The real buzz came from Amazon that launched Amazon Connect - Customer Contact Center in the Cloud. GE Appliances is one of Amazon Connect's initial customers (and shared the stage at EC17 with them). Last week, they launched contact center tools. Before that, they launched Chime, a web conferencing app.
"Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost," according to the website. It got a lot of coverage (telecomp and techcrunch, to link but 2).
Chime was launched in conjunction with Vonage who will be handling the consumer and small business market. Level3 partnered with Amazon on Chime for Enterprise, which partners will get to sell soon.
In both cases, Amazon is entering a crowded field with a self-service, low priced offering that hangs off of their massive computing infrastructure. It is mainly price disruptive, but that doesn't mean it won't shake up Wall Street which will re-adjust valuations for the likes of Cisco, Citrix, Genesys and Avaya.
GENBAND partnered with IBM Watson for AI chatbots in its Kandy wrappers. The Kandy wrappers are pre-packed programs like a customer service chatbot that can answer FAQs and detect when the caller is getting agitated. It then takes the call transcript and sends it to a live rep, who if all the back-end works would be able to take over the call in continuum. The demo was great. Implementation will be difficult, but I would like to see Florida Blue jump on board and give it a try because they have horrible customer service systems (maybe on purpose).
West showcased the new version of Spark with Hybrid Voice.
Sprint had a robot running around their booth but I don't know why.
Counterpath demonstrated its new capabilities for what was once just a softphone. Now there is a good amount of reporting and analytics on users and calls. One user experience across multiple platforms (phone, tablet, laptop, Mac, Android, PC). It layers on top of existing UC, so Broadsoft providers can get better reporting, analytics and user experience without having to upgrade their investment. Counterpath also added a Salesforce plug-in so that interactions inside the Bria app can be captured in a CRM record. And you get screen pops!
BTW, "Voice is still a customer's number one choice when dealing with a customer service issue." [twitter]
"Cloud computing: Are these the hurdles that trip you up? More companies are using cloud-powered services, but it's not without pain. Here are some of the common complaints." Interesting read on ZD.
One thing that seemed to be a theme: User and Customer Experiences Matter.
]]>The US presidential election is finally over.
GTT is buying Hibernia Networks for $590 million (mostly cash). Hibernia adds sub-sea assets to GTT's Tier 1 global network. This move also adds IRUs across Europe to GTT's network. It also adds "about $185M in revenue and $65M in EBITDA." What is that 9x EBITDA and less than 3x revenue. This feels strategic as opposed to other M&A that feels defensive. (EarthLink-Windstream was both!)
More M&A: Lumos Networks, a fiber player in the mid-Atlantic region signed an LOI to "acquire Clarity Communications Group, which operates a 730 mile fiber network with 75 on-net locations located across four states in the south-eastern United States. The vast majority of Clarity's operations and fiber mileage is in the state of North Carolina." [PR} This is a strategic fill-in move. Lumos has been growing the fiber biz for about 5 years. It has a wireline business that was formed in 2011 as a spin-off of nTelos. LUMOS is trying to figure out what to do with its RLEC business.
Zendesk re-branded to pivot beyond just help desk ticketing. They added some analytics and business intelligience (BI) to improve customer experiences. It is about UX/CX now more than ever - especially if one company KPI is LVC (lifetime value of the customer).
In a similar vein, Why the goal should be unified experiences - not just unified communications.
BIG STATISTIC (for Agents especially): "40-75% of audio calls in the enterprise are conference calls - and its growing! [source]
75% of users communicate at work with 3 or more devices! [source]
"All are chasing the UCaaS growth opportunity. UCaaS is expected to grow from USD 17.35 Billion in 2016 to USD 28.69 Billion by 2021. The market is transitioning from the "early adopter phase" to the "early mainstream phase" for enterprise delivery." [source]
Google parent, Alphabet, is pulling back on projects - from Google Fiber (aka Alphabet Access) to Project Wing (drone delivery) - as it strains to build profitable business lines beyond Google and search.
