In cable news, you get a site survey done supposedly before quoting. You get the quote; give it to the customer who says Yes. You get paperwork; customer signs paperwork. Then three days after the paperwork is submitted, the site survey comes back. "Subject: Construction required. Comments: A site survey was completed that determine there is a total construction cost of $71,972 for construction to bring service. Your organization can pay the contribution of $69,687 or we can amend the contract to 36 months and increase total MRC to $2,400." Mind you , that $2400 per month is for cable broadband - 150x10. This happens TOO often. It makes no sense to me at all.
There are new acronyms to know in Security. According to 451 Research, "Managed security services (MSS) is an emerging sector of the security and managed services market. As new security threats evolve, many organizations find they lack the expertise to protect against increasingly complex attacks and meet compliance requirements. Security is one of the IT functions that can be managed by a service provider." MSS providers are MSSPs. If the MSSP develops and delivers security technologies and services, it is a security service technology provider (SSTP). If the MSSP focuses on delivering security services, but does not develop their own technology, then these MSSPs are "pure play". There are also Hybrids that mix the two. Fun, right?
Businesses buy a lot of software. Office365, Google for Work, email and web hosting just being the start. CRM, UC, conferencing, digital marketing technology, Business Intelligence (BI), Virtualization, Data Storage and Database and ERP. 451 Research survey suggests that spending will be up for software in 2017.
"SAN-based Storage (67%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Arrays (59%) are currently the most widely used storage systems by companies, followed by Backup/Recovery Software and Disk Backup Appliances (44%)," according to 451 Research. "Respondents were asked which storage systems and related products, including upgrades/refreshes, they plan to purchase in 2017, and SAN-based Storage Arrays (48%) tops the list, followed by Third-party Cloud Storage Services (34%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Array (34%)."
This leads me to suggest that you ask your customers about software and storage. There is money to be made there and you are leaving it on the table.
There are 2.5 billion smartphones on the planet now, according to Ben Evans.
"China now has 656 million internet users. Brazil trails only the US in total Facebook, Twitter and YouTube users, and the country has more mobile devices than human inhabitants." [TCrunch]
Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are 3x the scale of WinTel. Not just giants in tech, but giants in the economy as well. More so than IBM or WinTel. [mobile is eating the world]
Machine learning and AI are getting exponentially better each year.
Facebook has between 15-20% of mobile time. And smartphone apps are 60% of all time spent online in USA.
With Amazon Alexa and Google Home (and other voice activated search), what does that do to your SEO or PPC campaigns?! POOF!
There are "nearly 3.8 billion internet users worldwide, almost 2.8 billion are active on social media." The most popular social networks "as of January 2017, based on global traffic figures for unique monthly visitors, shows: Facebook (with 1.1 billion), YouTube (with 1 billion), Twitter (with 310 million), LinkedIn (with 255 million), Pinterest (with 250 million) and Google+ (with 120 million)." [channel partners]
"Cisco and DHL, the world's largest logistics provider, estimated last year that $1.9 trillion dollars of economic value could be created by the use of IoT devices and asset tracking solutions in the global supply chain and logistics sector." [business insider]
NOAA has a new satellite "GOES-16 has four times the image resolution of the existing Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) fleet." See images here.
SIDE NOTE:
That said, people who blame increased connectivity for widening ideological divides misunderstand what's going on. The world is not getting worse, nor are our divisions deepening. We've always had these problems - it's just that connectivity is bringing them to light. Racism, xenophobia, bigotry and sexism have always been there, it's just that we can see them more clearly now. This unprecedented, radical form of transparency feels scary and dark, because it forces us to look long and hard into the corners. But that's also why connectivity is so important. Billions of people are starting to speak out, and that means we are no longer able to claim ignorance, and filter out the terrible things that have happened on the watch of good people in the past. Welcome to the world as it really is, and not the way the gatekeepers used to tell us it was. It's about time. [Future Crunch 30]]]>
NoJitter did a reader survey about Skype4B. Gary Kim has the break down HERE. "Of the 224 respondents that say they are using Skype for Business on-premises, 33 percent said they are using Enterprise Voice as a PBX replacement."
Office365 is taking the business market by storm - and S4B comes with it. How many will use it for a full PBX replacement? No one knows yet.
