The new Chief Marketing Officer was the one who announced to her 5500 employees that remote wasn't going to work for her. Michelle "Peluso, formerly the CEO of fashion startup Gilt, explained [to employees] the "only one recipe I know for success." Its ingredients included great people, the right tools, a mission, analysis of results, and one more thing: "really creative and inspiring locations,"" according to QZ.
IBM's CIO had made it his mission to make the company agile with a small team mindset. "A feature of Smith's particular "agile playbook" for IBM was that "the leaders have to be with the squads [his word for small teams] and the squads have to be in a location." [QZ]
IBM has had "19 consecutive quarters of declining sales!" IBM is facing tough competition. In cloud computing, Lotus/Notes, storage and product lines, they aren't in the top 3. They need to do something different to regain momentum and compete against the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Here are a few of the reasons that this mandate might have been made.
Culture. You can't build (or re-build) culture remotely. Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum or on a virtual platform.
I understand the marketing teams need to be together since it is very hard to do creative work and brainstorming virtually, despite the cool new tools. It isn't people huddled in a room mashing it out. Remember that most communications are non visual.
"IBM's leadership believes that people working together stokes innovation." [WaPo] "IBM has research on their side. Studies have reinforced the so-called "water cooler effect," which indicates that employees who work in the same location communicate, collaborate, innovate better and perform better than if they were all working from their homes."
"Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companies, offering an option to work remotely helps recruit employees who are seeking better work-life balance or who want to live in a location where the company has no office." And IBM saved $100M annually in rent payments. However, they need more than productivity. They need a mind melt; dabble labs; skunk works; new blood with new ideas; and agility to fight off cloud providers and the big 5 GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). GAFA makes "around $2 million per employee (IBM makes about $200,000 for each employee)". Cost savings and productivity won't replace agility and innovation.
Yahoo famously did this. Other companies as well. QZ notes, "Famous tech office perks at Silicon Valley companies, like free food and laundry service, are at least partly designed to keep workers in the office, and the office designs themselves are sometimes created to optimize interaction." So this isn't unusual. It just goes against the trend. The trend toward remote workers is a cost savings one.
There is a reason that S&P 500 heavyweights used to spend 33 years on the list - and now less than 15 years!
]]>In the business market, Alexa is integrated with Skyswitch, a Netsapiens softswitch operator.
Better Late than Never: Amazon's Unified Communications Starts with 'Chime' by Edgewater Networks.
Interesting look at Hosted PBX seat pricing at CP online.
Seth Godin asks, "Learn something new and difficult and valuable." Why? "There are people who can cut corners better than you, work more hours than you and certainly work cheaper than you. But what would happen if you became the person who was smarter, better at solving problems and cared the most?"
47% of jobs are at risk for being automated in the next 20 years (faster probably). The only way to stay relevant is "Solve interesting problems"; Consultatively Sell Solutions; and utilize Creative Thinking.
FTTH Council has changed their name to the Fiber Broadband Association.
Windstream is making big waves as it fights against industry consolidation that may make it less relevant. WIND complained about Level3 not paying its bills. Now they are worried that the mergers will strand small business during the TDM-to-IP transition. This is all gamesmanship to get concessions favorable to themselves.
BTW, no one wants to buy Cogent.
Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners has closed a deal to become majority owner of the data center and interconnection company, COLOGIX, which runs 24 data centers in North America. So the data center market is still hot!
]]>Think about this: SD-WAN providers use an appliance as the CPE or end-point. This appliance can function as a switch, router and more. It can be a firewall, a wireless access point and more.
Most of the big name LECs (ILEC and CLEC) have added SD-WAN technology to their portfolio. Even lesser known former CLECs like TelePacific, NITEL, Transbeam and AireSpring are offering SD-WAN technology. That means less Cisco boxes being deployed.
Not only is this a problem for the hardware vendors like Cisco, ADTRAN, Juniper, Brocade and Extreme Networks (mentioned because of recent news), but this is a problem for VARs and MSPs.
Long ago, I explained that VARs selling carrier services was like CLECs selling AT&T services - you are fighting against your biggest vendor. Now those same vendors are going to take away the Box Business that floats their business. VARs still make money selling boxes (so do Avaya partners!). The margins have shrunk. The sales have declined a little year over year, but not enough to make many change their lines of business or their model.
