WPP is one of the largest advertising and marketing firms in the world. They are a conglomerate of a number of acquisitions of agencies globally. WPP was hit with a ransonware hack that disabled its network (see HERE and HERE). It shut them down.
No one think it will happen to them, but the ease at which hackers are able to assault ANY computer or Internet-connected device makes EVERYONE susceptible. This gets exacerbated by 4 things that are easy but users are too lazy to do: (1) have a strong password policy; (2) update operating systems as well as anti-virus software and RUN it weekly; (3) back-up data; and (4) stop opening attachments!
You should be on top of your customers today pushing those 3 things: password policy; Managed IT or at the least anti-virus software; and cloud backup. Go make some money while this is still fresh. Or go help your customers so they aren't helpless tomorrow!
BTW, this would qualify as Disaster Recovery
]]>If I was starting my telecom agency today, what would I do?
When I started in 1999, I was selling basically one product (Wholesale DSL to ISPs). That was my entry drug of choice. It led to frame relay, ATM, IP Transit, DS1/DS3 and PRIs. But it was a single offering to a very targeted market. Most of those clients from 1999-2001 are still with me!
Certainly an agent starting out is going to be offering bandwidth in all its colors. However, I would build a multi-vendor bundle to sell to a specific audience. I am a big fan of vertical sales. Anyone can be a Generalist, but being a Specialist pays better. How many GPs (general practitioners) are left in medicine or law?
And being a Specialist doesn't mean that you have to turn away other business that comes to you, it just means that you have Focus. You have a target to aim at. You have an audience that you can get to know and develop a message for.
It is far easier to market a specific bundle aimed at a target vertical than it is to create a marketing message aimed at the generic masses.
Targeted marketing is cheaper. Easier to send email or postcards to every ISP in the BellSouth region than to target every SMB in a state.
One bundle I have been working on is the Verizon Wireless One Talk service with 4G backup, a Cradlepoint router, FiOS and a Square POS (point of sale) system. It is a targeted package - Retail. It allows for add-on sales: smartphones, video surveillance, email or Office365 and web hosting. You could also offer credit card processing and PCI DSS Compliance via EarthLink. You could go bigger with managed wi-fi. There are many add-ons, but the original 4 component bundle is where to start.
The bundle contains the essential ingredients of a small retail shop: broadband, backup (because retail can't make money without 100% uptime on the Internet for credit card processing and digital phone service), wireless network, phone system and cash register. Signing up with SYNNEX and any of the Alliance Partners would get you all the access you need to bundle that - and make commissions.
Anyway that is how I would start today. Chasing Verticals with a multi-vendor solution that I designed for them.
]]>After 15 years, 2000+ providers can only take a 28% handhold in the market?
The growth rate of Hosted PBX (HPBX/UC/UCaaS) has always been a hopeful bad guess. And it will continue to do so because too many people, companies and dollars have been invested thus far for any analyst to turn on the sector.
There are 4 major problems with the UC Market.
One, PBX sales have declined about 3% per year. Even Avaya going bankrupt isn't going to speed that up. Not only do people trust boxes; they are cheaper in the long run. Single location businesses, which is most of them, don't have a PBX problem that UC solves. There is a current Product/Market MisMatch that needs to be examined.
Mobile UC may get more traction. Or a simple PBX like Dialpad or Fone.do. Gary Kim writes that the market may be too small. At ARPU of $400, it takes a bunch of sales to move a needle for a company like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast or Charter.
Two, I wrote this last week. Any 15 year old product needs a re-fresh or re-think. We are overdue for a Re-Think. Slack was a re-think, but that strays to the edges of what UC is. So does Cloud Contact Center. And these companies want to be everything for 1-1000 employees. This isn't Pasta or Rice. This is technology.
UC is Change. People hate change. The Channel doesn't sell Change; we take orders on replacement services. Harsh but mainly true. There are exceptions of course, but the general rule is that agents are transactional. Even Inter-Connects aren't excited to go sell a cloud service. MSPs will if it is white-label and can be bundled into their package, but that falls into POTS Replacement more than a full-blown UC deployment.
Three, HPBX has 2 camps of buyers: POTS replacement sold as cheap as possible and actual UCaaS. Where do you think most of the market is? Right, cheap VoIP.