If they release a version of Sharepoint that resembles Slack, that penetration could go up. We will be back in the days of a Microsoft monopoly, which if you remember correctly sucked.
This includes ALL Microsoft packages, including Win10. Salesforce had 2016 Full Year Revenue of $6.67 Billion, up 24% Year-Over-Year. In fiscal 4Q16, Microsoft's cloud offerings - Microsoft's core cloud offerings: Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and Azure - grew to reach an annualized revenue run rate of $12.1 billion.
SRG's survey begs the question where are the competitors? Google for one is not on the list. There are a number of UC&C providers - and none of them made the list. It is all the big names in enterprise software - IBM, Oracle, SAP, Citrix, Adobe, Workday and NetSuite.
"As long as Microsoft can offer $5/month SharePoint and $8.25/month (per business user) Office 365 subscriptions, Microsoft will continue its dominance in the fast-growing online Collaboration software segment." And when I read that sentence, I realize why agents are selling SAAS. At $13.25 and 10 points, it is $1.32 per user per month - even with 100 users it is $132 per month. Yet you have to project manage a migration that is challenging even for the experts. Too much to go wrong for too little pay out. And if that is supplanting your data backup or even your conferencing revenue, why?
That is the dilemma facing cloud: the giants own the market; the channel can't wrap a business model around it yet; and the giants will take more of the pie.
]]>This is where Big Data is going: watching your every move and analyzing it. Dave and I don't see eye to eye on whether this will be used like a carrot or a stick. People don't quit companies or jobs; they quit their bosses. Listen in as we talk about his new startup and the implications.
If you can't see the podcast player, you can download the mp3 here.
]]>In this podcast, I sit down with Omar Paul, co-founder of Zilkr, a platform for communications APIs and SDK. In the Age of Integration, the Age of the API, UCaaS providers have to start building an ecosystem. When apps like Slack and WhatsApp are enabled for voice and video calls, UCaaS providers have to offer value and integration or be marginalized to sometimes used dial-tone.
CPaaS is hot. Twilio just IPO'ed. Nexmo was just acquired by Vonage. Apps like Uber, Slack and so many more are adding comms. But not from the VoIP provider, from the CPaaS platform provider.
If you can't see the podcast player above, you can download the mp3 or listen over at Soundcloud.
]]>In 2003, a business would have ACT! CRM installed on one computer. They probably ran Hosted Exchange from an MSP, but had MS Office with Outlook on most computers. They probably had a website and used ADP for payroll. And maybe they had a file server running either Novell or Windows NT.
ADP at one time said they were the first cloud application. Email was probably the first public cloud application that most people used. (There were others before that.) The website is on a public cloud. So there are 3 apps running in the public cloud arena.
The file server and ACT! are running in the local LAN - or what we call today servers in the data center, even if that data center is a closet. That is the private cloud. The MSP is running MS Exchange in his data center on his private cloud, sotospeak.
Today, SAAS like Salesforce and Microsoft Office365 are public cloud apps. The data center is now a colocation in a data center. The company might use AWS or S3 for file storage. Azure or Google Compute for storage or apps. The Hybrid Cloud scenario is more defined today and a little more complicated,e specially if you throw in some VPS or IAAS platform too. But the WAN today has to connect all of these parts and pieces into an efficient network. That is where you, the telecom expert, come in.
Where is the Upsell?
Just asking the questions will put you in a different light. But asking the questions let's you see the whole picture, not just the Internet pipe at 2 locations. You can add value (and upsell) if you see the whole picture.
Hybrid Cloud has been around for a while. The concept is not complicated. And after you map it out, it isn't that complex. Make it simple. That is where the money is.
]]>Did you see that Apple had a revenue problem? Not as many iPhones are selling. "Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) says the mobile wave, which is split between mobile phones (voice/SMS) and smartphones, is coming to an end, and the next obvious market for growth is cars." Ben's blog is here and the slide deck is here.
The Autonomous car has big investment from everyone from GM to Apple to Google to Tesla to hundreds of other companies. It is where we are heading. (It is just another robot!)
Robotics. Global investment in robotics doubled from 2014 to 2015 to almost $600M, according to Financial Times. Robotics is going to replace a ton of workers.
