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.
]]>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.
"Business process integration and social media communications have become the primary focus of enterprises. Companies seek low-cost solutions, such as BYOD and web real-time communications (WebRTC) to deploy UC&C solutions." BPI or BPaaS - it isn't stand alone products. It will be an integrated platform to run business process that happen to include comms. (At least at the enterprise level)
And of course the growth guess: "Global unified communication and collaboration market expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% from 2016-2020," says a report by Technavio.
The news seems to miss that the different sectors of the marketplace are migrating from legacy for different reasons - like cheap dial-tone replacement, simul ring, etc.
The market is buzzing with Skype Integration news from RingCentral, MegaPath, BitTitan, even Yealink and others.
Master agencies are seeing a way to grab the attention of Cisco partners. First, AVANT teamed with Cisco to accelerate sales for Cisco Powered Providers.
Next, MicroCorp amped up its "relationship with IntelePeer, in order that certified Cisco partners can earn monthly recurring commissions on voice services for those selling the Spark and Meraki MC platforms." Cisco wants partners to get used to selling cloud and voice, because Spark, ya know.
RingCentral teamed up with Google for Work to chase enterprise. Having also integrated with Skype, RC is hedging bets or wants to be all things to all people, which never works.
Windstream, after showcasing Mitel and Avaya, teams with BroadSoft to bring customized Virtual PBX to the hospitality market. So WIND has Mitel, Avaya, BSFT, Allworx and Metaswitch. Yeah, that is cost effective.
As if there weren't a large number of service providers in the space of UC&C - from Fuze, RC, the Cloud Comm Alliance members to the LECs to the other numerous ITSPs. Now softswitch vendors have decided to become service providers, too. Broadsoft BroadCloud; GenBand Nuvia; Alianza Cloud Voice Platform; and Metaswitch MetaSphere Cloud Services are all competing with their customers and making it easier for new entrants into the already bloody ocean of Hosted VoIP. (Now even enterprises can be an ITSP).
Not to be left now. Cisco and Microsoft have jumped into the fray to compete for UC&C customers with Spark, HCS, Office365+Skype4B. The PBX vendors like NEC, Unify, Avaya and Mitel are in the mix and feeling the pinch to have a cloud component. Not only a cloud component but contact center too. Oh, how complex we must make it.
Everyone is pushing up-market, but Cisco recently did a study on small businesses. The study found "on the IT front, a majority of small companies (86 percent) are considering the use of cloud-based unified communications (UC) systems as a possible solution to their communications needs, replacing their more traditional premises-based counterparts."
Yealink has phones for Skype4B. One of the reasons that you see Jabra, Plantronics and Sennheiser at VoIP shows is because bluetooth headsets are becoming common in the call center space and more UC&C users are choosing to dispatch the deskphone.
"Yet unified communications as a packaged service, despite its relative maturity, remains far less than universally adopted, particularly outside of larger enterprise accounts. A recent survey of more than 400 enterprise and SMB IT decision-makers, performed by UBM Tech for XO Communications, found that only one-third of organizations had fully embraced UC. On the other side of the spectrum, a separate survey performed by Osterman Research for ConnectSolutions found that about as many IT decision-makers (26 percent) and business deci-sion makers (39 percent) are either "somewhat" or "very fearful" of migrating to UC. Nearly half of those surveyed admitted that they don't fully understand the full impact UC would have on their organizations. These fears and trepidations come despite the fact that 71 percent of those surveyed by Osterman believe there are "significant" or even "enormous" benefits that can be realized from the deployment of UC." This is a part of a nice piece that Martin Vilaboy at Channel Vision magazine wrote on UCaaS demand and adoption.
The role of SD-WAN in UCaaS HERE.
Good read on Churn from a former BSFT exec on LINKEDIN.
A look at UCaaS service delivery by AVNET.
]]>The Telecom Channel Partner Long Tail. 95/5 off-setting Pareto's Principle of 80/20. However, effort and real dollars are spent on the unproductive 95%. That is money and energy that could go into producing partners or marketing.
I talk about what an Aligned Partner is in my Channel Playbook.