Now if I am buying cheap VoIP, am I also going to pay for a backup circuit or SD-WAN or any other service enhancement or assurance? Unlikely -- or I wouldn't be buying cheap cable broadband and the cheapest OTT voice!!!
If the buyer spends more on bandwidth, has a backup circuit, they are likely going to buy UC as BC/DR and that isn't cheap VoIP.
The fourth Big Problem: There are far too many providers! Telarus represents at least 37 HPBX vendors. Other masters have at least 25. How does anyone differentiate/ stand out/ position in a marketplace where the cloud broker has a choice of 2000+ providers?
This becomes a problem for the providers who enter into a Price War (seats cratering to below $15 each) and a SPIFF War, where providers are literally buying sales.
One of the most successful HPBX providers, 8x8, is up for sale. This move comes after a recent re-branding as a Global UCaaS provider.
Are the owners (the 8x8 founders still own most of the voting stock) looking to exit? Or is it that the machine to keep bringing in 20% growth quarter after quarter is grinding down? I just don't know who would pay $1.5 Billion for 8x8. VZ payed $1.8 for XO which owned fiber assets. WIND payed $1.1B in an all stock deal for EarthLink, who also had a bunch of fiber. Fiber gets a bigger multiple than VoIP.
The other thought is that what if $300M is about all the B2B annual revenue you can get?
From a recent discussion about Amazon Chime: there are approximately 100 million phone/conferencing lines in North America. If Amazon Chime with Vonage can hit a 5% share of this market, that equates to 5 million subs. At $5/seat/month, that is $300M incremental revenue opportunity for Vonage. That would be a needle mover for most UC Provider, considering 8x8 is at $225M in annual revenue now.
The emphasis has always been on multi-location and mid-market. That's why "41% of larger enterprises are using cloud UC services." Now everyone is focused there (upmarket). However, the bulk of the businesses are single location small business (20 million of them). That means a new product bundle is needed to attract this crowd. Many thing that this sector will be mobile only with an auto-attendant in the cloud.
When you look at the large number of messaging apps, at some point, one of them - Slack, Messenger, WeChat, HipChat - will hit the right bundle of functions to steal mass appeal. Not yet, but maybe soon.
]]>Microsoft has been far behind AWS but then they started later too. This study shows that AWS has 45% share of public cloud infrastructure market -- more than Microsoft, Google, IBM combined.
Amazon launched a conferencing service called Chime.aws. They launched it with Vonage Business. Why? Unless the old Nexmo service is the back-end for the WebRTC voice and video and screen share. Vonage has 4 platforms - consumer VoIP; Vocalocity small biz; Broadsoft and Nexmo. I think they would have conferencing covered.
Amazon offers VPS and Hosting too. They also are a sales agent for Frontier and Comcast.
ABRY Partners owns StackPath which acquired Highwinds, a Florida based CDN company. StackPath will now offer secure CDN on top of firewall and DDoS mitigation services.
Dell announced that is unifying the Dell and EMC partner programs. Dell used partner feedback to make it simple, predictable and profitable. It is the best of both programs, says Dell. "It Preserves best of legacy Dell and EMC programs to reward partners who sell the full portfolio, including services, grow their business and win net new customers." One characteristic: "One deal registration program and a Zero Tolerance policy for deal conflicts."
Datto has acquired OpenMesh to further its pivot to be a premiere partner for MSPs. "The Open Mesh wireless access point and ethernet switching technologies will join the existing Datto Networking Appliance to create the Datto Networking line of products, optimized for small-to-medium sized businesses and delivered exclusively through Datto's global network of Managed Service Provider partners." I guess it will compete with Ruckus, Meraki (Cisco) and ADTRAn's managed wi-fi solutions.
In an interesting vertical move, "Evolve IP has partnered with Nimble Storage to provide healthcare organizations with on-premises Nimble Storage flash arrays, supported by HIPAA-compliant and HITRUST-audited hybrid cloud, cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions from Evolve IP." [channelvision]
]]>I think about this in terms of cyber-security and disaster planning. No one wants to spend on it. (They don't like buying insurance either.) But when (not if anymore) disaster strikes in the form of outages, hacks, breaches, malware/ransomware, severe weather, floods, tornadoes, etc. many businesses are unprepared and fail.
Personally I don't know how to change someone's bias. It's like the worldview that on-premise hardware is better than cloud.