Life Science (or biotech) is still healthy. From cancer treatments to testing, investment in this sector is still good, largely because R&D spending at Big Pharma has shrunk in total dollars due to consolidation. Also, Big Pharma drug pipelines are lean; they tend to buy new drugs, treatments and tests these days.
The ancillary to this is the IoT Healthcare sector which saw a rise of 20% in 2015 investment, according to CB Insights. One problem being faced is clinical efficiency, which is tracking treatments to boost the effectiveness of healthcare providers as well as to improve the delivery of healthcare in hospitals and clinics via connected devices/objects. That takes us into wearables, ingestables, brain sensors, home monitoring and more. A lot of cool stuff in this space, especially happening here in Tampa Bay.
In Colorado and California, cannabis startups are the rage. Legal marijuana sales are tracking at 3x Coke's bottle water sales.
Education technology is also seeing investment, but our education system sucks, so I am ignoring it for now.
CHATBOTS, PERSONAL ASSISTANT and Other forms of AI
Matt Swanson, Paula Bernier and others think that "chatbots will cause a near-term disruption in how businesses interact with consumers, and a long-term paradigm shift in how people interact with machines." See Matt's article on VB.
Paula writes about Facebook, chatbots and customer service here. Thomas Howe wrote, "As alternatives to websites and to mobile apps, Chat bots, digital assistants and intelligent agents are the quick and efficient way to connect your employees and customers to your business." Companies like BizTexter and KISST are already shipping services (and they did it before Facebook!)
Financial Technology is looking good. When there is a best of list of conferences for a sector, you know there is money there. The Fintech startup scene, according to CB Insights, has been healthy for a while. Pretty much the way Craigslist sucked a lot of revenue out of newspapers, banking startups will suck some profitable lines of business from Wells Fargo and other large banks. Hopefully.
BTW, Payments startups saw a shift in the last two quarters. Digital wallets like Apple Pay are here. Investments will slow as winners start to emerge (like in the ride sharing space).
SIDE NOTE:
Latency Arbitrage is why latency matters to anyone in financial. Listen to why. ]]>From James Altucher: "Automation is eating the world. Every time a line of software is written, a job is lost." VR, 3D printing, AI and robotics will make us all unemployed soon. what then?
Sports Authority is closing all its stores. Macy's, Sears, K-Mart and B&N have been closing stores for a couple of years now. Retail - even luxury retail - is declining. Not all of it is online shopping. In the future, what do malls look like? Basically entertainment and food courts.
Dollar stores are taking share away from even Wal-Mart.
The rise of the minimum wage is supposedly a problem for business owners, but all of the complainers have cash stockpiled and executive pay has flourished. Hmmmm... The amount of money available to keep the economy spinning is lagging.
We have an economy that runs on two elements: service (consumer spending) and technology/The Internet. [Good read here by Dixon on the Internet Economy]
As most businesses and consumers consume the Internet, the number of subscription services we pay for is increasing. Our monthly spends are going up with our bandwidth consumption.
The number of contractors or freelancers has increased to more than 35% in the US. As that keeps increasing imagine what happens to annual income, stability, savings, retirement...
I will just leave it there.
Research on the brain is cool. What words do to your brain HERE.
Two things that people talk about are ecosystems and blockchains. These are two systems that investors look for in startups.
"Consumers don't hate advertising; they dislike how the advertising is distributed." "According to an April 2016 report by Accenture, 84% of digital consumers complain that advertising too frequently interrupts their content consumption, 40% plan to remove these interruptions either via paid subscription or ad blocking software in the next twelve months." from mynfo, a Tampa startup that just closed $6.8 million in Series A financing!
Most business models - newspapers, magazines, car companies, schools, VARs - have not changed much in the last 20 years. So as change comes (not IF, but WHEN that change comes) it will disrupt most of the players.
Rovi Buys TiVo in $1.1 Billion Deal. Is Roku next?
Verizon's brand is taking big hits due to 3 things: (1) the strike; (2) vandalism of systems creating big outages; and (3) Frontier taking over a large chunk of FiOS customers. Frontier's take over was a cluster, like every other take over has been. What shocked me the most is how few people outside the industry actually knew that Verizon had sold off its assets to Frontier. Even fewer knew that Bright House was being bought by Charter. Telecom is at the very bottom of what people think about.