In 2006, Alec Saunders and Chris Wood had a discussion about the Voice Long Tail (see here and pdf). To me, 10 years later it has played out as written. 80% of the money and voice lines are still either Centrex, POTS, POTS replacement or SIP trunks of some kind. It may be even more than 80%. Windstream has 1 million SIP trunks off its Broadsoft and XO has 2 million. Add in the voice lines from cablecos which are generally SIP trunks or some VOIP POTS replacement. The Hosted PBX, UCaaS, UC&C and whatever we call it next amounts to 20% of the sales (that is an estimate). It probably is more dollars per sale by far.
Where would gaming VoIP put us? Where does in-app video and voice calls put us?
The thing that is just catching up is that for it to be more than POTS replacement it has to be specific and useful to the user who is going to make a change. Slack and Skype4B are examples. 8x8 with its Allstate integration is a niche app. We need more of those.
We need more turn-key packages like Slack-CRM-WebRTC-Gmail-Zendesk-Mailchimp in a single window. [What I like to call Business Process as a Service.] Cisco is trying with Spark. But for the vast majority of small businesses under 99 employees, they would need a package that was turn key, easy to use and specific for their industry. Niche. Vertical. We aren't there yet.
]]>UC&C transitions closer to Workflow platform as task management is added to the UC&C system from Cisco:
Channel Vision magazine reports, "Redbooth has announced an integration with Cisco Spark to unite task-centric Redbooth workspaces and communications-centric Cisco Spark rooms. Through this integration, users can now work simultaneously in both Redbooth and Cisco Spark to seamlessly communicate and collaborate."
The premise of Spark is that it will be so integrated with the software that an enterprise uses that a user will only have to work in the Spark window all day instead of bouncing between browser tabs or application windows.
Velocloud is now powering Mettel's SD-WAN solution. It is going to be huge for CLECs and channel partners. Not just powering MPLS, but offering a layer of network management, security and continuity to the new network environment that is a mixed bag of DIA, MPLS, and broadband trying to connect to SaaS, AWS, data centers and offices. It deployed correctly, SD-WAN could be the competitive edge that CLECs and OTT cloud service providers need.
In the network space, NITEL has a database to view "Over 500,000 fiber-lit, CLEC buildings" due to its "Partnerships with over 130 providers to provide network agnostic last-mile access". Having a fiber lit building list is good IF it was used for prospecting but it isn't. It is mainly used to determine install times or what carrier to quote. CLECs are starting to publish their LIT building lists. TWC, too. You would think they would want that data available in as many places as possible to sell deeper into LIT premises. Not hidden behind a subscription service like NEF or Geo-Tel. Veterans in telecom would rather have a LIT building than manage a fiber construction project that can take 6 months or more.
NITEL hired a new channel chief too. Congrats Michael Masini.
Charter is retiring the Time Warner Cable Brand. It confused people - TWC, twtc, Time-Warner. Now it will all be New Charter. "Charter will continue to be led by Tom Rutledge, serving as chairman, president and CEO. Charter's board will have 13 directors, including seven independent directors, two designated by Bright House's owner Advance/Newhouse, and three designated by Liberty Broadband (including John Malone and Greg Maffei)."
Congressional IT desk warns representatives of ransomware threats - and bans Yahoo Mail from Congress. How will these Congress Critters get mail now? Oh, right - AOL.
The LinkedIn password breach was 117 million records, according to ARS. Have you changed your password recently?
Fitbit acquires "wearable payment assets" from startup Coin, from ARS.
TelePacific Communcations receives the Women in the Channel's first ever Platinum Sponsorship Award 2016. TelePacific is a sponsor of TCA since its founding as well as a sponsor of WIC since its inception too. (Thanks, TPAC!)
Congrats to CRN Women of the Channel friends of mine: Karin Fields and Trish Kapos of master agency Microcorp; Hilary Gadda of TelePacific; Caitlin Clark-Zigmond at CoreDial; Brittani Von Roden of VAR Dynamics/CloudPlus; and to the rest of the winners as well!
In broadband, the cable modem is beating anything telco. Cable is winning 1M to 11k net new adds in 1Q16.
