Last year, Tech Data negotiated to acquire Avnet Technology Solutions for $2.6 billion. Avnet TS brings in $9.65 Billion in revenue and will increase Tech Data's share of data center revenue from just 29 percent to 45 percent. This move also gives Tech Data a presence in Asia-Pacific.
Tech Data competes with Ingram, ARROW, SYNNEX, Westcon-Comstor and to a lesser extent Jenne, ScanSource and CDW.
"Westcon has struggled in recent quarters, with revenue falling 10 percent to $2.26 billion and earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) falling 18 percent to $42.9 million," according to reports. This is not unusual in the VAD space. ScanSource and other VADs have been facing declining revenue and margins due to the turbulence of the IT space.
"SYNNEX has reached an agreement to buy the North American and Latin American Westcon-Comstor business from Datatec," according to Seeking Alpha. The financials of the deal are complicated and range between $715 and $915 million depending on earn out.
Most analysts have commented that this is a as good a fit (Westcon+Synnex) as TD-AVnetTS. It fills in holes both in line cards as well as geography.
Consolidation is happening at every level of the IT/tech/telecom sector. Less choice for the partner and customer is one result. The other is usually a disorganized organization.
The other blockbuster deal is in the Data Center space. Digital Realty Trust (which acquired TELX) is now buying data center wholesaler DuPont Fabros for $7.6 billion. "DuPont Fabros operates 12 data centers in three major U.S. markets, including Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia, while Digital Realty operates 145 data centers globally." Dupont Fabros is the data center landlord to Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Those are nice tenants to have if you are DRT.
This is more than either CenturyLink or Verizon received for selling their data center business. C-Link sold 57 data centers to a group of PE firms for $2.15 billion and a piece of the new firm (now known as Cyxtera Technologies). Cyxtera is a combo of Savvis and Qwest data centers that C-Link paid much more than the $2.5B C-Link paid just for Savvis. (Buy high sell low!) VZ sold its 24 data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion, which it bought from Terremark for $1.4B.
Dany Bouchedid, CEO of COLOTRAQ, the data center master agency, said, "This definitely establishes DLR in the wholesale colocation space more than ever. Dupont's data centers are enormous with next gen gear and mechanicals. In addition, Dupont owns their PPE (property plant and equipment) with some of their sites having a decent amount of land. Their PUEs are industry leading and their cooling and UPS technologies are ahead of their time. DLR will be a great platform for them to further market their capabilities."
Data Center is still a hot sector with PE firms swooping in as well as consolidation by the REITs.
]]>Cloud
Cloud adoption remains strong, with 60% of respondents indicating either Initial Implementation (31%) or Broad Implementation (29%) of production applications. Just over a quarter of the respondents are either Running Trials/Pilot Projects (15%) or Discovery and Evaluation (12%).
Respondents were asked to pick their top cloud computing related projects over the next 12 months and Cloud Security (37%) topped the list followed by SaaS for Application Modernization/Migration (33%) and Technology/Infrastructure Refresh (32%) was a close third.
"The [451] survey also asked if organizations are using professional services for their cloud enablement and it turns out that they are almost evenly split, with 41% indicating that they do use professional services - while the other 59% said they do not.
451 Research reports from HERE, HERE and HERE.
IOT
Compelling Business Need (52%) was the top driver for increases in IoT spending while another 48% cited Improved Daily Operational Efficiencies second, and Respond Faster to Customer Needs (43%) was third.
Currently for the vast majority of respondents, 87% said they did not have a dedicated budget for IoT, but rather it is part of their overall IT budget. In contrast, only 13% said they have a dedicated budget for IoT.
IoT presents new deployment challenges, so respondents were asked about their key IoT-related technology priorities. IoT Security (47%) tops the list, followed by Big Data Analytics for IoT (34%) and IoT Infrastructure Equipment (31%).
IT Pain Points
For those respondents that are adding dedicated staff in 2017, the top skillset they are looking for is Data/Analytics (70%). Security (55%) and Cloud Computing (55%) are tied for second and Network Edge/Perimeter (45%) is third.
According to 48% of respondents, Cost/Budget is the chief IT pain point, followed closely by Responding Effectively to Changing Business (45%) and Security Issues/Concerns (41%).
Data Center Priorities and Pain Points
Respondents were asked how they would address a shortage of floor space or power capacity within their data centers. An external fix, to Utilize Off-Premises Public Cloud Providers (37%) topped the list, followed by two internal initiatives: Consolidate IT Infrastructure to Accommodate Power and/or Space Availability (34%) and Expand an Existing Data Center (26%).
