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)."
]]>First up, Blue Coat is selling itself to Symantec for $4.65 Billion. The cyber-security software company was going to go public via an IPO, but chose the private sale route, which seemed a safer bet for the PE firm, Bain Capital, that bought Blue Coat in 2015 for $2.4B and financed acquisitions to bolster the product portfolio to annual revenues of $598 Million. Blue Coat lost $289 million in those same 12 months. Good deal for Symantec, who sold its Veritas data storage unit to the Carlyle Group for $7.4 billion earlier this year.
BitTitan, the cloud services enablement specialist, has announced that it has closed a $15 million round of Series A financing led by TVC Capital, according to Channel Vision mag.
Speaking of IPO, twilio filed for one. VoIP Logic has an interesting take on it here.
Two Rhode Island based IT firms merge. "Carousel Industries, a leader in communication and network technologies, professional and managed services and cloud solutions, today announced its intent to acquire Atrion, Inc., a leading IT services firm specializing in security, productivity and collaboration, unified communications, networking, applications and integrations and data center solutions." This kind of PR is annoying to me because no one - even with 1300 employees - can be a "leader" in every aspect of IT and comms. And most mergers don't even come close to 1+ 1 = 3. Rarely do you get 1+1=2. It is usually 1+1=1.
Now for the big news: Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash. I have no idea why everyone is calling this a real-time comms project. The adoption of Slack changed everything. You can see it in how other projects have pivoted or added features, like containers, groupware, video and voice calling.
To me this seems more like a continuation of efforts to be a portal for employees that Sharepoint started. As Microsoft works on Sharepoint revisions (to look more like Slack?), they have to be thinking of ways to compete with Facebook and the myriad social networks that are taking up eyeballs, video and chatting away from telcos and enterprise communication systems.
Slack's loudest benefit is the reduction in email, which means less time people spend in Outlook. Cisco Spark will have people doing everything from a single GUI (in theory). That means Office365 is just one of the integrated services.
Do you need MS Office suite if your resume is on LinkedIn, docs are shared on a collab platform, databases are in the cloud, and contacts are on your phone?
No one wants Windows 10 and its all seeing activity tracking. Add that to LinkedIn and MS will know an awful lot about a lot of people. Almost as much as Google and Facebook know.
Microsoft has tried this before with acquisitions of Lync, Yammer and Skype. It takes them years to get the integration right (if at all). Remember, they bought Skype in 2011 for $8.2B and didn't really get the integration until 2014.
Maybe this is their new mobile strategy... LinkedIn, a clunky platform for resumes and social networking that as of late has many users frustrated and disappointed. Will we see Lync integration in LinkedIn soon? Click to email, call, chat, video anyone in your network? Oh, won't that be fun from a noise stand point.
They just dumped Nokia and took a huge write off on that mess. Have they made any money yet on Skype?
According to the MS CEO, it is all about the professional network meeting the professional network: "Think about it: How people find jobs, build skills, sell, market and get work done and ultimately find success requires a connected professional world. It requires a vibrant network that brings together a professional's information in LinkedIn's public network with the information in Office 365 and Dynamics."
Even this LinkedIn fan boy isn't sure what Microsoft is doing with Azure, Xbox, Win10 because he is on Chrome. The way I see it, LinkedIn in two years becomes integrated into Outlook, Office365, Win10, Sharepoint and Dynamics. Some of that will look like Salesforce and data.com (although Salesforce got a deal on Jigsaw in 2010.) The social graph adds a piece that MS doesn't currently have.
It will be interesting to see how Lynda.com is utilized by the combined entity. Will that become a tile on Win10 and Xbox? Probably. The deal slides are on Scrbd.
For segments of the marketplace this Microsoft centric move will make sense. Others will turn to Google for Work or Facebook for Work - or an IBM suite if they ever resurrect Lotus Notes & Domino into a true competitor for enterprise. Spark may take some of this. Add Apache Open Office to Spark and what do you need MS for?
What will also happen is that another online Rolodex will make some headway in this space, the same way that Snapchat took from the other social apps.