]]>A survey from BroadSoft found, "one in three small businesses expects to have mobile-only UCaaS solutions in place by 2020." I guess Verizon decided to jump to the future with its One Talk Mobile service (powered by BSFT). (I wonder how Mast Mobile is doing?)
Same BSFT study found "more than four in five (82%) expect OTT messaging and collaboration software to be the mainstay of communication by 2020, with the remaining 18% saying email will still be the primary messaging tool." Now they always say email is going away, but Slack does replace internal email to relieve that inbox load. The volume of comms is not going away, it is just shifting to other buckets. But will one of those buckets be yours?
"A report from Osterman Research in November found that two in five business decision makers were either 'somewhat' or 'very' fearful about moving to unified comms (UC). Reasons given for not making the jump include not fully understanding the impact UC would have on their business, as well as various investments in legacy phone systems." Selling Change is Hard. Selling UCaas on features is harder. Deployment is frightening. User adoption is slow. These issues need to be addressed in the sales process. (It's called building Trust.)
Businesses buy Microsoft and Cisco for a few reasons: (1) never get fired buying these brands; (2) so many certified people working in enterprise act as brand ambassadors plus trust the brand; and (3) marketing/branding.
There are many studies on UCaaS. Are you reading them? Applying that info to your bundle or sales techniques?
It isn't that you don't have a good service (hopefully), it is that you don't message it; target it; and market it. And you better hurry because the market is quickly being dominated by about 15 companies of the 2000+.
]]>I wasn't aware of how many vendors were pushing Office365. These include Level3, Sprint, Arkadin, CallTower, TelePacific, Velis4, BitTitan, Rackspace, Tierpoint, CenturyLink, Evolve IP, NeoNova, even GoDaddy. Partners might want to just ask their favorite vendor about it.
In just 15 minutes on this podcast, expert Greg Plum of PlumUC gives us a good look at Skype for Business and why partners should examine it for their portfolio.
If you have iOS or just can't see the flash podcast player, you can either listen on Soundcloud or download the mp3.
If you want to hear more from Greg Plum on the Skype for Business opportunity, he did a podcast with Velis4's VP Guy Yasika on soundcloud.
]]>Frontier says that the 30K people affected by the transition (and who still have issues) will get credits and should get over it as 30K represents less than 1% of their customers. The Florida Attorney General jumped on the PR bandwagon to wag her finger at Frontier. When you deregulate phones and then give a pass on an acquisition like this, you can't do more than wag a finger.
Sprint just remembered that they have a fiber network. It only generates about $600M in revenue for them currently - about the same as the revenue VZW makes on IOT.
This is offbeat: The FCC issued an Order ($100K fine) resolving a call completion investigation involving inContact.
Evolve IP took a majority investment from a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners. It is a cash infusion for growth and ramping up. " The Company's services are currently deployed in four continents and 15 countries, to more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with more than 100,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points." This investment makes it a little harder for someone like Vonage to scoop up Evolve IP.
Vonage spent most of its acquisition fund buying twilio's biggest competitor, Nexmo for $230 Million. This is CPaaS, communications platform as a service space that Twilio has owned. This is the elastic VoIP space. It will be the fourth platform that VB will be running, which is an expensive proposition. It is a business more like wholesale VoIP Orig/Term than it is about retail VoIP, which is Vonage's bread and butter. This begs the question how do their salespeople sell this versus UCaaS? Two entirely different businesses.
Diane Meyers at IHS released their Top 10 UCaaS players scorecard: 8x8, Vonage, West, RingCentral, Mitel, Verizon, Star2Star, Broadview Networks, Fuze and Nextiva. 600K seats puts you at the top of the heap. "Landing just outside the top 10 were Comcast, ShoreTel, Cox, CoreDial and Windstream."