Already seeing UC providers moving away from Polycom since the merger announcement with Mitel. Fuze/thinkingphones went with Yealink. Birch is hollering about Panasonic. A few smaller players are testing out Grandstream. The move away from Polycom has started. Add in a move to softphones and mobile apps and what is MITEL buying?
Sangoma launched a line of phones for FreePBX and its newly launched PBXact UC, a premise based UC&C appliance.
"I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does." [The author is talking about Venezula] "Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again." <- sound familiar?
]]>Slack has video and voice. Snapchat does too. WhatsApp - also owned by Facebook - does too. Office365 does. Apple has Facetime. There isn't anywhere that you can go to get away from voice or video calls.
This means more avenues for ads, robocalls, annoyance and loss of productivity. All of this was supposed to make it easier. (I hope it all comes with a DND (do not disturb) button that is easily found.)
A bunch of UCaaS players are rushing to catch up to Slack by adding threaded group messages, containers and the like to UC&C Presence and IM apps. Here's the problem: I have too many ways for people to contact me!
If I thought I was tethered before (because of a smartphone), now it is far worse.
And the inbox is now inboxes!!! Not just Outlook and Gmail, but Messenger, Slack, twitter, SMS/text. Where did that address or request go? What inbox is carrying that thread?
I not only have too many interruption points, I have too many inboxes. This stuff isn't getting simpler. It is getting more complicated.
Can you imagine discovery during a trial? I need his snapchat, facebook, twitter, gmail, outlook, messenger, office365, skype history, inbox and calls. How long would it take to gather all of that?
Gary Kim writes that telecom is a commodity like sugar. The Next Gen Network isn't a carrier network; it is the Internet. Everything rides over that now. Not the best solution for a reliable, secure network.
With Hosted PBX revenue at around $9 Billion globally (via Gary Kim), then it isn't growing but contracting.
Free P2P voice is taking over where cell phone minutes had ruined the landline business. Texts, email, chat and social media are replacing voice calls. [Even in dating, a form of sales, there is no way to call anyone through a dating app despite technology that could provide for it.
Chat is replacing text. Minutes are declining. Where will the revenue come from?
As they spend CAPEX to build fiber to the premise and to the tower, dropping $40K on a fiber build is not uncommon, how do they get the revenue back? The ROI is long. The ARPU is flat. The only thing changing are the fees. They keep adding more and increasing them. The fee should just be called Margin or Profit.
No idea where this is going, but it isn't getting simpler. The way to interrupt someone is too pervasive. When employees are already working longer hours, distraction avenues have increased. Would be nice if it got simpler.
]]>I wonder if Polycom saw the writing on the wall that the battle is going to come down to Microsoft versus Cisco? Motley Fool thinks that is why the OTT ITSP 3Some - 8x8, RC and Vonage - all had a bad day at the stock market. That would be funny, since who pays that close attention to the space? Not even analysts in the space really pay that close attention to detail.
Certainly, Skype for Business gets a lot of press. SfB is the Donald Trump of UC&C. But that doesn't mean that the OTT ITSP 3Some is going away - or won't add 20% revenue next quarter. There are other candidates for a company to use for UC&C, phones and dial-tone.
With the new Windows 10 update came a pin called PHONE on my laptop. So maybe there IS something to worry about.
The MS Connectors and Groups seems like MS is taking cues from Slack, even though SfB is integrated with Slack.
When the Fool says this: "RingCentral and friends are now facing challenges from Microsoft and many other titan-sized technology experts. The proof is in the pudding, and these VoIP experts must continue to show that they can deliver healthy business results in head-to-head competition with true giants." It makes me wonder if the Fool knows that the Giants ARE in VoIP -- Comcast, AT&T, Verizon. I mean, VZ has Cisco HCS, VCE, Broadsoft - and after buying XO will have more Broadsoft plus Genband.
Granted, no one is putting on seats as fast as SfB or Slack. And that, I think, is why the analysts are crying. In ten years of VoIP, it just hasn't crushed it yet.
I don't know if the analysts have looked, but customer acquisition is expensive - and hard - in VoIP. Far easier to include Lync with Office and Email than to try to sell it. Remember how MS included a shitty browser for free on the desktop? Or how they gave away Sharepoint?