A bunch of investors are going to look at this and push more transactions. Facebook and Google hardly ever play follower, but they might shop for an online resume platform like JibberJobber - or a jobs board like Indeed or Monster to put some pressure on Microsoft and LinkedIn. If nothing else, that type of data can only add to the social graph that both of them have. This creates an opportunity for someone because there is a window of about two years before this integrates. We live in a first mover marketplace.
$26 Billion in cash, like money is nothing. Will this be a bigger debacle than Nokia?
]]>Slack has video and voice. Snapchat does too. WhatsApp - also owned by Facebook - does too. Office365 does. Apple has Facetime. There isn't anywhere that you can go to get away from voice or video calls.
This means more avenues for ads, robocalls, annoyance and loss of productivity. All of this was supposed to make it easier. (I hope it all comes with a DND (do not disturb) button that is easily found.)
A bunch of UCaaS players are rushing to catch up to Slack by adding threaded group messages, containers and the like to UC&C Presence and IM apps. Here's the problem: I have too many ways for people to contact me!
If I thought I was tethered before (because of a smartphone), now it is far worse.
And the inbox is now inboxes!!! Not just Outlook and Gmail, but Messenger, Slack, twitter, SMS/text. Where did that address or request go? What inbox is carrying that thread?
I not only have too many interruption points, I have too many inboxes. This stuff isn't getting simpler. It is getting more complicated.
Can you imagine discovery during a trial? I need his snapchat, facebook, twitter, gmail, outlook, messenger, office365, skype history, inbox and calls. How long would it take to gather all of that?
Gary Kim writes that telecom is a commodity like sugar. The Next Gen Network isn't a carrier network; it is the Internet. Everything rides over that now. Not the best solution for a reliable, secure network.
With Hosted PBX revenue at around $9 Billion globally (via Gary Kim), then it isn't growing but contracting.
Free P2P voice is taking over where cell phone minutes had ruined the landline business. Texts, email, chat and social media are replacing voice calls. [Even in dating, a form of sales, there is no way to call anyone through a dating app despite technology that could provide for it.
Chat is replacing text. Minutes are declining. Where will the revenue come from?
As they spend CAPEX to build fiber to the premise and to the tower, dropping $40K on a fiber build is not uncommon, how do they get the revenue back? The ROI is long. The ARPU is flat. The only thing changing are the fees. They keep adding more and increasing them. The fee should just be called Margin or Profit.
No idea where this is going, but it isn't getting simpler. The way to interrupt someone is too pervasive. When employees are already working longer hours, distraction avenues have increased. Would be nice if it got simpler.
]]>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!
]]>No one makes voice calls any more. It is all text and chat. These simple communications have been enhanced to include peer-to-peer video calls in the same vein as Facetime and Skype. WebRTC has allowed WhatsApp and Facebook to add calling features to their messaging apps, pulling even more minutes from carriers. (Most of this revenue is now in mobile data buckets, which means just 2 carriers get most of the money.)
The real disruption in business communications, the last bastion of good revenue for carriers, is being done by non-telcos. Twilio is just one example of elastic communications from a non-telco. The bigger news was the Slack-Skype integration.
I saw a list of forward thinkers of VoIP and it was a list of CEOs. Only one company on that list is making any noise at all. The rest are just staying the course, while the course is changing around them.
If comms is all about mobile, shouldn't the forward thinkers being making a dent in mobile, SMS, chat, IM, presence?
Video, security, analytics, APIs - see the lies of Highfive, Redbooth, Ringio, RogerVoice and Sinch - are the key components to be adding to the standard UC product offering.
In CIO magazine, "Given the cost and complexity of implementing UC&C .... When making those decisions, CIOs and other IT leaders listed these factors as the most important when selecting a UC&C vendor:"
Nice infographic about the CIO UC&C study.
Reviewing those 4 factors, forward thinkers would be looking at encrypted chat, better deployment, improved user and admin portals, and APIs / integration.
There are apps that you can add to your offering for encrypted chat, like Wickr or Signal or OpenFire server or Pidgin. For API, you could utilize a service like Zapier to help your users mashup tasks for productivity.