Respondents were asked about their highest-priority projects for data centers, and Improving Existing IT Asset Utilization (48%, up 4-pts) remains at the top of the list. Data Center Consolidation (28%, up 2-pts) is a second. Upgrading/Retrofitting an Existing Facility (20%, down 3-pts)is in third place.
]]>Now we have a bunch of hype around Cloud Farming and cloud assessments. That sounds great, but buyer beware! Unless you have a Cloud Architect or Network Architect on staff to review these plans, are you sure you have the clients best interest at heart?
In cloud, the hard part is the MIGRATION. In data center world, a colocation migration for a Fortune 5000 firm is a two year plan. Two years to move a data center cage! The circuits, the boxes, the IP addresses, the mapping, the design, the physical move, the duplication, yadda, yadda.
I sat in meetings on software migration projects in the early 2000s that took over a year to plan. Yes, a year to plan before starting the migration, which took two-plus years.
'Verizon Communications Inc. announced that it has moved more than 150,000 employees to Google's productivity apps, called G Suite," Bloomberg reported. I'd like to know how long that took.
8x8 sold some big accounts in the last 15 months - "Announced new deal with Regus, the leading global workplace provider, to deploy 8x8 Enterprise Communications as a Service (ECaaS) solution at Regus worldwide business centers." And 8x8 "Announced 2,400-seat deployment across nine global locations for new enterprise customer NetSuite." Neither of these deployments happened quickly. Try a year of roll out. Global LNP is a bigger nut to crack than getting some RLEC to release a number.
I'm not against Cloud Farming. I think that agents have to practice going deep to get more wallet share from the customer. Not just get the network and the voice, but the email, the backup, the SaaS, etc. To do that takes some skill and training, being deliberate and confident.
I just don't know how that works with reality (in scale). The shortage of qualified Architects and talent to assist in planning and assessment are just the first bottleneck. The lack of a PMO department from most partners and providers to steer the migration and deployments will create some messy implementations as well as unhappy customers and partners. Lastly, we come to the compensation. When the sales cycle coupled with the deployment timeline is more than two years, how will that excite partners to sell it?
Certainly, there is a move to cloud occurring. It is NOT happening at the rate of change that analysts or cheerleaders are predicting or broadcasting. Most computing environments will remain Hybrid - some SaaS, some colo, some other. Much of the decisions on this matter consider such factors as flexibility, ROI, TCO and internal IT skills.
People forget that Hosted PBX/UCaaS deployments still suck. That LNP still takes up to 14 days (or longer with Birch!). That Internet pipes are on a 120 day construction delay. That even something as minor as turning up a port and a circuit between two lit data centers can fast approach 90 days longer than the two week install interval quoted. If we can't get these relatively simple things to work, you want to jump on Complex stuff?!! [This is me LMAO!]
NOTE:
There are experts out there. COLOTRAQ has partnered with some smart people for Cyber-Security and Cloud Readiness Assessments. Certainly, Microcorp has leveraged its TAP Program to put experts at the ready for partners. Acuity in Tampa has started building up its own managed services portfolio including wireless management and VoIP deployment testing. Other master agencies have brought on some cloud talent. They had to. It will be the engineers, the talent that can break it down and talk plainly about it one minute and delve into I/Os the next that win deals. Look for those.
]]>They are jumping on the bandwagon for a number of reasons.
One is Consolidation. The new landscape of Ethernet is cable and ILEC. The CLECs are mostly all gone. You have to expand the catalog beyond just network operators and VoIP.
The other reason is price pressure. Pricing across all telecom products - mobile, bandwidth, Ethernet, VoIP - has been declining about 3-10% year over year, creating a problem for the operators and partners. When pricing craters, you have to sell more and more and more to maintain the same commission level. At some point, just selling network isn't going to work because you can't close enough deals or even fill a funnel fast enough.
When 1GB pricing is less than what 10MB pipes were just six years ago, think about how much you have to sell and how fast.
Even the current price war in VoIP/UC isn't helping. Because there isn't enough Demand for UC - the demand is for POTS replacement and dial-tone - the price per seat has dropped. It hovers just below $20 right now.
I understand that the customer wants the cheapest price - and it is easier to take the order when you find the lowest price - but you have also just lowered your commission.