EarthLink announced 4000 locations on its SD-WAN as it merged with Windstream. If EarthLink can sell multi-location retail and restaurant chains, the SMB market is in play. The bread-and-butter of the VAR.
I am not throwing around FUD. I'm saying that every industry comes under attack by new technology. The new techis SD-WAN; the legacy business is Cisco and VAR - as this segment moves to a bigger managed services provider and hardware-as-a-service.
"Management consulting's fundamental business model has not changed in more than 100 years. At traditional strategy-consulting firms, the share of work that is classic strategy is now about 20%--down from 60% to 70% some 30 years ago."
Former Big Three employees now work for companies like general counsel. They reduce professional services costs. They reduce scope of work and thus the price tag. Just another example of a high-profit business being annihilated, only Amazon didn't do it this time.
"Clients rely on brand, reputation, and "social proof"--that is, the professionals' educational pedigrees, eloquence, and demeanor--as substitutes for measurable results." That is a problem in consulting. The measurable part. I think that some companies hire ideas/strategy but forget that it is all about execution. I don't know if you can disrupt execution yet. Knowledge certainly. And I think we have spent a good amount of time just copying strategy from competitors. That isn't working out well either. Like in law and medicine, the general practice firm is giving way to specialists.
The second article is about voice first technology disrupting the search ad revenue model.
""...one thing that we are all clear about is the days of three top text ads followed by ten organic results is a thing of the past in the voice first world"-- Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior VP of advertising and commerce @ Google, November 29, 2016."
"Just like this generation now no longer has CDs, DVDs, tapes or records, the next generation will expect voice interaction, not with pages of search results but AI assisted, ontology, and taxonomy perfect answers, most particularly one answer."
"The writing is on the wall."
Medium.com just laid off one-third their staff as the traditional ad based business model was NOT working for them.
Retail isn't working for Sears/KMart, Kohls, Macys, Sports Authority and so much more. Have you been to a mall lately? Anyone holding a shopping bag from a store in that mall?
New drug will regenerate teeth, so where does that leave dentists?
A large hedge fund will replace managers with artificial intelligence!
What does this have to do with YOU? Well, anyone can be displaced or replaced. The number of displaced workers is growing. Either you are growing or you are dying. Either you are learning new skills or someone/something will leapfrog you.
Hugh MacLeod writes, "To innovate, you don't have to reinvent the whole thing. Innovation is taking what exists and making it better. It's grown-up copying."
]]>In UC&C (and most software) "CIOs will be buying into the customer experience and not the technology," writes RingCentral's Sahil Rekhi."In 2017, CIOs will be buying communication solutions with a focus on experiences rather than technology; removing distinctions between communication, collaboration and productivity. Workplace communication and collaboration tools in the cloud will be made to create a unified and consistent experience across multiple devices, moving businesses away from a siloed approach to communications." Most ITSPs are not set up for the complete mobile experience yet, let alone a full UC&C CX (customer experience).
There are providers still trying to add analytics to call logs. Because we are still stuck on replacement instead of impact, outcome or experience. (One reason that Slack took off: UX!)
GOOD READS:
Fred Wilson's frank look at what will happen in 2017.
Start the new year with better sales meetings HERE.
PR trends in 2017. Content versus Attention versus Influencers = Viewers running away to the "Dark Social", "the amount of communication which occurs behind closed doors and messaging apps and private groups."
Sales Hacker's Top 10 Trends & Predictions Heading Into 2017.
This is a twofer: 5 lessons from the book LinkedIn's head of recruiting recommends to all new managers is a summary of Ryan Holiday's book.
Are you hiring? Good read on what to look for. I always say Attitude first, but this CEO says have a meal with the candidate and look for Gratitude and excitement.
MEDIA PAIN
Medium has laid off one-third its staff. Medium is a blogging/media platform founded by the same guy who founded Blogger, Odeo and twitter. He is having an issue with business models as the world of the Internet is based on free. No idea why he didn't try charging $9.99 per year per reader or some other nominal amount. It isn't a volume shop like Huffington or Buzzfeed. It has a targeted audience. But that is the problem: everyone uses the model that they see, not one designed specifically for their product.