AT&T will be laying off between 50K and 80K workers in the next 5 years. It is trying to retrain some. AT&T will follow VZ into the OTT video arena. AT&T purchased Quickplay before launching its DIRECTV streaming service, according to Telecompetitor.
That's a wrap.
]]>One is to package your product the way we have traditional sold it. That is to say, on-premise PBX (like Sangoma, Fonality, Digium, S2S) as the made ingredient coupled with SIP trunks and some "cloud" elements. Another version of this is to offer Key System Emulation (KSE), which is an awful way to provide hosted VoIP. No one will be happy. Paging, door buzzers and other gotchas will result in a loss of money and a pissed off customer.
The other way is to go all in with UC&C. Integration, contact center, analytics, portal, softphones, collab -- and have a good case study on how you deploy it and for whom you deploy it well.
The final away is to pivot to verticals. Integrate your communications platforms with vertical software systems, like dental office practice management or legal practice and case management software.
RingCentral just added Zapier to its list of integrations. The communications platform that was formerly known as Prince, I mean, Hosted PBX that became UCaaS, is slowly become a communications platform for work flow.
Why Zapier? Zapier takes some of the scripting away. It is pre-written code to use to add functions with a zap! There are other platforms like Zapier (like elastic.io, IFTTT and cloudwork.) These services utilize an open API on your comms platform to leverage APIs on many other software applications in order to help data flow and be efficient.
All About the API, a conference in Vegas in July to showcase the transition from Hosted PBX to enterprise comms platforms and how they are changing how businesses do business (like in tele-health, IoT and more!) Visit All About the API website for details.
By the way, real reasons people aren't buying your stuff? "Real reasons: My boss won't let me, I don't trust you, I'm afraid of change." Seth Godin.
]]>A pretty good primer on SDN from BI in 2012!
Charter Bid Approved! Only condition, NewCharterCo can't have data caps for 7 years. Big deal. In many markets they are the sole broadband provider. $$$.
In a time when storage is practically free, Microsoft sends me a not: On July 27, 2016, the amount of storage that comes with Microsoft OneDrive will change from 15 GB to 5 GB.
the Digital Divide
A new report about Western Mass's fiber fiasco sheds light on the national failure to provide high-speed digital access to rural America. The Digital Divide is still a fight. Despite AT&T, Comcast and Google Fiber thumping their chests about Gigabit, it is available in just pockets of America. AT&T is offering $5 internet to low-income families at 3 MB, which is DSL speed. And if I am not mistaken was part of their merger conditions for AT&T-SBC. Verizon keeps raising the price of DSL. Comcast, other cablecos, satellite providers and fixed wireless ISPs have data caps, which customer hate. And that is in urban markets too.
M and A
X5 Solutions, a portfolio company of NewSpring Capital, rolled up three telecom companies - NovaTel Ltd. Inc., CornerStone Telephone Company LLC and Richmond Telephone Company. [press release]
Consolidated Communications, an ILEC formerly known as SureWest, buys another one the Illinois-based Champaign Telephone Company. This deal adds 275 fiber route miles, 310 lit buildings, and 1,500 business customers.
Allied Fiber burned through $93 million in money to make $50K and was forced to file bankruptcy by its primary lien holder. [My tweet has all 3 links - Rich Tehrani's post, the Ramblings story and the BK filing.]
All About the API
July 18-21 in Vegas, the first ever All about the API conference in being held. Join Dialogic, Teli, Vidyo and others to learn more about the API and the business around it.
]]>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.
]]>SD-WAN is a better term than SDN (software defined network) and dynamic bandwidth is a better way to talk about it to your customers.
The data center is a pivotal part of any network - VoIP, Enterprise or Service Provider. Improvements to the data center are coming from NFV, SDN and companies like Fiber Mountain and Rackspace.
After the acquisition and absorption of FreePBX, Sangoma looks a lot like Digium. The two had booths next to each other and the similarities were startling.
You knew you were in the ITEXPO hall by all of the desk phones on display. (The room lacking the phones was the IOT expo.)
In my open source panel discussion, one comment that I liked was that the Bell-Heads are retiring (finally), hence why open source is being adopted.
I don't know if anyone else noticed, but many people that were in telecom have fled. Quite a few went to cloud providers, but a good number have left the industry altogether.