Or on the small business side, the rise of Personal Assistant apps in the past two years along with the tsunami of information, means that a better unified inbox, search, curation, prioritization are all things that users are looking for.
Have you looked at Cloze, billed as a relationship management software that "keeps track of your email, phone calls, meetings, documents, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. And everything from dozens of other services." Unified messaging beyond just the concept.
I'm not saying if you have to do this stuff, but I am saying that you should be trying new stuff. New ways to deploy, to remove friction in the sales side or the implement side or the admin track. Analytics to the call logs. Endpoint management. Business Process Improvement. Security for no other reason than terms like HIPAA, PCI and Sox. Encryption of data at rest whether that is call recordings, vociemail, faxes to enable peace of mind for the HIPAA/HITECH admins. (Rackspace has a way to encrypt databases here.)
Otherwise you will be selling cheap voice against a real disruptor.
Another reason to add something to your product offering is to have an upsell opportunity with your current clients to make them stickier, more productive and add some ARPU.
]]>Broadsoft has 400+ customers worldwide and you would think it just have 4 in the US. Windstream and XO getting props for 1 and 2 million SIP trunks respectively. (Comcast probably has more SIP trunks than the 2 combined). BSFT bends over backwards for Verizon and its VCE offering. Vonage just got a seat at BSFT, which really ticked off all the other customers who have been flying the BSFT flag for a lot longer.
Needlless to say, the big boys lean on BSFT for the whole bundle, which means that they have no IP (intellectual property) in the game and it comes down to (a) who gets in front of the customer first; and then (b) price.
Where will CLECs fit in the new world order?
Fone.do, Switch.co, Panterra and a few others have tried to do some innovative things with the Hosted PBX. Not enough marketing budget to get through all the noise though. Also, the channel partners really don't want to SELL Hosted PBX; they want to take orders for dial-tone replacement. It is a problem.
Microsoft Office365 with Lync/Skype for Business has really sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for Hosted PBX/UCaaS players. Lots of media. Fastest product ever for MS. It was cheap, then cheaper. It has even muffled any talk from Cisco about Spark or Google. It is crazy.
Now it just got crazier. You can now make Skype voice and video calls from Slack. Skype added the feature officially (see here).
I mentioned that Slack needed this. Can't believe MS got their first. I thought BSFT was an engineering firm?
I have also mentioned numerous times that it will be the integration that will be the difference maker -- moreso than price.
In fact, I have 2 panels at ITEXPO on the Age of the API and Business process as a Service. And the ITEXPO West has been replaced with "All About the API Conf"
Businesses buy Outcomes. That's why SAAS will transform to Business Functionality as a service instead. Who will get there first?
As everyone looks to go up market to mid-market or enterprise or whatever you call 250+ seats these days, it gets crowded. Thinking Phones just announced they hit 1000 customers and that their latest contracts are all for 1000+ seats. That seems great, except that West lost a huge contract last year - $15 million UC&C customer - who decided to go single source. That single source was likely Microsoft or Cisco. That vendor was likely Verizon, AT&T or Dimension Data/NTT.
I hear talk of global all the time. From Masergy, Aryaka and others, that they have a global network ready for the Global Fortune 5000 firms. Yeah,how many of them are going to waive their MARCON contracts with BT, AT&T, Verizon, Telefonica or Telstra? How many are going to give up their Office365 installment? There are only 5000 in that group. They make for nice whales, but watch out you aren't hunting Moby Dick in a row boat.
The market is getting carved out. The UCaaS players need to carve out a niche that they can excel at and own it. Going head to head in the 50-500 seat space with the same product as everyone else is not going to be pretty.
To the consumer, UCaaS and Hosted PBX isn't about the softswitch. They don't care about the technology. They care that it works. That it is implemented properly without disruption to their business. They want efficiency and productivity, which is why Slack and O365 and Skype in all its forms is adopted and used. That is important: adoption and use. RC tracks usage, because if you don't ever log in, you will turf.
Back to the CLECs. They made their money in the real SMB space. They still can if they could forget about competing head-to-head with their vendors (the Duopoly) and launch a few product bundles that are theirs exclusively. Until then, it is a declining future.