As Seth Godin pointed out, "Newspapers won Pulitzer prizes for telling us things we didn't want to hear. We've responded by not buying newspapers any more." That is why we have click-bait, fake news, struggling newspapers and uneducated voters. It is all about the pageview, even in this content marketing world. Go figure!
RETAIL SUFFERS!
Sears is closing 150 more stores. Macys is closing stores. Retail had a bad holiday season - and the stock market is unforgiving. American Apparel is BK (and Amazon is trying to buy it.) Retail has to change. Big time. Also, malls have to re-think what they are to consumers.
Fast food is hiring robots and self-serve kiosks; retail is tanking. What will teenagers do for employment? What will many others do for employment in place of managers, buyers, maintenance, etc.
Ford is staying. Carrier is staying but they got tax breaks and other bonuses to do so. And they are going to automate those jobs out of existence. AI is replacing some fund managers. If you can't fix or code a robot, what will you do for a job?
]]>Like Tech Data's TD Mobility, Amazon already offers cellular plans from many cellcos as well as a wide selection of devices. In fact, because of its e-commerce platform, Amazon is a huge step better than TD Mobility, but it is customer facing, cutting out the partner. And it is doing that again now with consumer Internet and Voice.
If this works, it is just a matter of time till Amazon is selling to small business both cable and telco bundles. SD-WAN for partners looks more and more like a life saver.
Anything that can be transacted will be replaced by either Amazon, another website platform or AI (artificial intelligence). Machines are eating jobs!
If you are not adding Value, you will be replaced. In his book, Linchpin, Seth Godin talks about Genius and Art. Channel Partners have been doing their Art: helping businesses with their technology solutions for years. It takes Genius - and we all have Genius to share.
What does adding Value mean? It varies greatly from customer to customer and vendor to vendor.
One way is to provide advice. Another way is to be on top of technology and introduce clients to new technology like cloud and SD-WAN. It might be technical knowledge or business acumen. But you have to have something because automation is going to wipe out jobs.
Now Amazon Lightsail was announced VPS starting at $5 per month. They are going to crush the hosting business too, I guess.
]]>This is where Big Data is going: watching your every move and analyzing it. Dave and I don't see eye to eye on whether this will be used like a carrot or a stick. People don't quit companies or jobs; they quit their bosses. Listen in as we talk about his new startup and the implications.
If you can't see the podcast player, you can download the mp3 here.
]]>We went from TDM to VoIP to Hosted PBX to UCaaS to UC&C.
We went from T1 to cable broadband to Gigabit.
The consolidation of cable will tighten the market in 15 to 18 months. (It takes that long for integrations to take hold.) Now if the integrations are not a big fail, then cable - New Charter/Spectrum, Comcast, Altice - will ratchet up the competition in the small business market for triple play.
"Cable/MSOs are the fastest growing providers in the business services market, with much of their recent success in the mid-size business space," reported MarketResearch. Think about that: the mid-sized space - not just the small business segment of the market.
Of the $104 Billion total businesses spent on telecom services in the US in 2014, AT&T had the largest share (33%), followed by Verizon (22%) and the rest of the LEC band of brothers (Level3, CenturyLink, Sprint, Windstream). MSOs have more than $12 Billion of that pie, with the lion share - $5B - going to Comcast coffers alone.
SIP anyone? 54% of business cable subscribers also use cable for voice, the report states. That means less than half the businesses using cable are buying voice from another provider. That is a shrinking opportunity for the 2000 Hosted VoIP players in the US.
"Last year the Cable/MSO share of businesses with 100+ employees rose to 17%, reports TNS. "The main driver behind this growth was a heavier reliance on internet service and the need for greater bandwidth; two areas where larger cable providers excel."
Telco broadband has not kept pace with cable in speed and price. Egged on by Google Fiber - and a declining market share of businesses - ILECs have started tentatively rolling out faster fiber based broadband - 100MB to 1Gigabit depending on the ILEC (Windstream versus CenturyLink or AT&T).
UPDATE: Google just rolled out Gigabit Fiber to small business starting in Charlotte in July of 2016.
The ILECs have made a tremendous CAPEX investment in TV - just as OTT TV is hitting its stride. They spent big to supply triple-play, when they could have spent the money on FTTx projects for faster bandwidth. That was just uncreative thinking. [More of that Me-too mentality ingrained in telco.]