Providers are starting to cut commission points when they lower the price. Partners and Channel Managers aren't happy. Well, then sell it at rack rate.
So carriers consolidation means fewer vendors and pricing compression means less overall commission. More vendors are needed. Luckily over 600+ vendors have entered the space in the last three years while more than one-quarter of the partner channel have moved on. Retirement, M&A, and business shift/pivot have resulted in a lot less sales partners at a time when there are so many more vendors to choose from.But to be realistic choosing a UC vendor among the 2000+ available is like picking Red Delicious apples at the grocery store. They all look the same. How many do you want to smell and test for firmness before you pick one?
The cloud computing piece, as we found out two weeks ago, is owned by Amazon. AWS and S3 are hosting about one-third of the web!!!! Rackspace, CenturyLink, Azure, Google Compute, IBM/Soft Layer and the others haven't really stepped up their marketing game (even in the wake of Amazon's outage.)
Businesses are moving to SAAS, IAAS and other computing environments. Partners are in a position to offer assistance to businesses in this regard. It is uncharted territory for many, but the business model has shifted to wallet share. If you want to survive (and thrive), it is about getting more wallet share from the customer. That means selling them email, Office365, VoIP, colocation, security and more on top of the network and bandwidth that makes up the typical sale.
We have seen a number of press releases in the last 4 months about SD-WAN - mainly about SD-WAN providers signing up with carriers and with master agencies. SD-WAN the new UCaaS!!! This technology could be the next big thing, but they said the same think about IP Centrex (VoIP) over 15 years ago and about WebRTC.
Our biggest problem: We push Product. That's right. We are a bunch of Product Pushers. We would make ideal drug dealers because we don't create demand, we just push a product on someone who wants it.
We don't sell Solutions. We don't even offer Solutions. The vendors don't offer solutions either. They pimp products. It makes all of this really hard to sell.
]]>Hwver, today Equinix bought 29 data centers in North and South America from Verizon for $3.6B!
Equinix continues its expansion in major cities ignoring the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that other data center companies are moving toward. That expansion to the edge "is an industry wide shift in focus to edge computing and having these peripheral data centers in tier 2 markets might very well be a more comprehensive strategy to having a footprint where your clients need to be. In the Future, clients will look to the edge, meaning closer to their end users and subscribers as they expand out from their primary markets," remarked Dany Bouchedid, CEO of the data center master agency COLOTRAQ.
Bouchedid continued, "As an industry we need to collectively adapt and do away with old ways of thinking even if we are still taking about traditional data centers. This reminds me of the wireless cell site deployment era. The initial deployments were always tier 1 markets yet once that reached a saturation point, the carriers had to move to where more subscribers resided. So they began to expand into tier 2 and 3 markets. What we are seeing in the data center industry so far is purely demand driven."
It is also profit driven. Data center companies are real estate companies. It is why a few of them are structured as real estate investment trusts (REITs). It is why investment dollars flow into a third, fourth and even a sixth data center in an NFL city like Atlanta, Chicago or even Phoenix.
CenturyLink just sold their data center business for $2.1B to a coalition of PE firms headed by the former CEO of Terremark. C-Link was getting enough out of their data center business AND they needed cash for their Level3 bid.
Meanwhile agents are left wondering about commissions. Will the new company continue to pay the commissions? Or will that fall to CenturyLink? Who is billing the client now? Which company will the customer renew with?
Tierpoint rolled up Windstream and other data centers. They are held by a PE firm. This is a risk for channel partners because of the potential for sale. In other words, will your well written agent agreement be enough to continue to see commissions after a sale like CenturyLink's or even Windstream's?
One executive at a master agency noted, "The battle between Digital Realty Trust and Equinix continues! IO, Cologix, and Interxion are next."
]]>Jeff Ponts of Datatel; Emmett Tydings of AB&T Telecom; and Chris Palermo of GCN joined the podcast this week to talk about the M&A in the industry and what partners can do to mitigate risk in 2017.
It has been a turbulent year with a lot of mergers and acquisitions. It makes people anxious.
Jon Arnold is a fellow blogger who recently saw Guy Kawasaki keynote Nextiva's event. The one thing lacking in telecom is Innovation. As partners, WE need to innovate to the tune of adding new skills, being creative, thinking through problems and cross-vendor solutions.
Give this podcast a listen - and leave your comments.
If you can't see the flash mp3 player, you can listen on SoundCloud HERE. Or you can download the mp3 HERE.
