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10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

By Peter on Thursday, May 23

Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...

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Tagged sales, strategy, volleyball

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

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Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

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Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

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Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

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Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...

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Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

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Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

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Top 3 Reasons its Hard to Sell SAAS

March 14, 2009

Software-as-a-service (SAAS) is the new buzz in 2009. Salesforce.com hit a $1B in sales so its the poster child. Google is the other golden child of SAAS pushing is Apps and Gmail to businesses. For me, even hosted email is SAAS.

I am a referral agent for IKANO who is a Google Apps aggregator.

Posted in agents, email, saas, sales and selling

Tagged: agents, channel partners, email, google, hosted email, microsoft, saas : Related Tags: sales cycle, hosted email, service providers, making decision, google, decision

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Can You Guess the Carrier

March 13, 2009

Telecom is broken. I can't remember the last time an order went smooth. Well, wait, I can actually, it was a BellSouth Metro E. The REUC order center for BellSouth FCC circuits really knows how to work an order. For 10 years that group in Sunrise FL has been outstanding to work with.

Posted in agents, bellsouth agent, telco, telecommunications

Tagged: agents, channel partners, telecom is broken, telecommunications : Related Tags: guess carrier, suite number, order, install, number

Where's ACC Business Going?

March 12, 2009

ACC Business is a subsidiary of AT&T. It uses the AT&T network to provide voice, data and Internet services to small and medium business via agents only. ACC Biz does not have a direct sales force. Tech support and billing through ACC Biz is actually more customer friendly than using AT&T.

Posted in agents, channel, telco, telecommunications

Tagged: acc, att, channel partners : Related Tags: business

Google Voice Ready to Launch

March 12, 2009

The blogosphere is all a-Twitter with the news of the re-launch of Grand Central as Google Voice. Read here for Google Voice is like Gmail for Voice Mail and here and TechCrunch for the break down of features. Highlights would be SMS integration and voicemail transcripts. It makes me wonder why other providers haven't done this kind of integration and "special" features before. Is it because Grand Central is really a techie toy?

Posted in unified communications, voip

Tagged: google, sms, unified messaging, voip : Related Tags: google voice, grand central, voice, google

Correction on Airband

March 11, 2009

As it turns out, Airband is NOT leaving the Indirect Channel altogether. My source corrected me that Airband did let two channel managers (East and West), but that these C.M.'s were not making their numbers. Airband did retain the channel manager in Dallas and is interviewing internally to fill a channel manager position. Airband will be putting some more focus on it. Maybe that focus is the result of the extra $3M in funding Airband got last month.

Final quote, "Just thought I would let you know it looks like they may have been shedding some dead weight, but not eliminating the channel all together." Thanks for letting me know.

Posted in agents, channel

Tagged: agents, airband, channel partners : Related Tags: channel manager, airband, channel

AT&T Striking and Hiding

March 11, 2009

It looks like AT&T is heading for a strike. Most people at AT&T I know have already been cross trained (I use that term loosely) to handle union jobs. A wholesale account manager will be heading to Michigan to be a T1 installer. Nice. Glad I don't have any AT&T orders in the system.

Also, it looks like AT&T is keeping its sales meetings quiet.

Posted in agents, bellsouth agent, channel, telco, wireline

Tagged: agents, at&t, channel partners : Related Tags: channel

LTE and WiMax in 2010

March 9, 2009

It must be confusing to the consumer: 3G, 4G, CDMA, GSM, EVDO, WiMAX, Wi-Fi, LTE. I'm in the Industry but I notice when people confuse the terms. (Seems often like everything is inter-changeable).

Clearwire will be rolling out WiMax for its 4G service, according to a company press release.

"During 2009, we expect to launch our Clear™ branded mobile broadband services in a number of new markets such as Las Vegas, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas/Ft. Worth and in our largest existing markets, namely Baltimore, Seattle, Honolulu and Charlotte," Wolff added. "With a robust pipeline of cell sites under development, we are working to significantly extend our wireless 4G network to many more markets, giving us the ability to cover as many as 120 million people with true broadband mobility by the end of 2010, including in major markets such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Houston and the San Francisco Bay area to name a few."

Clearwire is stating that it will blow VZW out of the 4G water in 2010 by spending $1.5B in 2009 on its network.

Of course, Clearwire is bleeding money too.

Posted in wi-fi, wimax, wireless

Tagged: clearwire, financials, lte, mobile, vzw, wi-fi, wimax, wireless : Related Tags: wimax business, bright house, transaction agreement, clearwire, sprint, wimax

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Level3 Board Selling Shares

March 9, 2009

In an article in Tulsa World, Level3 CEO Jim Crowe, Vice Chairman Miller, CLO Stortz, and CFO Patel all sold shares of Level3 for about $0.70. Each still holds over a million shares. (Crowe owns 8.9M shares).

Posted in economy, telecommunications

Tagged: financials, level3 : Related Tags: shares level, shares, level

What Would You Do?

March 9, 2009

Let's say you had a Channel Manager who only checked email twice a day: 6 AM or 7 PM. Nothing in-between. You couldn't get much response out of him outside of that. It's affecting your ability to get quotes and answers and time to process orders.

Now let's say that you Google his phone number and find out that he has a second profession. Not just a Channel Manager but a whole second career. Wow!

What would you do?

The picture on the website for his second job clearly identifies him as the channel manager you have met. The contact info on his websites are identical to the ones on his telecom business card.

What would you do?

Posted in agents, channel

Tagged: agents, channel partners, ethics, telco : Related Tags: channel manager, second, channel, manager

When the Agent Contract is Broken

March 9, 2009

At the Channel Partners Expo in Vegas last week, I helped man the booth for the newly formed Technology Channel Association, a non-profit agent association that was formed to create a community for best practices, a code of ethics, and solid training of the indirect channel.

Regrettably, the TCA received two separate pleas for help from agents. Both agents were no longer receiving commissions from a carrier.

In one case, the agent was wearing a shirt to advertise the lost commissions. The word I heard was that he had failed to meet quota for a few months.

Posted in TCA, agents, channel, commissions

Tagged: agents, channel partners, commissions, tca : Related Tags: realize agents, agents, carrier, agent, quota, channel

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