All of this will stress ILECs, some CLECs and even some OTT VoIP players. When cable takes about 35% of the SMB market, there won't be much room left for anyone else.
In March of 2016, "During the fourth quarter, Verizon reported that total broadband connections dropped to 2.1 million as it lost more DSL subscribers after losing 94,000 DSL customers," according to Fierce media.
Verizon is transitioning. Verizon is now betting on mobile ads (AOL acquisition and Yahoo bid); 5G fixed wireless broadband replacement for wireline services; and IoT (including connected cars) to add to its coffers.
A point I make often is that the debt that the ILECs carry is crippling with flat revenues.
Think about this: Vonage has taken $800M worth of voice revenue. Twilio gets $240 million in voice revenue. This is revenue that typically would go to Level3, Verizon and AT&T (and it probably does terminate to them eventually for a smaller percentage of that money).
WebRTC is being used in so many apps to allow for video and voice calls - bypassing the traditional voice network. [And bypassing the cellco text system and dollars.]
Then, we have Cable beating Telco in broadband bandwidth. Always has in fact. Gigabit fiber will be the real winner if the telcos decide to pursue that route for real (versus in just press releases).
We have telco getting in the data center - and now we have telcos looking to get out of that business without embarrassment.
There is a Talent problem, too. There are too many musical chairs. Not only can't you set a strategy when you shift personnel that much, you can't execute on a strategy either if the cogs are constantly being replaced. (And I don't mean cogs in a bad way. It takes a lot of talent to keep the wheels spinning.) The talent drain has also resulted in a domain knowledge drain as well. Quite frankly that means they don't where things are and how things have been done to keep things working. It isn't all documented, especially fiber maps!
Let's face it, for many companies that started with an A Team, they are now running with a B or C team. Why? As Steve Jobs said, "A Players hire A Players, B players hire C players. Get it?"
People move from company to company in teams. The same routine and team may work once, but it is not often a repeatable experience. There's a reason the Cavaliers recruited LeBron back to Cleveland - and didn't hire the whole Miami Heat starting line up.
The telco organizations harbor stifling factors: monopoly mindset, legacy systems, federal accounting and regulations, departmental silos and competing internal interests. These factors do not lend themselves to attracting more A Players.
There is also a surprising lack of talent for the new services and skills needed for omni-channel marketing; omni-channel customer service; cloud, managed services, migration and integration. This lack of skill will choke growth and brands.
We see outages and hacks every day. The worry is only about getting a customer. There is little concern for retaining that customer; data security; or a resilient network (4 Nines is good enough).
Many people are choosing smaller organizations to work for. The reasons are numerous but I would think that impact and voice play a major part. In smaller businesses, any one person can have a voice and can see the impact that they are having on customers, culture, and the company. That isn't the case in larger organizations.
Flat organizations (and smaller companies) have less meetings, fewer silos, maybe more transparent governance.
Most financial experts are predicting an economic slump in 2017. It won't matter which candidate wins the Presidential election, a slump is coming. We have under-employment; increasing number of freelancers; and a stagnant wage. None of these components inspire an economic engine that is fueled by consumer spending.
ARPU for cellular, cable and VoIP segments have been fairly constant over the last 4 years worth of data I could find. Bandwidth and voice revenues are actually shrinking. Total telecom spending from 2013 to 2014 shrunk $6 Billion dollars according to MarketResearch.
Growth will be hard to find. We are seeing a price war in cellular accompanied by escalating customer acquisition costs.
Hosted VoIP is experiencing a similar battle for customers that is increasing the cost of customer acquisition. Rising SPIFFs and other compensation are being used to grab both market share and channel partner attention.
PBX vendors are NOT crashing and burning as many had predicted. Premise PBXs are still being sold and installed by a robust band of vendors - Mitel, Shortel, Avaya, 3CX, Fonality, Zultys, Panasonic, NEC, Siemens and more.
We are half way through 2016. No big winners. The Twilio IPO was a surprise. Vonage spending all of its acquisition money for the year on Nexmo, Twilio's competitor, seemed strange, since there were Broadsoft clients they could have picked off instead to take a big step forward in the race. Slack and all the Skype4B hype are little surprises.
2016 is half over - and so many companies have either done M&A or played musical chairs that I expect nothing magical to happen in the rest of 2016. And I look at all of this and wonder what 2017 holds.