VoIP Providers have to pay salespeople, build a channel, give away phones (and other hardware), SPIFFs, free months of service, just to get a customer. The cost of that acquisition is being questioned apparently on the stock market. OR it may all be a fluke and stock speculation going awry.
Either way, it doesn't shake the fact that the cost of acquisition is similar to cellular right now. The cellcos are buying customers for over $650 each!!! Imagine that!! The Street always watches the wrong numbers.
Meanwhile, in the handset market, Polycom probably peaked in market share at 38%. Yealink and many others are running into the space --- at the same time that many seats are being deployed without a handset! Softphones, mobile apps and even bluetooth headsets are taking market share from the handsets. Not just Polycom, but all of them!
This merger announcement was not taken well by many SPs. Fuze (formerly known as ThinkingPhones) has already announced inter-op with Yealink. A few others I spoke with are looking at Grandstream, Obihai and others -- because MITEL competes with them!
Now Windstream, AT&T and Verizon may not care with phone, because they sell MITEL and Avaya also. The rest of the players are tired of competing against their vendors! (BSFT should hear that last comment again and again!)
It wasn't even a good deal for Polycom. "The transaction will comprise $447 million in cash (23%) and $1.51 billion in stock (77%) and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Mitel doubles in size--reaching revenue of $2.5 billion (2015 pro forma)--paying a relatively underwhelming 1.2 times trailing revenue (EV of $1.5 billion) and 7.3 times trailing EBITDA for a videoconferencing vendor," writes William Blair of Equity Research.
Also, Polycom's relationship with Microsoft for video was supposed to help Polycom's video business, especially for video enabled phones. I could see Microsoft relenting and using there own version of WebRTC to do video and calls inside Lync/SfB in the near future.
MITEL probably should have bought SLACK! By the time it closes this deal, Polycom won't be worth as much as it is now (diminishing returns).
There is a brave new world here. It is ruled by mobile apps - Facebook, Instagram. Snapchat, WhatsApp, twitter, Slack and others. (3 of those are owned by FB!) We know in the consumer play, FB has plans to be a trojan horse in payments and transactions. However, who takes the business desktop? So far it is Office365.
Cisco just launched Spark. It's integration with Salesforce is a highlight, but its ability to integrate with many other apps is why the folks at 170 West Tasman Dr. in San Jose think they will get some market share back. They are counting on Spark working well, the channel embracing it and the Cisco ecosystem still being valuable.
Customers buy ecosystem for integration, ease of use and sameness of GUI for the employees who utilize this stuff. Ultimately, BPaaS is where Spark is heading, with everything happening inside of Spark instead of a number of windows.
That is the one thing that MS and Cisco have: a certified channel that drinks the kool-aid. And these 2 companies are already ingrained in the Fortune 5000.
This space keeps getting interesting. The market thinks that MS/Cisco won already. You could say that Polycom cashing out admits defeat -- or the investors wanted the cash. Makes it harder for the ITSP market.
]]>The ecosystem is the environment around software like Apple, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. It stretches pretty far and runs up and down the stack. It isn't just horizontal; it is vertical too. It makes the company pervasive in your life.
The brand of the iPhone became a status symbol, ease of use, security, luxury, and becoming part of the clique - the Apple/Mac/iOS clique. (I am often told I don't get it because I am an Android/PC guy).
The iPhone, and then the Samsung line of phones, is now the promise of a digital leash. Anyone can contact you, any number of ways at any time - voice (rarely); text; messaging on Kik, FB, whatsApp (encrypted); Snapped at; tweeted at; DM'ed; and on and on.
Due to ubiquitous cellular networks and not quite ubiquitous wi-fi, we can look anything up; research and buy; and even pay with this little device. This little device that people would not give up despite the growing expense - monetary, health, privacy.
Now ... that same consumer is being asked to buy a desk phone to go along with your state of the art unified communications platform. How silly is that?
They have a phablet in their pocket that has more computing power and more applications that the IBM 3033 mainframe I used in college at RPI by a thousand-fold. Yet you want them to still use a desk phone like it was 1999? The whole idea behind cloud is flexibility, mobility, scale and productivity.
The beauty behind the iOS app is that it looks similar across devices - laptop, tablet, phone.
