Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

PBX

3 Sales Strategies for UCaaS

May 3, 2016

With so many hosted VoIP companies out there -- has to be over 3000 in US and Canada - there are three strategies that these service providers can choose to sell their products through.

One is to package your product the way we have traditional sold it. That is to say, on-premise PBX (like Sangoma, Fonality, Digium, S2S) as the made ingredient coupled with SIP trunks and some "cloud" elements. Another version of this is to offer Key System Emulation (KSE), which is an awful way to provide hosted VoIP.

What Channel Are You Watching?

April 25, 2016

One thing I have noticed: UCaaS sales overall are not accelerating. Gary Kim writes how it is becoming a commodity.

The VoIP services market is up 5% to $73Bn in 2015, says IHS. Residential makes up 62% of that.

This Might Be Big

April 15, 2016

As I mentioned after Vegas, MITEL is buying Polycom for almost $2B according to Reuters.

Polycom brand to be retained, but the execs at Polycom lost this battle. CEO and CFO of MITEL stay in roles and the combined org is headquartered in Canada, much to the delight of Canada and the tax burdens.

MITEL bought Aastra in 2014 for $400M.

Channel Strategy: A Quick Look

March 21, 2016

Often I hear from channel execs that Agents aren't the future because they aren't moving to selling cloud and managed services fast enough. It is always the MSPs and VARs that will be the partners of the future.

Funny how different vendors are trying different things. Fonality is placing bets on both sides as they announced both a distribution deal with Ingram Micro and an exclusive deal with The (Agent) Alliance.

What Are They Feeding Enterprise?

March 9, 2016

After a 27 hour trip to Enterprise Connect, I can safely say that we have an unqualified me-too business. Video conferencing and collaboration - now called meetings and workflow - were printed on every booth. Here is what I saw.

Cisco demonstrated Spark, which I thought was for SMB, but is being pitched to Enterprise especially with its big hook into Salesforce.

It Will Be an Outsider That Kicks Your Butt

February 22, 2016

Bloomberg has an article about Facebook at Mobile World Congress and how FB looks like a competitor to telcos. FM Messenger, WhatsApp (that FB owns), SnapChat, Skype, Slack, and many other messaging apps are video and voice enabled (in many cases thanks to WebRTC). More minutes are moving away from telcos. At least, the US cellcos have realized that they are in the dumb pipe bytes business.

Is There Anything Impressive About VoIP?

January 11, 2016

I am getting peppered with email invites to lunch-and-learns, webinars and other events to learn about "impressive" companies. Is there anything impressive about VoIP? Is anyone doing anything really unique? I am having a hard time thinking so.

Unified Hope for UCaaS

December 16, 2015

End of year buzz around unified communications (UC, UCaaDS, Hostd PBX, Hosted UC) is ramping up. All part of the predictions and trend watching for 2016.

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.

UNIFY Gets Acquired

November 9, 2015

Two years ago, Siemens Enterprise Communications re-branded as UNIFY. "Unify, is a joint venture between the American private equity firm The Gores Group and German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG," according to Wikipedia. It is a premise-based comms platform. Now, Atos is buying Unify from Gores and Seimens.

3 Reasons Most VoIP Providers Will Fail

July 29, 2015

There are about 2000 Hosted VoIP providers in the US (if you include ILECs, CLECs, RLECs and cablecos). They can't all win in the business market for at least 3 reasons.

I talk about Integration all of the time. Why?

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