You can ignore this as the rant of a cynic, but Slack has 2 million daily users and growing after less than 2 years from launch. Integrated with MS already. Office 365 has nearly 50 million monthly active users, according to BI. If they all get voice enabled by MS, where does that leave you?
Where does that a channel partner selling dial-tone replacement? OUCH!
BTW, Skype celebrates 2 trillion minutes of video with mobile group video calling.
SIDE NOTE:
Both Zane Long and Michael Sterl have left Vonage Business, where they were leading the channel sales division.
CallTower, a UC provider that sells a Lync integration service, is merging with SoundConnect.
]]>First, I have a shout out to my bud, Alex Doyle for this very nice video (commercial) for VZ UC&C. I have no idea if he is pitching the Cisco HCS platform or the Broadsoft VCE that he spent years sweating over.
Apparently, Forrester is predicting that UC's sell by date is the end of 2016. Like milk, UC is will go sour in the next 12 months. So much for all that talk about CAGR.
I will agree with this statement: "It is how a vendor uses UC technology that will influence the next wave of enterprise communication and collaboration." It is all about UX -- the user experience. That is 3 steps after the sale - deploy, train, adopt.
The case study company "Cresa saw high adoption of its new UC system because of the system's flexibility to allow individual users to customize the service to fit their needs while maintaining uniformity across the organization." The case study talks about Integration.
The problem with HPBX has been that other than click-to-call there really wasn't much integration. The providers are moving past them with acquisitions and alliances (like 8x8 and Fonality with Allstate and its practice management software).
I keep seeing the staggering growth rates predicted for VoIP -- it only happens if you count SIP trunking. UC is not growing that fast. Evolve IP surveyed businesses about UC. The results were anything but hopeful.
"Most of the professionals who responded to the Evolve IP survey didn't even know what "unified communications" means." [CRN]
Two-thirds of respondents said their phone was the tool they preferred to contact colleagues! So much for the death of the desk phone in the near term. ITSPs aren't exactly pushing soft clients and mobile apps with bluetooth and headsets. No idea why -- but they aren't. Most ITSPs are still Polycom distributors with a softswitch.
The problem for buyers of UCaaS: "The most prominent was simply the challenge of selecting the right system, cited as a major obstacle by 22 percent of respondents. An additional 17.5 percent said selecting the right provider was a major obstacle, followed by 16.5 percent who cited employee adoption, and 13.5 percent who cited determining feature priorities." NOTE: selling UCaaS is HARD! The buyer has to like the salesperson, listen to the salesperson, trust the salesperson, trust the service provider and believe that the service will help them and be deployed as promised! That is a lot to overcome!
"More than 80 percent of the organizations polled by Evolve IP host their own phone systems, but that's changing." More than 10 years and the premise PBX is still 80%! AND "only 16.5 percent said they're planning a move to cloud-based" <- that is less than the predicted CAGR
Don't get depressed yet. Remember as I wrote earlier, just sell transactional network :)
Then there is this hopeful piece from CP interviewing Broadsoft, Vonage Business and Coredial:
"Seventy percent of respondents believe cloud UC/PBX will capture at least half the SMB sub-100 employee market within five years, and expect 200 percent cloud UC growth for midmarket and in excess of 300 percent cloud UC growth for the large enterprise segment."
Expect, hope for, maybe some day. How much of that market will Cisco, Microsoft, AT&T and Verizon own? Probably more than anyone wants to admit in telecom. It is nice to hope and pray, but what ACTIONS will these providers take in 2016 to make deployment, adoption, User Experience and sales simpler?
"BroadSoft believes service providers will seriously challenge Microsoft's Skype for Business by offering an open, mobile and cloud-based UC and collaboration alternative with next-generation, real-time messaging, BSFT's Behbehani said." I'd like to hear HOW?
Collaboration tools like Slack, Glip and HipChat will significantly disrupt email usage. I agree with that. Millennials will be okay with that; older workers probably not. (They want to call co-workers.)