]]>Krebs experienced an IOT botnet attack earlier this month. An ISP client was under two DDoS attacks in August.
These attacks are increasing in frequency -- and are not going away. This will be normal business soon.
Email and iPhone hacks are in the news.
What are you doing to protect your clients?
Quite a few data centers offer a DDoS Mitigation service. (So does Level3).
There are a number of managed security service offerings - from firewall to IDS to UTM* - available from a number of providers.
In a time when bandwidth pricing is decreasing -- and customers want to spend less -- someone needs to bring up the topic of security and redundancy. Why not you?
*Intrusion Detection Service and Unified Threat Management
]]>This year I think every major carrier had an outage that lasted more than two hours. Some lasted all day. Some were regional. Some were nationwide.
Facebook, twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! mail, Outlook/Hotmail, Twitch, Slack, Playstation, Xbox Live - we live online. The new normal is not even 4 nines. Four 9's - 99.99% Uptime - is 1 hour of downtime per year. However, 99.9% means 8.76 hours of down time per year. We are in a 3-9's world.
It is too expensive to build a resilient network. And the carriers have learned that customers want cheap. With cable, they learned that Best Effort was "good enough". Who taught them that? Customers did. They buy unprotected circuits. They don't pay extra for protection or failover. BC/DR is for utilities. Even businesses in the Gulf region that survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005 can't be bothered with DR/BC. Not all. But most.
We only buy insurance when it is absolutely required by law.
Carriers also learned that a service level agreement (SLA) looked good to the buyer. It was a check box on the RFP. Yet the carriers know that paying out for an outage (just ask Frontier in FL, TX and Cali) isn't all that expensive. The most a customer can get back is a month's billing amount. The usual credit is 1/30 of the monthly bill. At $300 that is $10.
SD-WAN will help some businesses with back-up / failover, if they are willing to put a 4G or other broadband circuit in place as insurance. If they are willing to pay for the SD-WAN.
The funny thing is that no one thinks about Redundancy until there is an outage. Then they are peeved, yelling, calling it to be put on hold for hours. To be put on hold so they can vent and call back later to fight for a credit. Yippee!!
With all our data and applications in the cloud, Internet is as vital as oxygen or electricity. Down time means that no one is doing much of anything except Solitaire. How expensive is that?
Right now, Florida is staring into a category 4 hurricane named Matthew. Water, bread, gas, wood, batteries and other supplies are scarce. No one prepares. No one thinks ahead. Panic mode is just so unproductive.
Think about the cost of a 3 hour outage. No one does but it is our job as the Trusted Advisor to point at days like today and say: See?! Let's put a plan in place for this.
Disaster Recovery as a Service is a big deal especially for data center businesses. Right now, companies along the East Coast of the US are wishing they had planned better and bought some DR insurance.
Stay safe out there. Plan better starting tomorrow.
]]>Do business consider this? Not often enough. As a telecom consultant, it is my job to point it out to the business decision maker. How much is an hour of down time worth?
Last week, Comcast suffered a massive voice outage nationally. Windstream, CenturyLink and others have all had widely reported outages this year. Outages happen more often now because of a best effort mentality. No more five-nines.
Hacks happen every day. Unprotected computers are infected almost immediately. No one thinks it will happen to them. It is the hurdle in selling security (and insurance). Why worry? It won't happen here.
Ramsonware is scary. It is occurring more often. A smart backup can alleviate some of the hardship.
Business Continuity (BC/DR) is becoming more important for businesses every day if they recognize it. One indicator: do they utilize battery backups everywhere? Then start the conversation there.
SD-WAN will solve some security, fail-over and BC issues. It might be time to learn about how.
On the carrier side, AT&T is going deep into SDN and NFV. AT&T is releasing their SDN software, ECOMP, to open source. They are talking about being able to use white box CPE globally. Via 4G that CPE will download the necessary software to be a router or firewall or what-have-you.
TelePacific Rolls Out Advanced SD-WAN Connectivity in Nationwide Pilot.
SD-WAN is fueling 150% growth at Aryaka.
Verizon is partnering with Viptela to offer a hosted SD-WAN service.
Masergy, XO, CenturyLink and Mettel - even Vonage - have all added SD-WAN overlay services. Don't you think you should know what they are when your mid-market clients ask?
Join us for another Blab! about SD-WAN on 8/3 at Noon ET.
