in Europe with ransonware hitting banks, airlines, utilities and other businesses. Many businesses closed early in Europe. Some businesses in the US with parents in Europe were also infected.

WPP is one of the largest advertising and marketing firms in the world.

The Next Billion Dollar Telecom Player

June 26, 2017

GTT has been on an acquisition tear lately. They bought Perseus and Giglinx in the last month. "Perseus specializes in the ultra low latency connectivity used by the high frequency trading community," according to Telecom Ramblings. The purchase price was $37.5M plus the assumption of $3M in capital leases.

The Cable Merger World Churns

June 23, 2017

There was a report that Verizon tried to buy Charter for about $100B. It was rejected for being too low.

The other rumor is that Altice which bought Cablevision and Suddenlink is looking at a nearly $2B IPO and will use those proceeds to buy Cox. But that may not happen because Charter now wants to buy Cox.

John Malone, the pioneer cable consolidator, has been all about consolidating cable, telco and wireless.

Sangoma Picks Up a Distributor

June 20, 2017

Sangoma Technologies Corporation is buying Buffalo-based VoIP Supply. VoIP Supply is a distributor of the hardware that goes with VoIP including phones, switches, headsets, et al. Apparently the privately help distributor "in fiscal 2018, will be accretive, will add over C$15m in revenue to Sangoma," according to the press release.

Sangoma is paying $3M in cash plus about another million in stock and options for VoIP Supply.

POTS and PBX

June 20, 2017

Recently on LinkedIn and twitter, home for the haters, there has been noise about the death of PBX. Toshiba and Avaya certainly give credence to that thought. However, analyst research demonstrates that PBX seats still outpace Cloud seat sales. That gets muddied by MITEL's numbers for "cloud" seats (3 million) and Broadsoft's numbers for both "cloud" and "UC".

Waiting on the Channel

June 15, 2017

Whether it is TPX CEO Richard Jalkut or other channel executives, providers are impatiently waiting on the channel to jump off selling network and start selling other things.

The products that have been launched recently sit in big buckets titled IOT, Cyber-Security, Managed Services, SD-WAN and of course UC (UCaaS, UCC, WCC).

Rich Tehrani has a nice read about AI and analytics transforming companies like Vodafone.

COLOTRAQ has a new IT Risk/Cyber-security Assessment and Planning Service.

Telecom Tidbits (Part 2459)

June 13, 2017

Some stats from 451 Research

Enterprises buy a variety of computing services from public to private along with VPS, hosting and everything in between. "It's easier for enterprises to develop, test, operate and migrate workloads across hybrid architectures when the CSP's public and private cloud code base is the same, or at least virtualized and functioning identically." However, they cannot procure this variety from Amazon or Google. They would to go to the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

"Consumer tablet demand continues to shrink.

Is It Easy to Switch From CM to Agent?

June 13, 2017

I hear Channel Managers (CM) mention how easy it is to be a partner. Recently, one CM told me that he was going to start being an Agent part-time.

Someone I met in Vegas was a laid off CM who was discussing how exciting it was to launch her partner business. I hadn't heard from her and just checked on LinkedIn. She is back in the W-2 world of being a carrier channel manager.

2 Blockbuster Deals

June 9, 2017

The VADs (value added distributors) are feeling the pinch of the growth of cloud, SAAS, SD-WAN, managed services - amid the decline of laptops, PCs, hardware and software licensing.

Last year, Tech Data negotiated to acquire Avnet Technology Solutions for $2.6 billion. Avnet TS brings in $9.65 Billion in revenue and will increase Tech Data's share of data center revenue from just 29 percent to 45 percent. This move also gives Tech Data a presence in Asia-Pacific.

Mary Meeker's Internet Trends

June 8, 2017

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins puts out an annual report on Internet and Internet related trends. This year it is a 355 slide report. [You can download a pdf version here.] (Here is a 35 minute summary from Mary herself.)

Highlights:

The Accordion Channel Strategy

June 7, 2017

An Accordion is a musical instrument that is stretched and squeezed while the piano like keys are played.

A better analogy might be Thermal Expansion and Contraction.

Channel heads tend to have this mentality of "Let's sign up EVERYONE!" The more we sign up, the more sales we will make. Logical, but false.

Cisco's Business at Risk?

June 4, 2017

"CEO Chuck Robbins' first orders of business upon taking the helm at Cisco was to initiate a transformation away from hardware and shift to a software, cloud, and recurring revenue model. Last quarter was yet another example of Cisco's slow but steady progress. Total revenue declined 2% to $11.6 billion," reports Madison.com.

There is an interesting article on Business Insider about Facebook making switches and routers for themselves.

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