In another article, the prediction is that UCaaS will go Up-Market. I tend to agree since bigger companies used to high-end PBX and call center software will see cloud based contact center as a boon. They are used to feature-rich, high functionality AND Contact center -- a good fit for the UC&C providers that can match up with these enterprises.
There needs to be 4 things for UCaaS to grow as predicted:
1. Integration -- so it is more business functionality as a service and not just Hosted PBX. These are two opposing views of cloud comms. Plus it has vertical targets like with Allstate, CLIO, et al.
2. Training -- so much more training of users and sales teas is needed. And re-training annually for the customers and their employees. You need adoption to increase to reduce churn.
3. User Experience -- Slack took off - 2 million daily users in less than 2 years - due to its intuitive user interface. It isn't rigid. It has APIs. It integrates with other software. Flexible. Ease of use. Mobile and desktop. Much needed.
4. Better Targets. ITSPs chase the whole market. Each segment of the market wants a different story/message. Each segment has different hot buttons. No one provider can do it all. They have been trying and failing and failing and flailing.
I am invested in the cloud comm -- how many posts have I written about it; how many clients are ITSPs - but we are at a pivotal point in the VoIP industry. Some see it; some don't. Consolidation, MS, Cisco, Google, mobile, consolidation, automation and more factors are kicking in. Nothing is as it was in 2003 when BSFT's second customer rolled to market. Nothing.
]]>While search slideshare (now LinkedIn slideshare), I saw this slide, which sums up customer expectations as well as a conversation I saw having with Pete Davis of Panterra.
BYOD is not just an IT PITA (pain-in-the-@ss); it is about the user choosing. That is what Netflix is - user choice (including binge watching). That is what Consumerization of IT is.
Napster was about user choice, not piracy. Most of the mp3 downloaded were not available as mp3 commercially.
Want to be successful? Be Experience-Centric. Be User-Choice-Friendly.
In Hosted UC, some customers want OTT to save money. Some want UC delivered via a secure private circuit (today usually delivered via MPLS to enterprise and mid-market). Some will want both (hybrid). Some will want desk phones; some will not.
Some folks are looking for secure IM/chat/messaging. Some are using Slack. Othersare using Lync with Office365. How are you integrating those choices?
Be flexible or lose business.
Last thought about Experience-Centric. This means the deployment and training and support has to enhance the user experience. Think it through. Get feedback. Improve.
]]>More notes from BSFT Connections 2014 in the desert by friends of my at the show.
These notes are from ANPI's prezo and others. It coincides with David Byrd's blog post about the best part of UC is Presence and IM.
"Scheduled meetings should be for large groups. Small ad-hoc meetings should be able to do without scheduling. As Presence becomes widely used, everyone's availability will be known in order for ad-hoc meetings to occur." That's a lot of Interruptions. MS Exchange allowed for calendar insight for years to improve meeting scheduling. Presence will give a more immediate view, but may result in more interruptions. The ideal for Presence will be if it "lets you know what steps to take next - voice call? video call? email document? desktop share?"
One sales tip is to "ask business owners if they want to take advantage of video. Usually they say they cannot afford it. There are several free solutions, but they are not integrated and not secure and no way to know who is using them." With BroadCloud, video can be "integrated all under one cost, one set of guidelines."
Another sales tip: discuss increasing productivity, enabling mobility, increasing collaboration instead of the phone bill and number of seats.Ask yourself, "What does this mean to biz owner? How would this change the sale? Can you quantify it or monetize it?" You need to convert time into money for the business decision maker (or CFO). You must convince the business decision maker that this service can save more than cost, and show how you got there. To turn time into money demonstrate how to save time on each collaboration, instant messaging, web meeting - click, click, click - integration at work. DEMO! Other ways will include chat and call handling - " always relate back to time".
I always recommend eating your own dog food. If you are going to sell Hosted UC, you better be using Hosted UC daily. It's the only way to become familiar with the features. The speaker suggests "forcing sales and management to use video. They will see productivity increase; a cultural shift; and then sales with a little more passion." I have to agree. When I was consulting for Vidtel, it was video calls all day. They are quicker, more engaged and far better than voice calls (or email or texts). Much of the communications is non-verbal and video can help fill that gap.
