Google Fiber stopped over-building fiber to the home (FTTH) to give fixed gigabit wireless a chance. This isn't even 5G. This is current non-millimeter tech.
AT&T is trying to get BPL (broadband over power lines) to work with Project AirGig. Will it work this time? The power infrastructure is still pretty old/antiquated, ut technology has gotten better.
API isn't talked about like that. Integrations are. UCaaS as a stand-alone platform is not that impactful to the employee work day. Integrated with CRM, email and other work day applications is. [All About API is at ITEXPO.]
Intelepeer just announced a platform that integrates with Cisco Spark. Hope they demo that at ITEXPO.
The IDEA Showcase is Thursday evening. I always get amped at startup events because there is great energy (hope, promise, excitement) that we kind of lack in telecom.
If you like startup stuff, the week of Feb. 13 is Startup Week! Techstars runs that globally.
Channel Vision Expo is collocated with ITEXPO again. This is the first channel partners event of the year. And it is collocated with MSP Expo. Should be interesting because more and more referrals and indirect sales are making a difference for cloud providers. 8x8 notes, "New monthly recurring revenue (MRR) sold to mid-market and enterprise customers and by channel sales teams accounted for 60% of total new MRR booked in the quarter."
I don't understand Blockchain. (There I said it!) Maybe I will get a chance to see what that is about on the show floor next week as well at the Blockchain Event.
WebRTC is still a thing, according to Andy Abramson. We'll see as Real Time Web Solutions has a section of the ITEXPO as well.
Most of the noise in my email is about HPBX/UCaaS, SD-WAN or IOT. The IOT Evolution is happening at the same time in Ft Lauderdale but it is a separate show. Verizon, Amazon, Gogo, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cisco (but no AT&T) are speaking and/or exhibiting.
That is a lot of tech to take in at one time, but it also in one place. Where can you get that much info/demo/prezo in one place?
Some interesting stats from 451 Research Group.
Overall IT Spending vs. Cloud Spending. Cloud spending remains strong, and the growth rate continues to outpace overall IT spending. A total of 44% of cloud users expect spending to increase over the next 90 days, while 4% expect a decrease. In comparison, 38% expect an increase in their overall IT spending vs. 11% expecting a decrease.
Cloud Adoption. SaaS (64%, up 1-pt) remains the most popular type of cloud computing in use, followed by Infrastructure as a Service (43%, up 4-pts) and On-Premises Private Cloud (34%, down 2-pts).
On-Premises Private Cloud Vendors. The most popular vendor for on-premises private cloud is VMware vCloud (65%), with Cisco (33%) and Microsoft Cloud OS (30%) a more distant second and third.
Key Attributes. The most important attributes for on-premises private cloud vendors are Platform Reliability (66%), followed by Value for Money/Cost (47%) and Technical Expertise (36%).
If you are in Ft Lauderdale next week, let's grab coffee! Or join us for dinner on 2/7 HERE.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>2015 consisted of M&A, musical chairs and hacks. Next year, more of the same.
We are ending 2015 with a revelation that Juniper's software has had malicious code in it for a couple of years
"At the Connected Health conference, [director of Verizon's RISK Team] revealed that it had investigated 1,931 incidents affecting 392 million records in 25 countries." [source]
TMC CEO Rich Tehrani has a report of cyber attacks in the Greater NYC area.
IoT will only make matters worse when it comes to hacks. Every drone is a possible hack. We still take security for granted - or worse as something to not worry about. (When was the last time you changed any passwords?)
Next year, we will have the Dell-EMC merger and most likely the Charter-TWC-BrightHouse merger. This will result in massive layoffs and worse customer servcie. For the Tampa Bay area, both ISPs will be changing in 2016 as Frontier takes over FL, CA and TX from Verizon in a $10B deal. Broadband is going to suck at home in 2017.
RLECs are consolidating almost as fast as the VoIP companies. Both for the same reason: survival!
RLECs have gone through a massive reform of USF, which has upended their business model. Telco TV, Hosted VoIP, fiber to the tower and rural cellular are the means to which RLECs are hoping to survive, but consolidation is always viewed as a way to scale and be profitable.
FCC Rural voice rules will also hamper them a little in 2016.
Data center is still hot. Private money is buying up data centers for their REITs. That won't change as cloud services are housed in data centers. And it looks like where the ROI is right now. Plus it looks a lot like real estate - and old money understands real estate!
Cablecos will be pushing hard for DOSCIS 3.x and to take even more market share from the ILECs in both the residential and the SMB markets. All about broadband now. It might also be about threatening to rollout MVNOs but we'll seeif they are serious. Quad plays haven't really burned up the market yet.
Internet Unicorns will still be the talk of the town - until they try to IPO!
Look for more strategic partnerships between CLECs and IT specialty shops, especially security, due to the increase in hacks and concerns (and liability).
Lastly, software companies, especially UC shops, will add more functionality to their software offerings in the way of integration, analytics and BPI (business process improvement). See more about this at ITEXPO.
BTW, the Merger Between Alteva, Inc. and MBS Holdings, Inc. (Momentum) has Completed according to an email this morning. I was told that shareholders at Alteva wouldn't vote Yes for this due to the share price offer. I guess that person was incorrect.
]]>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.
]]>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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