Lenovo gets into the UCaaS space with the launch of its "Smart Meeting Room Solution, essentially a unified communications offering which allows various devices and screens to be able to collaborate in a workplace... The solution combines Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny desktop with Intel's Unite software."
Streaming video is a big thing for Live events like Blab, FB Live, Periscope and others Rich Tehrani takes a look at it here. Note: no telecom companies are in this space.
Telcos in the US and UK are not making enough SaaS sales. A majority of the SMB cloud revenue is going to the SaaS providers themselves, according to a report.
The Digital Divide is real: Broadband service tends to stop at the poverty line in the US.
The FCC approved Globalstar's spectrum for wi-fi. They want to create a nationwide wi-fi service and charge for it. No idea if the radios in devices can utilize it. Google of course despises this plan.]]>
Cisco demonstrated Spark, which I thought was for SMB, but is being pitched to Enterprise especially with its big hook into Salesforce. The demo that I got at the booth was rather disappointing. Not very visual. Looked like a console.
"Cisco Spark delivers cloud-based business communications that enables customers to message, meet and call anyone, whether it be on their mobile device, desktop or meeting room end-points." [PR] Isn't this what all the UC&C platforms promise? And keep in mind that this is re-branded Squared.
Not that Slack is the end-ll-be-all, but if you can't at least offer that type of look and feel and functionality (what I refer to as UX and CX or simply user or customer experience) then what are you doing? With two million daily users in 2 years, there is something they like about it besides the way it decreases internal email that people like.
Atlassian HipChat has a similar UX. The room or container or locker or folder or whatever you want to call the holding space for documents, conversations, recordings and notes around an event - sales call, project, meeting - is about organization and working on it when I want to or can as well as a depository for everything about the event in one easy to use, share, store space. This is a long time coming - and it still needs some improvement but it is getting better.
I still am waiting for a single inbox for email, texts/SMS, IM, etc. One place for all my comms. Maybe some day. Right after SSO (single sign on), which we haven't heard about since FOWA 2007.
I did hear more talk about APIs, SDKs, and integrations. Zapier and IFTTT weren't there but maybe in spirit.
Genband had some news. It has re-organized its product portfolio under Kandy. Now fring and other products that are monthly recurring revenue are under Kandy. Genband is in a patent dispute with Metaswitch that some have speculated leads to a merger. Genband is also doing co-marketing for its customers - see here.
And XO touted that it is using GenBand for advanced real time communications. When XO becomes Verizon in 2017 that means Alex Doyle will have one more platform to deal with!
ThinkingPhones came out as Fuze at this show with a marketing campaign playing on Unified.
NETSCOUT has a platform to measure service delivery issues in a multi-vendor environment. This platform looks at Voice and video media performance; Call signaling and UC server performance; as well as Network and enablers' infrastructure performance.
One big announcement came out before the show: Switch.co re-branded as Dialpad. Craig Walker was a keynote speaker at the show. Dialpad was in the Sprint booth talking about mobility and enterprise. (They gave away nice jackets.)
Another big deal was Avaya launching Zang.io, in what at first glance looks a little like Kandy's logo (and font and colors) and at second glance looks like they are trying to put one up on twilio. It is kind of a mixture of the two. "Zang connects popular collaboration apps like Google Hangouts with business solutions like Salesforce.com or SAP for a seamless user experience. Zang comes with simple SDKs, sample apps and the ability to use other third-party communications apps, which speed adoption and value creation." (You can read the rest here.)
This either works for Avaya and they move beyond premise PBX - or it fails and they file BK. Those are the only 2 options because while telcos like Windstream still sell Avaya, from what Avaya partners tell me, it is more about old logos, not new logos. And there is too much competition in the Enterprise space. Lot of big booths (20x20 and larger) at the #EC16.
One cool toy came from Oblong. "The result of more than 20 years of research at MIT Media Lab, OblongĀ“s flagship product, Mezzanine, is an immersive visual collaboration solution defining the next era of computing: multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, multi-location." It was a total immersion telepresence system that could be controlled by something like a Wii game controller or an IOS device. It was a nifty toy that brings Minority Report to life.