One discussion at the dinner Monday night centered on the sudden drop in demand for desk phones when selling UCaaS. Seems folks would rather have a Plantronics bluetooth headset and the softphones. Also, users want to be able to turn up the UC fast, which CAN be done with apps/softphones, and not with desk phones (or number porting).
From the API panel, a few points were made. (1) The value in Business Process Improvement (BPI) is in the removal of friction. Remove friction from sales, from paperwork, from data entry, from support, from implementation. (2) The API lets the information (data) be free. (3) The biggest companies have ecosystems powered by APIs - Google, Apple, Amazon, Salesforce.
Back in the day, the Holy Grail for contact center was single call resolution, which was almost impossible because of organizational silos, walled gardens of data and software project management. Today, those obstacles are slowly disappearing.
Customer Experience will be the chief differentiation. If 420 carriers are selling BSFT, the one that provides the best CX or UX will win. (No one stands out yet).
Hotels and convention centers have to get better at wi-fi.
Trade shows are still the best way to meet people face to face which is still the foundation for relationships, an element required for sales.
]]>Broadsoft has 400+ customers worldwide and you would think it just have 4 in the US. Windstream and XO getting props for 1 and 2 million SIP trunks respectively. (Comcast probably has more SIP trunks than the 2 combined). BSFT bends over backwards for Verizon and its VCE offering. Vonage just got a seat at BSFT, which really ticked off all the other customers who have been flying the BSFT flag for a lot longer.
Needlless to say, the big boys lean on BSFT for the whole bundle, which means that they have no IP (intellectual property) in the game and it comes down to (a) who gets in front of the customer first; and then (b) price.
Where will CLECs fit in the new world order?
Fone.do, Switch.co, Panterra and a few others have tried to do some innovative things with the Hosted PBX. Not enough marketing budget to get through all the noise though. Also, the channel partners really don't want to SELL Hosted PBX; they want to take orders for dial-tone replacement. It is a problem.
Microsoft Office365 with Lync/Skype for Business has really sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for Hosted PBX/UCaaS players. Lots of media. Fastest product ever for MS. It was cheap, then cheaper. It has even muffled any talk from Cisco about Spark or Google. It is crazy.
Now it just got crazier. You can now make Skype voice and video calls from Slack. Skype added the feature officially (see here).
I mentioned that Slack needed this. Can't believe MS got their first. I thought BSFT was an engineering firm?
I have also mentioned numerous times that it will be the integration that will be the difference maker -- moreso than price.
In fact, I have 2 panels at ITEXPO on the Age of the API and Business process as a Service. And the ITEXPO West has been replaced with "All About the API Conf"
Businesses buy Outcomes. That's why SAAS will transform to Business Functionality as a service instead. Who will get there first?
As everyone looks to go up market to mid-market or enterprise or whatever you call 250+ seats these days, it gets crowded. Thinking Phones just announced they hit 1000 customers and that their latest contracts are all for 1000+ seats. That seems great, except that West lost a huge contract last year - $15 million UC&C customer - who decided to go single source. That single source was likely Microsoft or Cisco. That vendor was likely Verizon, AT&T or Dimension Data/NTT.
I hear talk of global all the time. From Masergy, Aryaka and others, that they have a global network ready for the Global Fortune 5000 firms. Yeah,how many of them are going to waive their MARCON contracts with BT, AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica or Telstra? How many are going to give up their Office365 installment? There are only 5000 in that group. They make for nice whales, but watch out you aren't hunting Moby Dick in a row boat.
The market is getting carved out. The UCaaS players need to carve out a niche that they can excel at and own it. Going head to head in the 50-500 seat space with the same product as everyone else is not going to be pretty.
To the consumer, UCaaS and Hosted PBX isn't about the softswitch. They don't care about the technology. They care that it works. That it is implemented properly without disruption to their business. They want efficiency and productivity, which is why Slack and O365 and Skype in all its forms is adopted and used. That is important: adoption and use. RC tracks usage, because if you don't ever log in, you will turf.
