Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

hosted uc

M5 Bought by Shoretel

February 2, 2012

The Trouble with UC Sales

January 23, 2012

In a recent study, titled IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications Voice Infrastructure 2011-2012 Vendor Analysis, IDC analyst Rich Costell wrote that "Customers still struggle to justify the deployment of UC and calculate its overall ROI." The conclusion: "educating potential customers is critical" to UC sales.



"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein.

The transition to selling UC will need to be done with first educating the sales channels. I still hear cost savings as the first reason to sell VoIP.





Another Broadsoft Merger

January 21, 2012

In a surprise move (to me anyway), Megapath acquired IP5280 Communications, a Colorado ITSP. Both Megapath and IP5280 utilize Broadsoft, so that will make some of the transition easy. (And likely was a factor in the acquisition decision.) IP5280 had 1000 customers. Megapath, a combination of Speakeasy, Covad and Megapath, has 62,000.

And So The New Year Starts

January 2, 2012

NY's Broadsoft based Hosted VoIP Provider, Stage 2 Networks, started the new year with the acquisition of the Hosted VoIP Division of Consolidated Technologies, Inc., a New York City area Avaya partner. Stage 2 needed the growth is my take from the PR comments from CEO Joe Gillette. There will be more of this in 2012, because there are too many VoIP Providers and most have very little growth. This transaction is similar to Telovations grabbing FeatureTel. It costs money to run a Broadsoft.

The Cellular Battle

November 28, 2011

I don't mean the AT&T-T-Mobile merger, although that is just one battle in the war for cellular supremacy. (Other battles are Sprint with Clearwire, Sprint with the cablecos and the MVNO model.)

"Former T-Mobile CMO Denny Post says carriers should focus on retention, rather than relentless promotions aimed at new sign-ups." Post says that it is the end of the New-to-Wireless Customer Era and that cellcos must re-think customer care.

Post continues, "It is going to become an absolute competitive scrap battle, [because] any customer is going to have to come from somewhere else."

Can I Have Siri Without the iPhone?

November 2, 2011

In this TMC article, Tammy Wolf writes about a few hot tech trends. This one is surprising.

The iPhone 4S' Siri and IVR technology: One of the most talked-about features on the all-new iPhone 4S, the virtual assistant application Siri makes it possible for smartphone users to perform everyday tasks only using the sound of their voice. Using interactive voice response (IVR) technology, which has long been used by contact centers and enterprises for customer assistance, applications like Siri are designed to remind you about important meetings, help you draft e-mails and place calls, and basically function as your "co-pilot." With similar applications continuing to pop up, the recent emergence of an Android knock-off called "Iris, and Siri's potential functionality on the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch, it's looking like IVR may become a permanent staple in the design of smartphones.

4 Random Thoughts from a Telecom Show

October 28, 2011

Here are 4 random thoughts from the STC (Society of Telecom Consultants) today.

The oil industry looks at green. When you are doing a comparison between Hosted PBX and Premise based PBX, remember that when you are moving hardware to cloud, so the premise saves on power, A/C, battery, and other stuff, which also means that on Cloud Communications means that the electric consumption is moved to a shared environment. It's a Green effort.

It's Monday So Lots Happened

October 17, 2011

Polycom bought Vivu, a video collaboration company, to help Polycom push it's Presence gear. Video, video, video. Yet I never have video calls or video call requests. To me, I wish you would work on the phone part.

The Panel of 5

October 11, 2011

How does an agent distinguish between five CLEC's if the channel heads of those five companies spend much of an hour saying, "I agree" and "What she said".

That's what happened at the carrier executive panel at the Microcorp One-on-One event last night. Donna Wenk, SVP at PAETEC; Blake Wetzel, VP at CenturyLink; Mike Jerich, VP of Global Crossing and now Level3; Cardi Prinzi, EVP at EarthLink; and Carolyn Rehling, Regional VP of Sales at Sprint sat on a panel as Brad Miehl, CEO of master agency Microcorp, asked about plans for the Channel, products and what we might see in the Industry in the near term.

Everyone said MPLS and SIP -- oh, and Cloud - would be core products in 2012 - even Sprint, who mentioned its global MPLS.



Metaswitch is Blowing Up

October 6, 2011

I know that the M Forum was last week, but the news is tumbling out of Metaswitch faster than I can read it. It started at CPExpo when EarthLink Business confirmed that it was going Meta despite buying STS which was a Sylantro shop. Deltacom and ONE Comm had a lot of Metaswitches lying around (mostly unused.

Optimum Lightpath (Cablevision) rolled out Next-Gen Hosted PBX for the mid-market and enterprise.

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