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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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A Lesson in Value Proposition

May 23, 2012

This came across my twitter stream this week:

"Must-read for founders: A VC explains how to build a killer value proposition" on VentureBeat by Michael Skok, a Venture Capitalist at North Bridge Venture Partners. His slideshare page contains a couple of really good decks of information about Go-To-Market and Value Prop - two things that I help companies address in this industry.

That's his Go-to-Market diagram.

Posted in Marketing, PBX, agents, hosted uc, sales and selling, voip

Tagged: agents, hosted pbx, marketing, sales, sellecom, value, vc : Related Tags: value proposition, customer service, special sauce, value, product, proposition

Combatting Mobile Data

May 23, 2012

How do you offer your broadband customers mobile access? There are a couple of options. One is MVNO, reselling cellular data cards to your customers. This is a very expensive option.

Posted in cableco, cellular, wi-fi, wireless

Tagged: att, cableco, cellular, mso, vzw, wi-fi, wireless : Related Tags: speed internet, cablecos starting, access included, hotspots, cablecos, access

No Special Sauce

May 21, 2012

There is no special sauce.

Everyone has the same technology (or will 5 minutes after you market yours).

It was never about the technology.

It has always been about the Customer Experience!

(What do you think churn is all about? They don't like you and will leave for a few dollars off. It's the CX - the customer experience - that retains them.)

That means you have to stop talking about the technology now.

Posted in Marketing, technology

Tagged: customer service, marketing, strategy, technology : Related Tags: special sauce, customer experience, technology

Cellular Mayhem

May 18, 2012

Just looking at the news makes me think that the cellular industry is having a week of mayhem. Besides the mess I wrote about earlier this week, "US wholesale player LightSquared has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid efforts to resolve regulatory issues that have prevented it from launching its satellite service," according to Telecoms. "The carrier has been planning to build a ground-based LTE network, supported by satellites, but the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked the project, stating that the proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference." That about spells it all out.

Posted in FCC, cableco, cellular, mergers, mobile, spectrum, wimax, wireless

Tagged: att, cableco, cellular, duopoly, fcc, spectrum, sprint, vzw, wireless : Related Tags: unlicensed spectrum, spectrum wispa, spectrum, network, mobile, sprint

A Day in My Brain

May 18, 2012

I was in NYC (Tribeca) this week to spend the day at a Q&A session with Seth Godin. He is a marketing guru and author of a lot of best selling business books. Like these:

Here are some of the gems that I liked.

"A "brand" is the promise of an experience." [Boy, could I riff on that one!] Brand IS the experience.

Posted in Marketing, PR, conferences, startup

Tagged: books, marketing, powerpoint : Related Tags: thirsty people, direct marketing, google apple, people, thirsty, marketing

A Game of Risk

May 17, 2012

Everyone blames the FCC. AT&T blames the FCC for all of its woes after the FCC (and the DOJ) said no to its merger with T-Mobile. Boo-hoo. It was a risk.

Posted in FCC, cableco, cellular, mergers

Tagged: att, BK, cableco, cellular, FCC, vzw : Related Tags: competitive landscape, mobile, another, merger, competition

Sprint is Losing

May 17, 2012

I have had Sprint for a long time. Mainly, I have them because I don't like to give my money to the RBOC cellcos. I may just have to switch.

Sprint's network makes me think that THEY are an MVNO.

Posted in cellular, wimax

Tagged: 4g, BK, cableco, mvno, rant, sprint, strategy : Related Tags: blame sprint, million phones, sprint, network, phone, phones

Polycom Gets Some Cash

May 11, 2012

So Polycom announced that they will "divest its enterprise wireless voice solutions business to an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners, Inc. for gross proceeds of approximately $110 million in cash." I was confused by this until I realized it is a sliver of their business and represents DECT and Wi-Fi handsets only.

Polycom is in the process of remaking themselves from a hardware IP Phone company to a video conferencing solution provider. This was a way to get some cash and start selling off pieces of the business that don't fit that focus.

Posted in conferencing, tele-presence, video, wi-fi

Tagged: mergers, polycom, video conferencing, wi-fi : Related Tags: business, polycom

Robo-Calls

May 11, 2012

I need to learn not to answer the phone if I don't know the caller. It's always robo-calls. And it is usually a Level3 number! 407-412-9892 was the Florida PAL.

Posted in FCC, off topic

Tagged: rant : Related Tags: phone, dialing

The Incumbent Mindset

May 10, 2012

I'm heading to NYC next week to attend Seth Godin's seminar. It is always worth the trip to me. From his Domino Project newsletter today, a little insight:

"It happens to just about every industry, from hard drives to furniture--the insurgents, coming up from the bottom of the market, had an incentive to refine their techniques, engage with their customers and innovate. The incumbents, saddled with much higher costs and less innovation, watched themselves go bankrupt, one by one."

Can you say China?

Posted in CLEC, Internet, Marketing, broadband, cableco, cellular, mpls, voip

Tagged: differentiation, ilec, mpls, strategy : Related Tags: market, industry

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