Voxbone was serving up international DIDs, right alongside Belgian chocolates and expresso! Thanks!
Yesterday (3/8) was International Women's Day, so here are some forgotten women in tech history.
Today's GapingVoid cartoon is about silos in organizations and collaboration. Ha!
]]>First up is Apple versus the FBI over end-to-end encryption on the iPhone. For privacy nerds, Barry Eisler's new book, God's Eye View, was a scary realization that the NSA has too much reach -- and very little oversight.
Over at AVC, there is a discussion about privacy - or rather whether you think Apple should bother - or if all info will be hacked, why not just let it out to stop terrorists and child porn?? The way I feel: if you make the argument about those 2 extremes, you lose the argument. You don't do things like give up freedom because of a fraction of the users. 99.97% of iPhone users are not hiding, so why should the 99 be subject?
BTW, Your Toaster May Eventually Spy On You, and Your Camera Could Kill Your Kid
SAAS
5 things about the SaaS industry. (I tend to extrapolate data from SaaS to the UCaaS vertical).
CLEC
Layoffs at EarthLink AND they sold off the IT division. Layoffs at Windstream too. If you are laying people off and cost cutting and you are in the C Suite at a telco, please pink slip yourself too because you are not fixing anything!!!
Running a CLEC is not just about controlling costs. It requires a Strategic Plan that is executed to properly. EarthLink had a couple of plans that just could not get executed. Talent is important but so is Culture and a Vision that the talent (the employees) buy into and want to see succeed. There needs to be a feedback loop.
Tom Peters really needs to keynote a telecom event. Or one of these CLECs should hire him to help you over the hump of failure.
CONFERENCING
The founder of Vidtel, Scott Wharton, is over at Logitech, who just unveiled a Breakthrough Group Video Conferencing Solution, which turns any meeting room into video-enabled collaboration space.
Metaswitch just announced Accession integrates with Zoom Video Conferencing.
After buying video conferencing company, Fuze, ThinkingPhones changed its name to Fuze.
PanTerra Networks Overview in 2 minutes 19 seconds - UC, Storage, Slack, analytics and more.
Communications, Collaboration or Workflow? Forbes article. NoJitter has a similar article about adopting UC for work flow.
Patent troll sues Apple, Verizon and AT&T for $7B in Various Patent Infringements!
Avaya vs Cisco in mid-market <-- as if that was the battle! The battle is with Microsoft - and it might be with Slack in 2 years.
WHY TIDBITS???
I write columns for Channel Vision magazine, Internet Telephony and Cloud Computing magazine plus this blog, plus work as an agent and consultant. Not everything that happens is worth 350+ words. Sometimes just listing the stuff that is crossing my desk helps me to tick off the puzzle pieces so that later I can write 700 words about a trend or an idea or whatever. So there have been a lot of tidbits posts especially in the last year, but it is so that you can quickly consume some industry news and I remind myself of stuff happening.
Thanks for reading!
]]>Cisco buys Jasper Tech for $1.4 billion, because Jasper's IoT cards are inside GM cars, vending machines and car charging stations.
The number of IoT developers is growing exponentially - "According to VisionMobile's new IoT Megatrends 2016 report, 4.5 million developers are working on IoT applications." According to TechRepublic, these developers are buying into revenue, not hype. Well, I would beg to differ as noted by the shift away from Wearables. I think even programmers follow the hype, then when the money isn't there move on. To me some of this feels like PowerBall lottery: play now, gamble some money (time and sweat) for a chance to be a millionaire.
The Lottery Economy is best explained by NYU Professor Scott Galloway in this very good 16 minute video.
Conferencing
Robert Scoble demos Speakeasy conferencing. It is an 18 minute demo, which is way too long. Well thought out features from a user perspective. Only iOS mobile app, but for folks like my brother who have replaced their laptop with a phablet, it will be great. Craig Walker and UberConf have some competition.
