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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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Complexities of Change

March 7, 2013

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Think about how many departments an order has to touch:

From the customer to the agent to the Channel Manager to the Ordering desk to Provisioning to Engineering to Deployment to the install tech to the router config to the LNP and 911.

In many companies - even small ones of 90 employees - these departments are silos.

Posted in Marketing, organizations

Tagged: change, strategy : Related Tags: change happen, change, people, departments

Sunset

March 6, 2013

We are watching the sunset of many things in telecom. The PSTN, growth, innovation, copper plant.

While there is much change going on in the industry, a lot hasn't changed.

VZ just pumped almost $350M into its Florida wireline infrastructure.

Posted in agents, telco, wireline

Tagged: agents, copper, PSTN, telco : Related Tags: sunset, copper

The TCA Has a New Board

February 27, 2013

This was my last TCA Channel Chief Summit. Five years after co-founding this non-profit trade association for channel partners with Dany Bouchedid of COLOTRAQ, Ian Kieninger of AVANT (but then at CDW) and quite a few others, the last of the founders leave the Board. We left it in capable hands with Jeff Ponts of Datatel as president and Dave Wallace of Aligned taking my VP slot. Black Box, CDW and PCG are all new faces on the Board who seem eager to take TCA to the next level - and they have Mark from WTG to help them, as WTG, since Vince Bradley helped found TCA, has been a big proponent of TCA (and it shows.

Posted in TCA

Tagged: TCA, tca : Related Tags: board

Are You Channel Ready?

February 27, 2013

I am at Channel Partners Expo in Vegas (speaking tomorrow at 9 AM). It is all about cloud and the channel here. It makes me ask: Are you Channel Ready?

Do you have a service offering that is channel ready?

Posted in VAR, agents, channel

Tagged: agents, channel managers, channel partners, VAR : Related Tags: channel ready, service offering, channel, service, ready, current

Are the Telcos in Trouble?

February 26, 2013

It seems that the big cable coalition - Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Charter, TWC and Bright House - are set to grab 15-20% of the small business market by the end of the year. This same clutch of companies also offer Ethernet over Fiber and Broadsoft based Hosted PBX which will be used to target Mid-sized businesses and Enterprise. Their only disadvantage is the same one that RBOCs faced before consolidation - regional networks. With NNI's and other cooperation, I am certain this group will get past that hurdle in 2014.

Posted in cableco, smb, telco

Tagged: cable, ilec, telecom is broken : Related Tags: telcos

Smaller is Better

February 25, 2013

As many of you know, I am a Seth Godin fan. Nicholas Bate has similar thoughts. His blog on Jagged Thoughts certainly hits home.

In a me-too industry like telecom (and now cloud), where there are 1000 companies offering VoIP, what is the bare minimum you have to do as a company to survive 2013?

Posted in Marketing, voip

Tagged: marketing, strategy, voip : Related Tags: ideas, employees, edges

Pieces of the Partner Puzzle, Part 1

February 22, 2013

To have a successful partner program, you have to have great channel managers.

Channel Managers are the whole conduit to the partner channel - and vice versa. Channel Managers are the conduit to the company for the partner.

Channel Managers have quota (boy, do they have quota).

Posted in VAR, agents, channel, sales and selling

Tagged: channel partners, goal, quota, sales : Related Tags: channel managers, daily activity, partner channel, channel, partner, managers

Corporate Culture is Under-Rated

February 21, 2013

"In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever," writes Jim Collins, author of Built to Last. One of the aspects of building a business to last is "Build a cult-like culture".

Many SMB CEO's don't give culture its proper due.

"The real company values as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted or let go," writes Reed Hastings.

Tagged: strategy : Related Tags: corporate culture, culture, sales, hsieh, business, corporate

Sales is Tough!

February 20, 2013

Have you ever been in a meeting where all departments think that sales department is letting them down? That they are all doing their fair share but sales isn't selling enough?

People, I have news for you: Sales is Tough! And keeps getting tougher.

Posted in channel, sales and selling

Tagged: channel partners, sales, sellecom, selling : Related Tags: sales tough, sales, channel, selling, people, tougher

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