ASIDE: telco versus cable consumer data.
]]>The Conference Group laid off channel people. NgenX discontinued their agent program (and laid off channel personnel.)
Broadsoft lost Jeffrey Pearl and Mike Wilkinson.
Frontier and Charter are laying off as they work through integrations.
Some of the job loss is Synergy - that marketing term for redundant jobs after mergers and acquisitions.
Some of it is due to companies just not marketing clearly or correctly.
Who is your target customer? How do they benefit from your services? Why should they buy from you and not someone else?
These are basic questions that many companies just can't answer.
And while they flounder to figure it out, there are companies buying market share and taking mind share (Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Slack to name a few).
And admittedly some of it is that people just have not gained any extra skills. With all the books, blogs, online courses, even taking in just one of those per quarter will help you improve and grow. And when that happens you get more valuable. You should be investing in yourself.
Do you have the skills necessary for 2020?
Today, the average Person watches 5 hours of TV Each Day! My friend pointed out: "If you live to 96 and watch 4 hours of tv a day, that is 16 years watching TV ... 16 years of your life!" Think what you could learn or change if you just took 30 minutes a day for reading, learning or volunteering or whatever.
I saw this article today in the Telegraph: The importance of job satisfaction. "The work you do impacts everything else you do in life. Not only does it enable you to earn the money you need to provide for yourself and your family, take a holiday, buy a house... a job also allows you to feel you are part of something."
For some you just need the paycheck, but if you treat the job search like a marketing campaign, you can win a job you want. BTW, it isn't the company, so much it is the boss you are working for that is the chief factor.
If you haven't done so, connect with me on LinkedIn. And check their job board regularly, while also reaching out to your network. But please don't say you are looking. Be specific. What job titles will apply, what size company, geography, etc. The more specific you are, the more salience happens. (That means that when I hear it, I will immediately think of your name!)
]]>The music industry died in 5 years. Blame it on Napster, but it was more about the Kingpins not wanted to change. Movies and TV are facing this, but seem to be adjusting better than the music industry did.
Newspapers blame Google and so much else on the fact that they just didn't want to figure out a service model. What they need is a newspaper subscription service like Rhapsody for Music or Amazon Prime for News. Micro-payments that get you into a dozen or so news outlets. Not enough people are going to subscribe to one newspaper, especially when the news is free on another site. If a bunch of newspapers got together, they could make it work. The Tribune Co or the Garnett company or Ziff-Davis or Time-Warner just haven't gotten out of the old product line thinking. It isn't about Time magazine. It is about the entire catalog. Just a thought.
CB Insights has this article about the 62 start-ups picking apart the hotel industry. AirBnB is Number 1. But once the hotels loose conventions, then it is over for hotels. Sites like eVenues and more events taking place at non-hotel locations will have an impact. [And when you pay $38 topark for a night in Atlanta, you start re-thinking that whole downtown hotel thing.]
Much of it is arbitrage. Uber and AirBnb are effective because (a) people need to earn more money and (b) people want to save money, even in the face of the uncertainty. That is arbitrage. It killed the long distance business.
Craigslist's free ads killed the classified business. Arbitrage.
When I mention innovation, I don't mean buy LinkedIn. I mean, adjust to the new sharing economy.
When Slack comes along and hits 2 million users daily in 24 months, any responsible executive in the UCaaS space HAS to investigate that. Use it. Try it. Incorporate some of that into your next version. Or lose.
The big problem that most software faces is that it is not as easy or as good as the iOS. That was what prompted Consumerization of IT and BYOD. This created havoc in the business world. All because most software deployments suck, fail, and are not adopted by users.
In this autopsy of the failure of Coin, Product Risk is big, which is why you need a Product Manager, someone who owns the product and is driving it to be competitive, relevant to its users, easy to use and more. Most products lack a Product Manager.
Newspapers lack more than a Product Manager. They lack a business model. They lack utilizing technology. Why is there a single front page? When I login why isn't it more like Amazon or Google News - and by that I mean relevant to me? Why aren't they curating stories along with social media like Storify? The St. Pete Times does an epic job when chasing a Pulitzer - like here, just a beautiful Medium-like layout for the story.
It seems we are all in a race for revenue, but forgot that to make and keep a customer, you have to offer a product that they want, trust and use.