]]>In 2008, C-Link bought Embarq, formerly Sprint/United.in $11.6B deal including assumed debt. In 2010, C-Link bought Qwest which included RBOC assets that flew the US West banner. "The valuation of CenturyLink's purchase was $22.4 billion, including the assumption of $11.8 billion of outstanding debt held by Qwest."
In 2011, CenturyLink begins to stray from grabbing fiber and POTS lines in favor of the data center business it acquired with Qwest. Much to the chagrin of the agent channel, Savvis was scooped up for $3.2B including debt. This started a series of acquisitions to beef up a cloud business that for all intents and purposes C-Link is mired in for no reason.
The ITO Business Division of Ciber (managed services), AppFrog (PAAS), Tier3 (IAAS), Cognilytics (analytics), DataGardens (DRaaS), Orchestrate (DBaaS), netAura LLC (security services) and ElasticBox (VPS) - all scooped up in the last 3 years to make a soup out of a cloud division that it is still trying to sell. The rumor today is that Savvis will be spun off. No word if that will be just data center or both data center and cloud. And that makes even less sense since Level3 actually knows how to sell colocation - unlike practically anyone in Monroe.
I understand that being rural and watching your CAF and USF subsidies slowly decrease makes you yearn for fatter and happier days. And when you look at Level3's $10B in NOLs, you start to think like Carl Icahn. However, have you seen what Icahn did to XO???? Have you seen what C-Link did to Qwest and Savvis??? That husk will next be Level3.
With debt this deal will be worth about $34B to get combined revenues to $25B.
Not a single merger in telecom in the last fifteen years resulted in anything good. Not one.
The integrations rarely go as planned. These two companies probably have 26 or more separate and different software systems in the BSS/OSS. These will NEVER be integrated. Orders, status and asset availability will be a nightmare. I know. I know. You think I am a pessimist. But truly this will suck especially for the channel.
Any agent that says this is good is either (a) looking for press or (b) is delusional.
There is now less choice. When VZ takes over XO, except for Zayo, who is left that isn't a LEC or cableco? What happened to the CLEC industry? Totally collapsed as its owners cashed out. Everyone got bigger and no one got better. One by one they have fallen.
It is why Cable is winning the broadband game. (Cable is single minded.) It is why businesses buy cloud services from OTT. (Bell-head mentality precludes anything but network and voice.)
This is the LEC problem: lack of focus; deficient long term strategy; and a missing willingness to win the customer. It's all about the creation of value without actually creating any value.
Since the Board will almost stay intact and the CEO remains, what new gen strategy or thinking do you think will occur with the combined entity? I get why the L3 CFO is staying: someone has to keep that debt at bay and play with the NOLs so that the stock doesn't crash when revenues start to slide.
I won't even get into the culture differences between the 2 companies. L3 and TWT had only slightly different cultures but most of the TWT people exited. This is a good payday for L3 CEO but he will go down as the guy who killed a good idea. The blood of thousands of employees and agents are on Story's head.
Hopefully, someone else will make a BID for Level3 as a white knight - Comcast, Zayo, or a PE firm*.
**Although STT owns about 13% of Level3, I don't see a PE firm wanting the company, except to do to it what Icahn did to XO. L3 doesn't throw off enough cash.
According to CenturyLink press release, the deal, which is expected to close by the end of the 3Q 2017, results in:
Level3 has a bad quarter financially and the C-Suite says, "Don't look here! Look over there!"
Also, bankers! Besides the C-Suite, Bankers are the only ones making money on these deals. So yeah that want more M&A - as overall M&A activity in 2016 is down. Truthfully, bankers have ruined telecom with all this M&A.
Yesterday I was at a TelAdvocate event in Tampa. No agent there thought it was a good idea. Emails from other agents are basically panic. We just got done with integration. Please not another one!!!
What do they get with this merger? Two very opposite cultures. One is mainly an RLEC. One is mainly a wholesaler. Not does that match up?
Level3 fiber is everywhere that Qwest is with its Genuity, Gobal Crossing and own long haul fiber. L3 could probably do a better job selling colocation and data center that C-Link.
The big picture is that you would have a larger telco with massive debt -- and declining revenue. Since CenturyLink has debt of around $20B with about $18B in revenue and Level 3 has debt of about $10B with $8B in annual revenue, the combined entity would have $26B in revenue and $30B in debt. Plus years of integration work, layoffs, confusion, and eventually lost revenue and a lousy organization.