I shared this with my clients: West's study on How Companies are Using Collaboration Solutions - An Infographic Examining the Status of Unified Communications in the Workplace.
For channel partners, I will mention this again: there IS $$ in conferencing. PGi was acquired by private equity firm, Sirus Capital, for $1 Billion! PGi is a pure play conferencing company.
VoIP Phones
I don't know if it is the competition from other phone manufacturers - like Yealink, Grandstream, Mitel/Aastra, Sangoma, OBIhai, Panasonic and others - or if it is the fact that many desk phones are being replaced with headsets (winners here are Jabra, Sennheiser and Plantronics), but Polycom revenue is in decline.
Channel Management
Advertisement: My ebook, Secrets for Channel Managers Kindle Edition is available!
]]>Greg Plum of PlumUC and I had a 10 minute chat about the channel. Plum has been spending a good amount of time with MIcrosoft partners, a different segment of the channel from where I spend my days.
Why aren't more channel partners selling conferencing, Office365, cloud? The Hamster Wheel!
If you can't see the flash podcast player, you can either download the mp3 here or you can listen on SoundCloud here.
]]>TCN and GlobalConnect merged. Never heard of either company. Cloud somethingor other.
PGi, a publicly traded conferencing provider, was acquired by a fund management company, Siris Capital Group, LLC, for $1B <-- billion. Revenue in 2014 was $567M. Wainhouse suggests that the CITRIX spin-off of Grasshopper+Citrix's GoTo+OpenVoice would be worth about $600M.
Data center is hot. Now the UC&C space is heating up. It could be because there are no clear winners or dominant players yet. Certainly, West and NTT are big but they don't dominate. Neither does Vonage or any other UC company. There is plenty of room to consolidate and work towards domination.
Netwolves, a managed services provider, was acquired by a Health IT firm. "Vasomedical, Inc. today announced the acquisition of all assets of NetWolves, LLC and affiliates on May 29, 2015." [pr] I missed this one. Netwolves' "Fiscal 2013 and 2014 revenues were approximately $28 million and $30 million, respectively, and adjusted operating income was approximately $1.2 million and $1.4 million, respectively. Vasomedical completed the acquisition of all NetWolves assets on May 29, 2015, including all proprietary technology and intellectual properties, service provider and customer contracts, licenses, etc., for $18 million in cash and the assumption of certain liabilities, virtually all of which are operations related." That is a 14x multiple on income!!!!
]]>Formerly known as Thinking Phone Networks, ThinkingPhones is a Hosted UC company with $88 million in venture money. They used some of those funds to buy a video conferencing company, Fuze, to add video to their portfolio.
"Based in San Francisco with additional offices in Palo Alto and Seattle, Fuze helps distributed teams work across distances through HD-quality voice and video conferencing and content sharing across devices, desktops, and meeting rooms. More than 100,000 companies use Fuze to make meetings more meaningful, including Groupon, Starbucks, Macys.com, and Thoughtworks." [Y!]
"Prior to the acquisition, San Francisco-based Fuze raised $68.5 million!" Lot of combined VC money there. Let's hope the bet to add Fuze to the UC bundle will pay off in ThPh's "vision for unifying communication in the enterprise".
Apparently, it is a scale-able platform. "The Fuze team has built a powerful video conferencing platform utilized by more than 6.5 million users," added Derek Yoo, co-founder and CTO of ThinkingPhones. [pr]
This is ThPh's third acquisition in the past year. They bought Whaleback and Contactive.
"Within the first half of 2015, ThinkingPhones saw a 150 percent increase in net new customer sales over the first half of 2014. The company grew its physical presence, with new office locations in New York City; London; Paris; Copenhagen; Zurich; and Aveiro, Portugal as part of its continued global expansion strategy. With 300 new hires joining the company between January and September, the company also raised its total headcount to more than 550 employees globally." [pr] That is a lot of people!! 550 at $100K in rev per employee is at least $55M in annual revenue for ThPh.