]]>Sendhub,a business SMS provider that raised $10M, was acquired by Cameo Global, a global managed IT shop that does some contact center work.
Salesforce's leadership position in CRM now gets e-commerce with Demandware $2.8B acquisition
Broadsoft acquired Intellinote. [see here]
QTS buys DuPont Fabros Tech's New Jersey data center. This transaction comes after QTS transformed the Sun Times building in Chicago into a Tier 3 data center with 317K SF of capacity and 24MW of power.
Nest has unlimited budget, large workforce, and nothing. Oops!
The strike is over for Verizon and the lesson for the C-Suite: we can't get rid of wireline and unions fast enough.
ADTRAN launched hardware-as-a-service, a subscription service for MSPs to offer hardware to clients without leasing -- or another way to say that the leasing is built into a subscription service.
The Allied Fiber assets in the Southeast are up for auction under bankruptcy court approval. [source]
Rest assured, another prediction says the same thing that the other predictions said: VoIP Market Set for Steady Growth.
Want an example of Innovation? Zappos re-designs the shoe box!
CNBC list of Top 50 Disruptors
Mid-year channel trends HERE (site is hard to read with banners, pops, etc., but aren't they all getting that way?!)
Dean Bubley asks, "So uncomfortable Q for 5G designers & stds bodies: can critical-comms 5G really yield enough rev/profit to justify much expenditure/effort?" Follow up with this piece on 5G Vision. In short, is there enough revenue to build out yet another network (voice, 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 4G)?
Now softswitch vendors are service providers, competing with their customers and making it easier for new entrants into the already bloody ocean of Hosted VoIP. Broadsoft BroadCloud; GenBand Nuvia; Alianza Cloud Voice Platform; and Metaswitch MetaSphere Cloud Services [see here and here]
RETAIL: Sears, J C Penney - 30 Companies That Might Disappear In 2017 Based On Altman Z ]]>
From James Altucher: "Automation is eating the world. Every time a line of software is written, a job is lost." VR, 3D printing, AI and robotics will make us all unemployed soon. what then?
Sports Authority is closing all its stores. Macy's, Sears, K-Mart and B&N have been closing stores for a couple of years now. Retail - even luxury retail - is declining. Not all of it is online shopping. In the future, what do malls look like? Basically entertainment and food courts.
Dollar stores are taking share away from even Wal-Mart.
The rise of the minimum wage is supposedly a problem for business owners, but all of the complainers have cash stockpiled and executive pay has flourished. Hmmmm... The amount of money available to keep the economy spinning is lagging.
We have an economy that runs on two elements: service (consumer spending) and technology/The Internet. [Good read here by Dixon on the Internet Economy]
As most businesses and consumers consume the Internet, the number of subscription services we pay for is increasing. Our monthly spends are going up with our bandwidth consumption.
The number of contractors or freelancers has increased to more than 35% in the US. As that keeps increasing imagine what happens to annual income, stability, savings, retirement...
I will just leave it there.
Research on the brain is cool. What words do to your brain HERE.
Two things that people talk about are ecosystems and blockchains. These are two systems that investors look for in startups.
"Consumers don't hate advertising; they dislike how the advertising is distributed." "According to an April 2016 report by Accenture, 84% of digital consumers complain that advertising too frequently interrupts their content consumption, 40% plan to remove these interruptions either via paid subscription or ad blocking software in the next twelve months." from mynfo, a Tampa startup that just closed $6.8 million in Series A financing!
Most business models - newspapers, magazines, car companies, schools, VARs - have not changed much in the last 20 years. So as change comes (not IF, but WHEN that change comes) it will disrupt most of the players.
Rovi Buys TiVo in $1.1 Billion Deal. Is Roku next?
Verizon's brand is taking big hits due to 3 things: (1) the strike; (2) vandalism of systems creating big outages; and (3) Frontier taking over a large chunk of FiOS customers. Frontier's take over was a cluster, like every other take over has been. What shocked me the most is how few people outside the industry actually knew that Verizon had sold off its assets to Frontier. Even fewer knew that Bright House was being bought by Charter. Telecom is at the very bottom of what people think about.
Already seeing UC providers moving away from Polycom since the merger announcement with Mitel. Fuze/thinkingphones went with Yealink. Birch is hollering about Panasonic. A few smaller players are testing out Grandstream. The move away from Polycom has started. Add in a move to softphones and mobile apps and what is MITEL buying?