As brokers of telecom, we want choice in the marketplace. This doesn't achieve that.
I am hoping this is just a banker balloon. Both stocks moved up, so maybe someone was just doing some day trading.
]]>"Today's IT industry is dealing with data explosion. Therefore, companies need a data management system to manage the huge amount of generated data. Data centers are already under tremendous expansion mode in terms of storage and computing to accommodate the growing volumes of data and run computation on top of it," writes CIO Review. Data retention also factors into space. IOT will increase data stored and analyzed and retained. Private cloud, hybrid cloud and computing infrastructure have to be housed somewhere.
Space isn't really the limiting factor. Power is. Cooling is also becoming a limiting factor. Cooling to some degree affects the power. The US had not built a new power plant since 1996 -- until Wats Bar 2 came online in Tennessee this year.
Solar farms are starting to pop up. And there has been activity in wind farms. Amazon is turning up a wind farm in Texas. "Iron Mountain, a global storage and information management service firm, has agreed to purchase up to 100,000 MWh of power from the in-development Amazon Wind Farm Texas."
Google is working on a zero waste data center. " it takes a lot of power and resources to do all that data churn [from Google search, Docs, Drive, Music, YouTube, etc], which is potentially quite wasteful. Thankfully, however, the search giant has committed to a new initiative called Zero Waste to Landfills so that all of the waste from those data centers will be reused or diverted to a more sustainable route."
That is just the moves to make running data centers cheaper. But that means that data centers are going to be around a long time -- and there will be more of them.
Facebook's data center in Sweden made a social splash via a virtual tour. These giants - FB, GOOG, Amazon - are getting creative with data center builds, designs and usage.
The amount of M&A activity is high (compared to previous years and dollar values of the deals.) One example is Windstream selling its data center business to Tierpoint for a big profit. I mentioned some of this back in January. Since then, CenturyLink is taking bids for its data center business that it put together with Qwest Cyber Centers and Savvis.
Verizon is near a deal to sell its Terremark division, according to reports. That $3B will help VZ buy some more spectrum -- or just to pay off the debt on the AOL purchase.
Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is exploring a sale of Vantage Data Centers, looking for a billion dollars.
ViaWest is expanding in Denver.
There are federal mandates for data center optimization that must be met by 2018.
Data centers play a huge part in IT - whether the company has public cloud or private cloud or a colo. The hybrid nature of IT infrastructure for the enterprise lends itself to a continued reliance on data centers in the US.
]]>In the world of Anti-Virus, two Czech companies are merging. Avast made a $1.3B offer for all the public shares of AVG.
Jon Arnold has a nice write up from MoNage - Messaging on the Net - about messaging and comms. Interesting stats. It explains the Slack phenomenon.
From 451 Research Group, Colocation vs. Cloud: "Many providers claim that SMBs are skipping colocation and going straight to the cloud. However, 451 Research studies show that this isn't so black and white. In the 'S' portion of the SMB market (<249 employees), companies are more likely to have some sort of cloud-based service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS or hosted private cloud) than colocation services, but only by a margin of about 19 percentage points (49% to 30%). In the 'M' segment of the SMB market (250-999 employees), the numbers are about even between cloud and colocation services (38.2% to 38.9%, respectively)."
]]>Hosted PBX, UCaaS, and the like involve a lot more than the hardware version, because now it is a software application service delivery project. There is extension mapping to DIDs, SMS, and email addresses.
This isn't a simple implementation. This is a software deployment.
Copper was in just about every building. Occasionally there would be an issue with no available pairs, but today quote has a site survey. Many have construction costs or minimum spends for the build. Then there is the actual construction to manage. Customer site preparation, conduit, power and connectivity from the telco closet to the office suite.
It used to be easy: be like a realtor and sell some colocation. Now, VPS, IAAS, PAAS, and other virtualization means a conversion from hardware that was shipped, stacked, turned on, plugged in to a data migration and software project management.
So many moving pieces today. Much more project management involved than ever before, all while price compression also means commission decline.
If you are selling network, it got harder. Site surveys and construction projects to manage and communicate to your customer. More unpaid work for less compensation. It's understandable that you don't have the time or desire to learn the latest technology like UCaaS, Workflow, Contact Center, SAAS, AWS, SD-WAN, dynamic network, managed services and all the security products - UTM, cloud firewall, DDOS mitigation, etc.