Always nice to see M&A in the sector.
]]>And that is the consumer stuff filled with social and real time communications. What about the business customers Internet Traffic? What does it consist of? How much of it is real-time comms (voice, video, conferencing)?
Have they added UC&C? Are they collaborating with others in real-time via voice, web, video, screen sharing? Broadband may not be the answer to that kind of Internet activity.
Productivity gains are not about hours or minutes. Workers gain productivity in seconds, accumulated through out the day. Every screen refresh delay not only delays work, tying up the people on the call, but causes frustration that does not lend itself to productivity.
Just as your website has to load in less than 8 seconds, your business customers' LAN and Internet pipe have to be optimized for the work they are doing to see productivity gains.
Ask yourself: Why is Managed WLAN (or Wi-fi) gaining so much ground now? Because the speed, health and flexibility of the LAN has a direct impact on worker productivity.
Now shouldn't that conversation about cable versus DIA be easier?
]]>So what does a channel partner do when Gigabit is just $70?
You can try to sell it, but who wants to even do the paperwork for a $70 circuit?
Usually there is a triple-play bundle (even to businesses) for no more than $300. So what are you going to do?
You can educate the customer on the difference between best effort broadband and dedicated Internet access, what an SLA is and how vital the Internet is to her business. That is a starting point.
You can sell a backup circuit - 4G or fixed wireless or duopoly (cable/dsl).
You can talk about the Internet traffic. What is going over that pipe? VoIP, conferencing, video, SAAS, what? That will lead you to the many OTT apps that you can offer, like Hosted Exchange, Voice Powered Office365, Hosted PBX, mobile device management, CRM and so much more. However, to do that, you have to step away from network. You would have to leave the comfort of selling the replacement service that has been your security blanket since LD went away.
The funny thing is businesses are going to teh cloud. They are buying cloud -- just not from you. Change that. You don't have to be an expert on everything. You just have to get comfortable being uncomfortable and learning as you go. Trust in your Partners. Or go sell $70 broadband, but you better be selling 2 per day!!!
You could sell security or disaster recovery.
]]>Grasshopper is auto-attendant in the cloud for about 150K very small businesses. I am not certain that those 150K VSB do use or will use other Citrix products.
If you take this Citrix slogan: "Because in this new era, work is no longer a place - it's something you do anywhere inspiration strikes." Grasshopper is a good fit, allowing small businesses to be virtual.
The Citrix "vision inspires us to build mobile workspace solutions that give people new ways to work better with seamless and secure access to the apps, files and services they need on any device, wherever they go." The very essence of cloud services should be about this same vision.
last May, Citrix launched "Workspace Suite, its bundle of desktop virtualization, mobile device management and collaboration software", which was its push into Enterprise - the opposite of the Grasshopper buy. It will be a challenge to be all things to all businesses from VSB to Enterprise. Many companies try it and fail. See Cisco's acquisition of Linksys for an example.
[Good advice for people and companies.]
Earlier this year, Citrix "launched Workspace Cloud, a platform for delivering apps, data and desktops to any device through a Web browser." "Formerly called Citrix Workspace Services, Workspace Cloud will revolutionize the way access to apps, desktops, mobility and data is designed, delivered and managed," according to their blog. Once again, they pulled out all the marketing buzzwords to make it seem like this is everyone's answer to everything app and cloud. Horse Hockey. And apparently having products named similarly caused confusion: "The Suite is a bundle of products and Workspace Services is a delivery platform and control plane."
In January of 2015, "Citrix ... snapped up virtual storage purveyor Sanbolic. In doing so, it has completed its lineup of virtual infrastructure technology building blocks." Besides acquisitions, they have been losing a few key people -- a company in turmoil? Or a company growing fast?