]]>If you read this blog last month, then you know first up will be SD-WAN. This technology is going to change things for carriers and customers. This tech will allow customers to have monitoring, analytics, failover and a view into their WAN. It won't matter what pipe - 4G, 5G, fixed wireless, copper, fiber, cable modem - the customer will have a layer of monitoring and transparency that wasn't available before.
SD-WAN is going to allow even small offices to have disaster recovery with a choice of broadband - DSL, cable or 4G. Packet shaping, load balancing and more.
We looked at TelePacific, Velocloud, Escessa and Aryaka last month. EarthLink rolled it out (Mettel did too) with talk about one box (one appliance on the customer premise) will be the router, firewall, switch, et al. Simplifying the borders with SD-WAN. It all goes back to the SDN control panel at the carrier. If it all rolls out as planned, this will be the next Integrated T1 for CLECs.
Monitoring circuits is in. A couple of master agencies have bought in. AireSpring offers AireNMS (monitoring) for its circuits. SD-WAN will provide that built-in.
CenturyLink launched something that looks like SD-WAN (and they talk about an orchestration layer which is SDN talk). They launched "Runner, a configuration management and orchestration service that works across hybrid-IT architectures and diverse cloud environments." [CPonline]
SMS will come up often - in Push-to-talk technology as well as on landlines. This will extend the usefulness of copper for the ILECs. SMS will also be a part of the contact center platform. Companies will want customer service reps to be able to handle SMS/text as well as social media communications. We just saw this with MITEL's features PR. Vonage buying Nexmo (and twilio set to IPO) suggest that SMS via API is growing.
Take text and add AI (artificial intelligence) for businesses to automate answering frequently asked questions, like hours, directions, parking, daily specials, events, etc. There are a few companies in this including Thomas Howe's KISST and a former ITEXPO exhibitor, Biztexter.
Not many folks jumped on the MDM (mobile device management_ wagon. Well, after MDM leader, AirWatch, was acquired by VMware some were skeptical. In 2014, there were signs that it would change desktop management for laptops and iPads (see here). Next a consulting firm, CapGemini, looked at what they had to help them design this product called Workspace One . It takes the BYOD mess and adds some security and organization to it by delivering and managing any app on any device via enterprise mobility management. Think about the way you can sign-in across Android devices to see the same apps. Kind of like that mixed with desktop-as-a-service type thinking. CapGemini white labels it (see pdf). I wonder who else will?
Congress just got hit with Ransonware. Cyber-security and data backup will become critical for businesses. XO took a step towards this with its XO Site Securitythat integrates firewall and threat intelligence technology from Fortinet and managed security services from BAE Systems. (No idea why XO is NOW rolling out new products. They will be Verizon this time next year!)
BitTitan knows that Microsoft will own a good chunk of the business market with Azure, Skype for Business, Office365 and more (There are a number of Platinum and Gold Microsoft partners beefing up their Office365 practice now.). They added an Upsell engine! Plus are rolling out OneDrive for Off365. Microsoft just announced that they will revamp Sharepoint to compete with Slack and Dropbox.
SLACK. (That is all.)
]]>The East coast show is all cloud with many booths of with unknown logos. Granite, Bullseye, AT&T, Verizon, Windstream and, ooh, Sprint were the only telcos boothing it. I think that the agents may not care that much for the topics and the constant lectures from the stage of how they have to sell cloud or die. (I know I am.) For example, the topic sponsored by Broadsoft: The Death of PSTN.
There was a small invasion from global players with Telstra and Colt at the show, along with Portugal's IPBrick (pitching an open source Office365 product). Interesting to note that Cardi Prezzi and Carl Grivner were at PacNet when Telstra bought. Prezzi is still at Telstra Enterprise. Grivner is the next CEO of Colt.
The CLECs were talking (to me) about Managed MPLS with fail-over to broadband. Both Level3 and AireSpring spent some time telling me about this option being available now. While several people think MPLS is on the way out, both carriers said that MPLS is stil a hot seller.
Considering that a utility in CT still runs a frame relay network, I am guessing that all those pronouncements of things dying are just hopeful wishes.
]]>ALM owns a couple of dating sites, most notably AshleyMadison.com which has the tag line: Life is short; have an affair. The hackers were mad that ALM is basically scamming its users. About 90% of the members are male; many of the female profiles are fake; and ALM charge you a pretty penny to delete your account.