Users are not adopting UCaaS deep enough or broadly enough to be sticky. Partly because UCaaS means that they have to Change (and people hate change). Party they haven't been trained. Partly the story they have been told sounds awful.
Along comes UC-One revision 21 on Broadsoft, now there is a softphone and mobile client that is similar across devices. Now you ease of use, elegant design, a Slack-like interface and functionality across devices. It has presence, chat, video and voice calling, click to call, drag to conference, integration with Office365, universal address book - all in the app.
There is no need for a desk phone. This will run on your PC, laptop, tablet and phone. Up and running as soon as we port the number.
As slick as it is, only DSCI, soon to be a TelePacific company, is running revision 21 in the USA. This isn't BroadCloud; this runs on DSCI gear.
It has been awhile since I have seen UC-One. It looks like this could help make the desk phone obsolete.
The funny thing is that there is a PR firm emailing me press releases about new handset manufacturers entering the market (Yeastar being one of them). Polycom has likely peaked on the number of handsets that they will sell (or has one year left to peak), since Yeastar, Yealink, Grandstream, OBihai, snom and others are aiming to pick away at the desk phone and location phone market. Jabra is attacking at the speakerphone sector. The DECT and cordless phone sector needs help; it is limping along on dialysis because it needs an infusion of models that work with longer battery life.
For companies with employees who are mobile, virtual, in sales or knowledge workers, which is about 25% of them, a desk phone is a waste of money. Here in lies the softphone problem. ITSPs spend far too much time on the phone debate - how much, lease/buy, RMA. Why?
Probably for the 75% who still want a handset.
Mast Mobile combined an MVNO with a UC company. Cool idea, but the story and go-to-market are lagging. There is also the matter of most everyone has a cell phone right now.
Things are changing. We get caught in the trap of This is how things are done. We always sold it this way. Once we can learn to shift out of that comfortable rut, things will improve.
One reminder: you are not a handset distributor. You are not selling a phone system. You are providing a platform for communications in 2016 that allows for productivity and efficiency. If you don't believe that just go sell bandwidth.
]]>Have not heard this brand in a while: BROCADE. Where have they been? I guess they needed to make some noise, so they are buying Ruckus Wireless for $1.2 Billion. "Brocade now has the ability to offer expanded Wi-Fi services to its customers, and given that Brocade is a fairly major name in networking, having that extra service to offer should be regarded as a value point." Managed wi-fi is a big money maker for Brocade competitors Cisco and ADTRAN.
Good read about Apple becoming a services company. IBM and GE learned this years ago: You can't be a consumer products company, I guess (unless you are P&G). All about the M-R-R, but more about creating an ecosystem to compete with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Despite being acquired themselves, Ingram Micro is still buying companies. Following the NETXUSA buy, Ingram is now snatching up ENSIM. This will boost its cloud applications business that rides on Parallels, a company they at first invested in, then acquired. And cloud apps is where the new money is.
One regional acquisition today, 2 CLECs I know well got married:
Hunt Telecommunications, LLC, a regional fiber optic and cloud services provider, and Nexus Systems, a regional integrated communications provider, are pleased to announce a definitive agreement to merge companies. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2016. Both boards have approved the agreements. Now just waiting on regulatory approvals.
This merger creates a significant provider of core communications infrastructure services in the state of Louisiana. These services include fiber to the business, IP connectivity, next generation voice services, colocation and cloud services provided to leading businesses, schools, government agencies, and carriers in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf Coast.
]]>No one makes voice calls any more. It is all text and chat. These simple communications have been enhanced to include peer-to-peer video calls in the same vein as Facetime and Skype. WebRTC has allowed WhatsApp and Facebook to add calling features to their messaging apps, pulling even more minutes from carriers. (Most of this revenue is now in mobile data buckets, which means just 2 carriers get most of the money.)
The real disruption in business communications, the last bastion of good revenue for carriers, is being done by non-telcos. Twilio is just one example of elastic communications from a non-telco. The bigger news was the Slack-Skype integration.
I saw a list of forward thinkers of VoIP and it was a list of CEOs. Only one company on that list is making any noise at all. The rest are just staying the course, while the course is changing around them.
If comms is all about mobile, shouldn't the forward thinkers being making a dent in mobile, SMS, chat, IM, presence?