This is just another cloud component for Citrix. The Grasshopper purchase is just one small step in the Hosted VoIP consolidation (much more is needed). It is interesting that it isn't a roll up play like Vonage made with Telesphere and Simple Signal. I'm waiting on Dell to buy one.
]]>Two studies out about SMB trends. One from Intermedia.Net late last year is around mobile trends. "68% of mobile device activations in 2014 supported iOS". The study speculates that secure apps is why it is so big. Did they forget how big the Apple fan-boy base is? Android was 26%; Windows at 3%; and Backberry 1%.
The other study was around SMB UC trends conducted by Hanover Research and sponsored by Windstream's Allworx company. The study "found that the top five phone features used most by SMBs are: 3-way calling (60 percent), intercom (42 percent), conference call bridges (41 percent), music on hold (40 percent) and calling other locations using extensions (37 percent)." [ChannelVision mag]
The most telling piece of data: "The vast majority of SMBs are unfamiliar with telecommunications terminology such as IP telephony, hosted PBX, IP PBX, virtual PBX, SIP trunks or Unified Communications." [cnn]
Another data set: Missing the mark with women buyers. "Who's really holding the purse strings?" (this sounds like Tom Peters!). "Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases in the US. And they're making the big decisions--choosing the cars, picking the cable providers, buying the technology, selecting the vacation destinations." [source: glg] [infographic on women buyers]
8x8 is moving upmarket. But then what ITSP doesn't want to sell over 50 seats per deal?
8x8 has invested in the indirect channel and an enterprise sales team to move upstream. It takes time and investment. It works slowly. 8x8 added some fuel to the fire with its latest announcement: 8x8 Helps Mid-Market and Enterprise Organizations Accelerate Their Migration to Cloud Communications With New 'Enterprise Suite' Package. It is a collection of new offerings that includes ""Elite Touch" customer on-boarding and support methodology through implementation" [professional installation] and "application of "Virtual Office Analytics" to improve business processes and outcomes" [analytics - the thing that Panterra added and a reason BSFT bought Leonid - the next buzzword for enterprise, replacing the very tired term, "Big Data".]
Microsoft launched Skype for Business at another show [EC]. It was supposed to scare everyone as Microsoft will now voice-enable their UC&C suite. Doug Mohney writes, "Everyone else in the UC world needs to start to worry if they aren't partnering with Microsoft, because the company is not fooling around."
Not everyone is a Microsoft shop. I have seen Microsoft implement Lync as a PBX; it often goes sideways. Who is going to install all of this SIP capability?
I saw how Skype tried to take over my laptop to Skype enable click-to-call - ick!! Memory suck too. Considering that VZ announced global expansion of its UC&C product - and it is powered by Cisco, I think it safe to say that like everything else this will be noise for a while and things will go back to normal. You still have dropped calls. VoLTE has Caller ID issues. SIP calls are still sketchy 10 years later. I am selling as much TDM as I sell SIP. Main reason for SIP: save money... still... 10 years later. Microsoft doesn't change that.
Doug continues, "Skype for Business means Microsoft is deploying the ability to provide all the IT and phone needs for businesses--a capability that Tier 1 phone providers haven't mastered for the SMB world, and only have done so begrudgingly for the enterprise world. ITSPs need to think long and hard about what happens to their SMB customers when Microsoft starts flooding the market with a one-bill option for services." What it really means: (1) every ITSP needs to have better Positioning (call me!); (2) Execution of implementation is Everything now; (3) Retention; and (4) what do Microsoft Partners do now? With MS billing everything? Again who will install and maintain this? OH! And who will patch all the security holes????????????
Now if they would promise me HD Voice everywhere and FoIP would work due to an truly inter-connected T38 network .... that would be something.
Pretty interesting quote from a struggling ILEC/CLEC: "Communication and collaboration are keys to success in today's always-connected business world. The focus is not only on connecting employees, but also on reaching customers through the most efficient platforms," said Joseph Harding, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Windstream. [source]
]]>