The hackers gave ALM 30 days to take down the sites or the data would be released. They didn't - and it was. Last night.
"The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible--likely?--that you will know someone in or affected by this dump," John Herman wrote.
On twitter one message stood out to me: Journalists, remember that you are outing people - and suicide is a real possibility. Take care with this info.
What lessons can we learn from this hack?
Nothing is private - at all. Ever. Not Snapchat and it's disappearing images. (They don't disappear. They are stored.)
I am often amazed at the level of dumb in this country. Using government email addresses for this account instead of Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail?
"Here were millions of people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people (even if a great number of the emails are junk, or attached to casual gawkers, the leak claims to contain nine million transaction records). This hack could be ruinous--personally, professionally, financially--for them and their families," Herman states.
Keep in mind: "Readers should understand that if this dump does turn out to be legit, that just finding someone's name, email address and other data in the archives doesn't mean that person was a real user. As the above-mentioned Graham Cluley points out, AshleyMadison never bothered to verify the email addresses given to it by its users." noted from Krebs Security.
Companies do not take security seriously. It is overhead. It is a pain in the ass. They get a $100 million cyber-security insurance policy to cover approximately 65% of the Target hack.
Ubiquiti Networks was the victim of a cyber-heist to the tune of $46M. That was a social engineering hack foremost. What company even spends a little bit of money on security training and password management?
It is amazing how much data an e-commerce site collects. ALM had 37M records consisting of billing addresses, emails, passwords, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, payment history, phone numbers, credit card info, security questions, sexual preferences, and website activity. Identity theft and blackmail material for certain.
In an age of CryptoLocker ransonware, viruses, malware, key loggers, and even your ISP logging your every move, privacy is an illusion. In the name of technology, we have traded in any privacy at all for toys and convenience.
We have to be smarter about our online activity, especially Millennials and younger.
You would think that after this - and Target, the federal government and Anthem - it would be easier to sell security services. Unfortunately, everyone thinks it won't happen to them. News flash: the list of un-hacked sites is probably smaller than the list of hacked ones. Many of these hacks went undetected for up to 15 months!
Right now everyone should be changing passwords, but they won't. Companies should be scheduling password and security training, but they won't. IT Directors should be checking to see if default accounts are still active and unchanged on systems and gear. People should be updating operating systems and anti-virus software and at the very least running a malware scan, but they won't. This is why we have these issues.
Lastly, backup your critical data - to dvd or flashdrive or any of the numerous inexpensive online drives. Either take actions like these now - or pay for it later. And later is coming. You are not immune.
SIDEBAR
Troy Hunt has good read and a way to check if your email is in the data and you were pwned.
]]>CenturyLink grabbed Cognilytics
After 4 years of partnering with C-Link (Savvis) for DR-as-a-service, CenturyLink decided to acquire DataGardens. DG also white-labels its DRaaS to BCM and others. DG's CEO, Geoff Hayward, blogged about it here.
There were 3 other transactions in the cloud data storage and backup space. That sector was in some need of consolidation since the last two years saw some big failures. Interesting to note that these transactions involve companies with a specific target market. They wrote a bestseller.
eFolder acquired Cloudfinder [slide deck]. eFolder was founded in 2002 as a folder syncing service, sold primarily via channel partners. "Cloudfinder products provide backup, instant full-text search, restoration and reporting for business-to-business (B2B) cloud services, including Office 365, Google Apps and Salesforce." That is its differentiation. (You have to have one - or a lot of customers.)
"Cloudfinder is the only company that provides a unified backup and instant full-text search of cloud data across differing cloud services. From one user interface, businesses can backup, search, restore and get a data overview across multiple cloud services." [press release]
EMC bought Spanning and 2 other companies to add to its cloud portfolio, according to this press release. "Spanning is a leading provider of subscription-based backup and recovery for "born in the cloud" applications and data. Spanning solutions prevent business interruption due to data loss in Google Apps and Salesforce.com (a solution for Microsoft Office 365 will be available in the first half of 2015)." Lots of jockeying to add backup and data protection to what seems to be the big 3 business cloud services - Google Apps, Salesforce and Office365.