Video, security, analytics, APIs - see the lies of Highfive, Redbooth, Ringio, RogerVoice and Sinch - are the key components to be adding to the standard UC product offering.
In CIO magazine, "Given the cost and complexity of implementing UC&C .... When making those decisions, CIOs and other IT leaders listed these factors as the most important when selecting a UC&C vendor:"
Nice infographic about the CIO UC&C study.
Reviewing those 4 factors, forward thinkers would be looking at encrypted chat, better deployment, improved user and admin portals, and APIs / integration.
There are apps that you can add to your offering for encrypted chat, like Wickr or Signal or OpenFire server or Pidgin. For API, you could utilize a service like Zapier to help your users mashup tasks for productivity.
Or on the small business side, the rise of Personal Assistant apps in the past two years along with the tsunami of information, means that a better unified inbox, search, curation, prioritization are all things that users are looking for.
Have you looked at Cloze, billed as a relationship management software that "keeps track of your email, phone calls, meetings, documents, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. And everything from dozens of other services." Unified messaging beyond just the concept.
I'm not saying if you have to do this stuff, but I am saying that you should be trying new stuff. New ways to deploy, to remove friction in the sales side or the implement side or the admin track. Analytics to the call logs. Endpoint management. Business Process Improvement. Security for no other reason than terms like HIPAA, PCI and Sox. Encryption of data at rest whether that is call recordings, vociemail, faxes to enable peace of mind for the HIPAA/HITECH admins. (Rackspace has a way to encrypt databases here.)
Otherwise you will be selling cheap voice against a real disruptor.
Another reason to add something to your product offering is to have an upsell opportunity with your current clients to make them stickier, more productive and add some ARPU.
]]>"The hospitality industry today is filled with new and emerging options." AirBnB, VRBO and other sites are changing the landscape. Ubiquitous broadband coupled with smartphones and easy to make websites means that every industry gets disrupted.
Price is transparent. Mega-search sites are driving prices down. Consumers have choices -- more than ever before. And frequent travelers want experiences, not hotel rooms with a view. Disruption.
And when an industry gets disrupted, it just looks for scale. Not innovation, scale. Get bigger. Wrong answer, but whatever.
Telecom is already getting disrupted by apps like messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. WebRTC is going to disrupt it some more. It doesn't look like it did in 2000. Everything is device driven right now. It was always telco-driven before.
As we discussed on a recent podcast and ITEXPO session, you need an open source mentality. You have to be a Net-Head, not a Bell-Head.
]]>WAN as a Service seems to be popping up as the next synonym for dynamic bandwidth or SDN (software defined network). It is the name for SD-WAN or the replacement for MPLS. It seems WAN optimization software wasn't taking hold, so we jumped over it.
Where we are now is the point where the plumbers of the bandwidth pipe - cablecos, ILECs, L3 Zayo and Cogent - have to come up with a way to be more than a dumb pipe provider. They tried going up the OSI stack, but new-comers seem to be beating them. So it was back to marketing the Layer 1-3 better. Hence, WAN as a service.
The cablecos are long on Ethernet. Big, cheap pipes are the answer to what ails a business. Even Cogent believes that. We'll see.
On the upper layer of the OSI stack, lies the other side of as a service world. SAAS, UCaaS, DaaS -- but all of that is really just product sets. We took software from a disc to a container in the data center. We called it cloud services and offered it as a monthly charge. The only thing that changed was the delivery and the payment method.
Sure, you can access that app from anywhere you have a connection but more was needed.
The Key System was replaced by a Hosted PBX solution. But really what changed? Not much.
The whole idea of cloud was to change the way businesses did business. Enterprise class software and comms platforms were available to any business to look, feel and work like an Enterprise. Did we leverage that? Not yet.
The next wave - Cloud 2.0 if you will - will be about outcomes. It will be about BPI - business process improvement.
I am already seeing mission statements that read like this: "Bring technology solutions that deliver positive business outcomes in areas of sales, service, and operations efficiency." That is the promise of cloud. The deployment, delivery and implementation of these solutions have been less than stellar -- and may be a factor into the lack of penetration in the marketplace.
My readers have heard me evangelize about outcomes, integration and BPI for a while. The industry is starting to see that is where the money is. We will see how that works out.
Business-Process-as-a-Service - you heard it here first.
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