Back to the CLECs. They made their money in the real SMB space. They still can if they could forget about competing head-to-head with their vendors (the Duopoly) and launch a few product bundles that are theirs exclusively. Until then, it is a declining future.
You can ignore this as the rant of a cynic, but Slack has 2 million daily users and growing after less than 2 years from launch. Integrated with MS already. Office 365 has nearly 50 million monthly active users, according to BI. If they all get voice enabled by MS, where does that leave you?
Where does that a channel partner selling dial-tone replacement? OUCH!
BTW, Skype celebrates 2 trillion minutes of video with mobile group video calling.
SIDE NOTE:
Both Zane Long and Michael Sterl have left Vonage Business, where they were leading the channel sales division.
CallTower, a UC provider that sells a Lync integration service, is merging with SoundConnect.
]]>The move to the cloud is about being agile and competitive. Good things. However, it doesn't happen in silos.
Gartner writes, "Organizations are undergoing major transformations - to shift to digital business, become more customer-centric, and keep pace with regulatory changes. Any transformation impacts business processes, often requiring dramatic changes to how people work. Yet over 70% of transformation initiatives fail. Process management practitioners can change that and directly contribute to the success of their organization's initiative by applying the latest process thinking, techniques and technologies to innovate and drive change."
You see, you don't get competitive and productive by moving the software from a server in the back room to AWS. It doesn't work that way. Certainly, moving your email to Office365 or Hosted Exchange or Google for Work means less headache and your IT department gets a break. But the productivity comes from time saved.
Email and shared calendar are one thing; but what about an EMR system or HRIS system or a practice management system? In telecom, service providers are looking for a softswitch based on features and integration into existing billing systems. Everything touches everything, right?
Packaged software is long gone. Businesses making decisions about the cloud have to consider a number of options: private, public, hybrid, PAAS, IAAS. Most likely a combination of these will be adopted in most environments. This leads to other issues - like Integration.
Integration is the Bane of software deployment. It is one thing to have all of the latest applications, but quite another for these apps to share information. Quite another for these apps to improve workflow.
Many service providers build out CRM, billing and provisioning systems themselves. They want it customized. They don't want to pay a million for it. The shrink wrapped versions need too much customization. That customization is integration, work flow, user experience. Those 3 factors are what make the business agile and competitive.
After SAAS in the string of services comes BPaaS - business process as a service. This is a service oriented delivery of not just an application but a system or work flow. For example, there are a couple of companies that offer provisioning systems to overlay on your Broadsoft softswitch to allow for a single data entry point to flow through to billing and CRM. That is a business process as a service.
For years, you have seen the ads for UPS as Big Brown, the logistics experts. It is BPaaS. UPS and its army of experts are not just doing the shipping, but the logistics, the transportation and the efficiency studies for companies like COSTCO, Ford, Frito-Lay.
As Adweek explains, "UPS went public at $50 per share--the biggest IPO Wall Street had ever seen. Its corporate pockets suddenly bulging with $5.47 billion, the company went shopping, snapping up a slew of finance, brokerage and international trading firms. Eventually 40 companies melted into UPS, a consolidation that transformed the corporation from a package-delivery brand into a behemoth of logistics (a fancy term for moving both goods and information through a supply chain)."
BPaaS doesn't have to be that extensive (or outsourced). Broadsoft is trying to deliver on more than just a hosted softswitch with BroadCloud. IDEA2 is deploying more than a SugarCRM replica with its Sasquatch.
The next step isn't to just jam your software in a cloud computing environment and call it done. The move to cloud should be the opportunity to improve on the business, getting efficient, re-imagine, digitize and innovate the customer experience and the employee experience. What do you think about that?
The clash of titans we are seeing is the one side (A) replace what we have with a cheaper version in a cloud clashing with (B) most software deployments fail to delivery desired outcomes. Disruption in every industry is happening while companies deal with talent (human resources) acquisition/retention, technology (deployment, skills, training), sales, price/revenue compression, Wall Street demands, and much more.
You are doing yourself a disservice if you simply take your current software and jam it into a container in a data center. This is the time to examine your processes, work flow, systems to see what can be done differently, better, efficiently while matching business goals with user experience (customers and employees). Tall order. A Collision of Titans.
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