It's only going to get more complicated. Gary Vanderchuk's keynote at a credit union industry event is titled, "You Better Figure It the Hell Out". Some really good advice even though it isn't our industry and it is an hour. He even talks about missed opportunities and what it is like being an entrepreneur and CEO.
]]>Try something new.
Mary Meeker's annual Internet Trends report was released this week. She makes 2 big points:
One: There are now about 3 billion global internet users, but user growth is stalling at about 9% year-on-year. Smartphone sales are slowing, as is the yearly growth in the number of smartphone users, down to 21% from 31% last year. There will still be a market for bandwidth, but the it will not be lucrative. Revenues need to diversify from network.
Two: The rising Snapchat generation: Millennials communicate with text, but Generation Z prefers to communicate with images. There are now over 3 billion images shared daily between Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp--all but one of which are owned by Facebook. 55% of Pinterest users use the site to find products they want to buy. Messaging apps are moving from simple text tools to communicate with friends to platforms for commerce. It will make selling simple VoIP solutions difficult, because smartphone and apps beat a Hosted VoIP solution. This will make it even harder on the remaining VoIP Providers.
Other things not from Meeker's report, but from the news.
Ransomware is a real problem for small and large businesses. Even NASA got hit - as did Congress recently. It is so bad, the FBI issued a warning. Selling security is going to be a big market. Data backup is a good solution for ransonware (if set-up properly). So is an anti-malware solution. How many businesses can afford to be down for 2 days?
Have you thought about selling data center? If they have an extensive WAN or MPLS network, a data center may be involved. QTS is turning the Sun Times building in Chicago into a large Tier 3 data center. It will have with 317K SF of capacity, 24MW of power and have fiber connectivity from 5 carriers. If you need help selling colocation, call the experts at COLOTRAQ.
If you want to stick with just bandwidth, how about managed WLAN or managed wi-fi solution for bigger buildings? Cablecos offer it. Some telcos. ADTRAN, Ruckus, Cisco. In a world of IOT and mobile devices, managing the wireless network is a pretty big problem to solve.
Don't want to sell mobile devices? How about mobile expense management? Stay tuned for a podcast on Monday from Wireless Watchdogs.
Have you thought about Microsoft - and riding the wave of hype around Office365, Sharepoint and Skype4B? If you have read any of my blogs, I mention Skype4B often. There is demand for it.
WAN Monitoring is getting louder. Master Agents have added circuit monitoring. AireSpring offers it under the AireNMS service mark. Most VARs and MSPs offer RMM (remote monitoring and management) of desktops, laptops and servers. This is similar.
Colocation, Backup, Security, Monitoring, WLAN and mobile expense management are all items ancillary to what you are selling now. You would be doing a disservice to yourself and your customers by not mentioning them.
There will be a gulf of disapproval. (see diagram) I think that gulf is about 5 years old now. Time to get through the Dip, grab the bull by the horns and change.
]]>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.
]]>Verizon put its Terremark division up for auction. Windstream sold its data centers to TierPoint. Rumor has it that CenturyLink and AT&T are looking at selling their data centers.
The market for data centers is at a high - and the telcos need cash, so a sale makes sense. It might be why they are looking. If you can get a couple of billion, pay down debt, make the quarter look better, and as the CEO get some more money out of it. All upside.
In one of the LinkedIn groups, the discussion was about the telcos not having the right mentality to stay in the data center game. I don't think it is that. C-Link isn't having trouble selling old Savvis and Cyber Center space. It is that the cash out is available. And most of the CEOs of telcos are now just finance guys more worried about the Street and stock price than if the business is positioned correctly for the future.
Zacks is reporting that DuPont Fabros is putting its NJ1 Data Center up for sale. It was a pivot for DF to leave the wholesale data center space. They are pivoting back to wholesale.
TierPoint is on a roll. After buying Windstream's data centers for $575M, it just bought AlteredScale Data Center in Chicago. TierPoint bought CxP Data Centers based in Jacksonville, Florida, last year. Lots of added space to go with its acquisition from ABRY of Xand, leading provider of colocation, cloud, disaster recovery and managed service with six data centers located in New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Bulking up at TierPoint.
Cool look at Amazon's first AWS data center in Northern VA's Internet Alley where 70% of worldwide Internet traffic passes through!
]]>If you can't see the flash player or are on iOS or just want to use another player, download the mp3 HERE or go to Soundcloud to listen.
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