Carbonite will acquire MailStore for about $20 million. This acquisition provides Carbonite two things: (1) global expansion assitsance; and (2) email archiving and indexing solutions. This is a like adding fries to a hot dog for Carbonite (being the hot dog). Backup is generic, but the actual data to backup spans many areas - services, desktops, laptops, mobile devices, email servers, cloud apps, etc. I haven't heard of one service that handles it all.
According to CP Online, "Datto on Dec. 11 may have ignited that trend with the acquisition of Massachusetts-based Backupify." Like Carbonite, Datto is a hybrid backup and disaster recovery platform. Backupify is claiming that this will create the first total protection platform. A reminder from them that "data protection plans must be as fluid as the information flowing in and out of the companies that rely on them. As more critical data continues to move to the cloud, companies will demand more diversity as they decide which workloads to protect and where."
"With more than 2 million business customers and nearly 4 petabytes of data under management, Backupify is the largest automated data protection solution for the most popular online services including Salesforce, Google Apps, Smartsheet, Facebook, Twitter and more." It's unique advantage being the SaaS data protection - and its size.
]]>83% of Organizations Lack a Business Continuity Plan 1 Year After Hurricane Sandy. But then most people (A) don't think it can happen to them; (B) didn't learn from 9/11 and Katrina either (including our government and FEMA); and (C) people generally do not think climate change is real.
You aren't alone as a business owner or exec for not doing anything. "The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced action to strengthen the reliability and resiliency of 911 communication network during major disasters. Widespread outages and disruptions to 911 services in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions impacted more than 3.6 million people," writes Appy Geek. And this after an extensive study of 911 comms after both 9/11 AND Katrina. We study it, but don't execute on the improvements. What does that say?
Why do you need a disaster recovery plan or business continuity planning? Because when your customer files get destroyed by water and wind, what is left of your business? Not much.
"Hurricanes are, at minimum, a triple threat, and can damage lives and property through rainfall, through storm surge, and due to their powerful winds," writes Mother Jones. "Sandy is just the beginning."
First tip for Disaster Preparedness: Expect the Unexpected. Ever data centers - designed to withstand hurricanes - couldn't prepare for the flooding caused by storm surges on Oct. 29, 2012. (See stories at DCK).
These 19 Shocking Images Show Hurricane Sandy's Devastating Impact On The Northeast. A year later with a federal budget of almost $10 billion dollars and most areas are not yet recovered. A year! Could your business survive a year of uncertainty?
Interesting Businessweek headline: "Main Street Isn't Investing Much in Post-Sandy Upgrades". Could it be that the insurance money hasn't come in yet? Or as Businesweek writes: "Following Hurricane Sandy's more than $50 billion in damages (pdf) to U.S. businesses, homes, and public infrastructure, more business might be expected to follow suit. But the scale of the problems are often too big for business owners and require government planning."
At any rate, as a business owner or top executive, you have to do some planning in case this happens again. At the very least, backup as much customer and business critical data as possible offsite and far away.
Next put a communications plan in place. The Red Cross used twitter. The NJ 911 center used Five9. Let people know how to contact the execs in the case of an emergency.
The federal government has business continuity planning guides. A really good telecom consultant can help you design a BC plan. Every plane ride you listen to the safety instructions despite how few crashes there are. Every hotel room has a fire escape route map on the door. In school, we had fire drills. There is nothing wrong with planning for a disaster. You may in fact learn a few things while in the planning stages.
tw telecom fared pretty well during the storm, but even twt took lessons away. "being aware of where our equipment is being placed in buildings, how best to bring fuel into the city in the case of a disaster, and ideas on even better preparing for the next time; getting to that next level. Because, as much as we don't like to think about it, an event like this will happen again."
Finally, a good read about the aftermath and resettlement.
]]>Last week one of the nation's largest carriers experienced an outage that affected tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Voice over IP users, maybe more. At least one carrier employee dubbed the outage "catastrophic" yet the news media shrugged. While not exactly a reliable news source, even social media, which is at least a quick indicator of newsworthy events, hardly noticed.
How can it be that a "catastrophic" outage that is so far reaching never made the news? Perhaps it is because it was a busy news week covering an actual catastrophe, the tragic Boston Marathon bombing. If this had been Google or Facebook or Twitter, however, it probably would've made headlines. People that were impacted by the outage certainly noticed, though. Maybe we've just become jaded to "typical" outages that are not caused by nefarious acts of hacking, and maybe vast network outages are the new normal.