If you missed part 1, go here. More tomorrow.
]]>That unified inbox is an empty promise. Although it is spelled out nicely in this article about Google Apps:
9 Ways To Enhance Google Apps With Unified Communications is an article that explains a simple UC strategy: start with the idea of a unified messaging - one Inbox. Faxes, SMS/text, IM/chat (presence), emails, voicemails, conferences, video calls - all into one inbox.
Megapath is the latest CLEC to re-launch its HPBX offering; this time with a heavy bent on mobility (thanks to Counterpath). "As a combined solution, customers can get access to telephony capabilities with more than 50 calling and mobility features, such as voicemail transcribed as email, call recording and conferencing, and a number of new UC capabilities such as presence, video calling, screen sharing, and SMS text messaging." That's all of the UC components available, but the trick will be on deployment / implementation, user training, customer expectations -- all of the elements of user experience. Who knows if a CLEC has the chops to pull all of that off to create a customer experience that yields a raving fan.
There are so many players in the market that consolidation (and failures) are expected. The latest is that Alteva re-organized and received a take-over bid by a private equity firm. (Many CCA members would like a cash offer!)
Why am I talking about CX or UX (user or customer experience)? Because at the end of the day, all of the features in UCaaS will overwhelm the average user. They aren't intuitive. The phones aren't really clear what the buttons are for - and how many users will read a user guide?! The smart players will put help videos on the phones!
The benefits of cloud come from changing the way a business does business. UCaaS allows for many ways to change workflow and call flow, but without training and user acceptance, it will go against the grain (and the full benefits will never be utilized). That's where this article tries to go, as Culture will get in the way of Change:
Why Culture Eats UC Strategies For Lunch - "Too many unified communications implementations focus on technology without considering training, adoption, and -- most importantly -- company culture."
There is a ways to go in UCaaS especially in deployment, integration, training and CX. The ones that deliver on the true promise of UC will be winners (or will be bought!)
]]>This is a premise based system although a few ISP's have used Icewarp to sell to its customers. The server has 3 parts - email, VoIP and IM servers all in one. They like to talk features at Icewarp:
The Cisco UCS integration with IceWarp Directory Service is designed to make management simple. "It works the very same way as ActiveDirectory synchronization does. After binding the domain with a specific Cisco BE3000 device, the accounts from BE3000 are periodically synchronized into IceWarp Server. As a result, each BE3000 user has immediatelly his/her own account created in IceWarp Server with the same credentials for email, webmail, groupware, instant messaging, voice and mobile access." [source]
Icewarp was calling itself Unified Communications in 2010, when Tom Keating reviewed it.
]]>My brother works for a Microsoft integrator who has 135K seats deployed. I'm not even sure what that means, because Lync isn't being used exclusively as a landline or PBX replacement. It has many uses and not all of them are apparent. For example, it is can be deployed just for Presence and IM/chat. It can also be used for a conference bridge (like in the Office 365 bundle - does that constitute a seat?).
Sure, it CAN be deployed as a voice replacement BUT you still have to have SIP trunking from a voice provider. (Lync is not a dialtone provider; that will come from the SIP Provider.) Lync will act like a PBX in this setting.
Remember that Lync is the 3rd edition of Microsoft's Office Communicator Server. IMO, MS has not decided what they want from it yet.
Skype, mobile apps, messenger, Presence, PBX, conferencing -- it is all very cludgy. By that I mean, it isn't straightforward; it isn't user friendly.
My fears lie in the fact that Microsoft can't make a product that doesn't have to be patched every day due to too much bloated code and too many unnecessary features. And Lync has a lot of features. (Adobe is giving it a run for its money in patching Flash though.) Then by the time the user has a stable operating system (like XP SP3), Microsoft rolls out a new one - and we start all over again (from unstable and what many would call beta!)
My brother likens Lync to Sharepoint. Once people know what it can do... Well, more like, once it is thrust upon the users.
When you try to be something to everyone, you end up lost.
]]>When you look at what Skype (and of course all the copycats) have done to the international long distance market, you have to wonder how the video conferencing market survives. I say that because it is rare that I ever participate in a video conference. In the last year there have been three video calls - one on Skype and two on G+ Hangout.