Sangoma launched a line of phones for FreePBX and its newly launched PBXact UC, a premise based UC&C appliance.
"I never expected to witness the slow suicide of a country, a civilization. I suppose nobody does." [The author is talking about Venezula] "Hate, as a political strategy. Law, used to divide and conquer. Regulation used to punish. Elections used to cement dictatorship. Corruption bleeding out the lifeblood in drips, filling the buckets of a successive line of bureaucrats before they are destroyed, only to be replaced time and again." <- sound familiar?
]]>Buddy: "Robert Scoble leaving Rackspace for UploadVR to explore augmented and virtual reality (story here)."
ME: It was a great job for Scoble. Like a kid with a candy store. I didn't see how Rackspace could keep paying him to just play around with cool tech toys and blog.
Buddy: "Agreed. Even if they could. Not as meaningful as doing something perhaps??"
GapingVoid: "It's not about money or status. These are the three things that make people deeply happy in their work: purpose, autonomy, mastery. Everything else is noise."
Buddy: "Tell that to people's spouses!"
Maybe THAT is the real work-life balance!
Hugh MacLeod blogged that working in tech is a front row seat. Change is speeding up. But this is a great time to be in our sector. So much happening. Some really cool stuff. Some really boring stuff. But it is an adventure.
Maybe you don't have the job you want. Find something about the job you have to embrace. Do it for yourself. Life is short; you should enjoy some of it. Do it for your co-workers. If you find some joy, it is contagious.
]]>Saw stats that Vonage has 514,000 business seats.
"Birch recently announced the addition of 80,000 buildings to its Metro-Fiber network in November 2015." I wonder which cable provider they signed a wholesale agreement.
"Broadvoice brings its significant growth trajectory to the initiative: It serves more than 200,000 customers, with its business segment growing by 125% in 2015 alone." [CV mag]
In the same press release, "The company recently signed its first national master agent, Sandler Partners, giving it an increased footprint of 3,000 technology sales partners across the country." 3K partners with one master agency? That would mean that master has the entire attendee list of Channel Partners Expo in Vegas with signed agreements in its CRM.
Windstream is raising rates on sub-$1500 accounts - to make them profitable - or to shed them? Apparently shedding some of them according to CRN.
from my LinkedIn feed today*, here's a some stats about AWS:
*I don't know who to attribute it to because I lost it in the feed, which is an absolute mess and has no search function.
Sears is closing 50 stores. Wal-Mart is closing 154 stores in the US. Macys is closing stores. Do you see a trend here? What happens to shopping when it is mostly online/virtual? What happens to malls? And most important what happens to JOBS?
]]>Sprint gave its employees layoffs for the holidays. Despite the cash from Softbank, Sprint is losing ground to T-Mobile and has little hope of catching up to Ma and Pa Bell (ATT and VZW). It isn't about price as much as it IS about a quality network. Access to exclusive phones doesn't hurt either.
In positive news for this cellco, Sprint teams with Conversocial to become the first US telecommunications brand to introduce Messenger as part of their social care strategy.
Lots of throttling claims from YouTube, DISH and others to both wireline and cellular network operators. It figures.
It leads to an interesting question: Should ISPs filter the Internet for their customers?
Broadband use is down from 70% to 67% in homes in the US according to Pew. They probably can't afford it.
Lightower Fiber Networks has acquired network assets from HarborLite Networks, based in Baltimore, Md., which includes fiber in downtown Baltimore. Always good to buy fiber density in an NFL city.
Microsoft acquired Talko. Dan York talks about what that means here. Basic problem with every new talk or text app: You need network effect for it to work. Hyper-crowded market right now. And no one has a Snapchat problem.
Altice is trying to buy both Suddenlink and Cablevision. New York State authorities aren't buying their story about network upgrades. For once, consumer good IS being looked at. The authorities have to know that once they say YES, there is no way for them to enforce acquisition conditions. And every major acquisition that has come with conditions has had the buyer skirt them.
ShoreTel is buying Corvisa out of the UK and Netherlands for $8.5M.
IBM and BellSouth had a short history of working together. Now IBM is taking over AT&T's Managed Hosting Services. If you can't be good at it, outsource it!
Happy Holidays!
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