The unofficial cause of the outage (the official reason for outage (RFO) has not been released, at the time this is being written) was "the result of a DNS issue" which prevented calls from the carrier's PSTN gateways from completing for nearly two hours. The same source that called the outage "catastrophic" also suggested that this DNS issue may have actually been a denial of service attack; it seems unlikely, even if this is true - and at the moment it is pure hearsay - that it will be included in the RFO. Why? If you were to Google that carrier + DDOS you would find that there is a complete business practice focused on DDOS protection.
DNS is a particularly curious cause since some (many?) of the carrier's customers and service providers connect via IP addresses, not hostnames, and therefore DNS services are not needed. So, perhaps this had more to do with routing of calls within the carrier's network as opposed to access routes to competitive VoIP providers and enterprises. Whatever the root cause is determined to be, it is clear that there is still work to be done to prevent these kinds of problems. Is this the new normal? I don't think so. While it is still not infallible and problems with core components and services, such as DNS, can have a significant impact, a distributed VoIP network offers a greater level of fault tolerance than traditional services ever could. And it will only get better as we learn from these outages.
]]>M5 had the highest ARPU (average invoice per customer) when ShoreTel bought them - at $2000. Most other cloud communications providers hint at lower ARPU - maybe around $1000 per customer. However, 8x8 and Cbeyond are public and their cloud ARPU sits at between $200 and $250.
When you examine the "cloud services" of many carriers, it is just Hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and maybe some backup. That's $9 + $10 + $20 = $39 per user per month. Add in a Hosted PBX seat at $30 and you are now at $69 per month. For 20 employees, that's not a bad billing invoice for Agents, but it is also an unlikely sale. What small business will pay $1380 per month for phone and email? A PRI at $550 plus maybe $100 for the PBX lease and $50 per YEAR for Google has you covered. Add in some Dropbox and Bingo!
This isn't to discourage you. It's to put a pin in the hype balloon, which is starting to annoy me.
That leaves Agents chasing 20-99 employees - since that is a majority of the businesses in the US. Let's call the average 40. If you sell that business the full boat: Internet, Hosted voice, email and backup - the ARPU is worth it. The sales cycle will be longer. The deployment will require more input and project management than Agents are used to. (In fact, it is more than most carriers have ever had to do!!!) Post-sales support will also be required. So overall, it is a lot more work for a stickier client with more ARPU than you are used to. Are you up for that challenge?
Let's go back to the 8x8 example at $256 of ARPU. That's about a 9 employee shop. So you sell them 8x8 voice, cable modem AND another broadband service (like DSL or 4G or fixed wireless). You offer them Google Apps for SMB via NeoNova for some small change. Add in some Mozy Pro back-up (or Carbonite or other backup service that pays you). Next you try to get the cell phones - there has to be a couple that are corporate owned -- for a few more dollars. Don't forget the 4G data plan.
So you wrapped up the Internet Access, mobility, voice, some DR (disaster recovery), backup, email and office suite. After that, what software do they use? How about Conferencing? Do you see? You have to grab the whole wallet (or you can't make much money).
It has to become a lot like McD's. What do they do? A call center hits you first in the drive-thru with, "Would you like to try our ______ special today?" No. "okay. Order when you are ready." But don't forget "Do you want fries with that? or can we Super Size that for you?" It sounds cheesy but you are going to have to do it.
CenturyLink, XO, MegaPath and quite a few other carriers offer transit, Hosted voice and cloud services. It will all be on one bill, with one carrier to blame, with one throat to choke. It makes it easier to sell --- check boxes on an order form or site survey.
You better hurry because the MSP's like MindShift and others are already out there doing this.
When you consider that Parallels AS platform allows hosting companies - like Intermedia.Net - to sell, bill and deploy these services (Hosted PBX, email, storage, office) with a click on an online order page, spend this month - the last month of 2012 - deciding what your plan is going to be for 2013. While I hate the hype, many of your competitors are already targeting your customers. Selling them a T1 will be easy after they sell them VDI or backup or Hosted PBX. Then what do you do?
Again, you have to do it but I wanted you to have a realistic view of what it was going to be like. You have vacuum up the services - all of them - heck, sell them office supplies if someone will pay you for it! Managed Print anyone ;)
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