The low cost folks like Skype, Google, Vidyo, Apple's Facetime, even Webex is going to dilute that market. As more employees work remotely and mobile, some video chat will increase, but not likely through Cisco, Lifesize, or Avaya gear. More likely through the low-cost consumer services that make it easy for people to use.
In my experience, G+ Hangout was much easier to use than Skype or Webex due to no software download needed. Any gmail account or Gchat account means I can invite you and lets go. How does it get easier than that, Krish?
]]>"A company's corporate website is the top source of new sales leads--second only to personal connections and referrals, and more than seven times more effective than social media, according to a 2011 Demandbase National Marketing and Sales Study released today by marketing technology company Demandbase and online business network Focus, according to an article in the Tech Journal South. Yet the buzz says it's all social media.
Voice isn't dead either. If it was the contact center space would be folding up tents. Granted robo-calling is annoying, but it still won't end any time soon. (It just may get more challenging to reach humans instead of voicemail.)
Email is still my number one communication platform. Project management, clients, prospecting and more all happen via email. Notifications end up in email. When companies talk about unified messaging, it's about one inbox - the email tray.
Everyone has their preferred method of communicating: email, voice, text, chat, FB, twitter, and more. It is getting more baffling for people to keep track of conversation threads as they bounce from one medium to another - text to email to FB. But it all comes back to email - maybe mainly due to the inbox and inbox organization that we are used to. Texts, chats, notifications and more can all come back to an email inbox to be stored, organized and searched. That's why email will be around a while longer. Longer than you think anyway.
The future of media will be fractious at best.
Want an interesting look at new media?
]]>Metaswitch got into the SBC market, because their clients didn't want to buy the market leader, Acme Packet. Level3 jumped into the SBC market with a new service: Managed SBC.
Skype bought Groupme for a rumored $80M. Groupme was a contestant at the second Startup Camp, that also had the makers of the Android desktop phone, Glass.
Interesting thought: Inter-op is about user experience, so is device choice. Think about deployment from the user's experience.
Telesphere partnered with CosmoCom to add cloud-based contact center solutions. That's one more customer that won't be using BroadCloud. Oops! BSFT bought web conferencing company, iLinc, for just $2.4M. The hope is that clients will use BroadCloud instead of third party companies (like Citrix, MegaMeeting or CosmoCom) to fill in the UC components needed for the complete UC experience.
Sangoma acquired all the key assets of Vegastream.
InterCall announced that it will extend its Smoothstone VoiceMaxx IP-PBX services with the addition of VoiceMaxx CE, a suite of service packages based on the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution. Both Smoothstone and Intercall are owned by West Corp.
Here's something startling: a company debuted at ITEXPO with "a 100 percent turnkey white label product that will not only include provisioning, support, billing and telco services, but will also incorporate all of RealLinx products (VoiceLinx, SecurityLinx and BroadbandLinx)."
RingCentral got $10M more in funding. Aren't they self-sufficient yet?
8×8 recently acquired cloud-based call center provider Contactual Hosting.
"NetSapiens' SNAPsolution is utilized by One Source Networks to power a hybrid of cloud-based and premise-based solutions, integrating all of the necessary service delivery components critical to the OSN VoIP infrastructure, such as accounting, provisioning, and call switching to enable OSN's end-user applications such as unified communications, virtual PBX, conferencing, and enhanced call center solutions."
"Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere allows customers to use their smart phones and computers as VoIP handsets with complete business phone system capabilities."
CounterPath added SMS, chat and presence to its Bria mobile app. Counterpath also launched the Client Configuration Server (CCS), a carrier grade server platform specifically designed to allow enterprises and service providers the ability to efficiently and consistently deploy, configure, update and upgrade softphone and UC Client end-points.
Zendesk adds some VoIP functionality via Twilio. Zendesk Voice is a cloud-based call center that integrates with the startup's popular help-desk platform.
Vocal IP Networx now offers a unified communications (UC) platform, dubbed Vocal UC, utilizing Microsoft Lync software.
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