This year's Data Center Industry Survey from Uptime Institute seems to indicate that "It is moving slower than I'd have thought." That persuasion isn't enough to make the transition happen faster.
The legacy premise PBX sales have slowed down but have not been surpassed by cloud PBX yet [source and HERE].
No one is crushing it despite more vendors entering the cloud space every day. Well, actually, Amazon is crushing it with S3 and AWS.
"Many people don't seem to be willing to throw out their legacy systems but are still investing in diesel generators and backup power," says Matt Stansberry, Uptime Institute's Senior Director. Or they just can't. I have seen way too many businesses - especially telcos and cablecos - relying on spreadsheets and faxes!!!
"One statistic thrown up by the 2017 survey has changed very little over the last four years:
"It is probably because it's not easy to re-architect their legacy applications for a cloud environment." That is true. And not all software can port off AS400s and other legacy server boxes. In fact, COBOL Programmers are STILL in demand!
The providers only hear about clients that want to migrate or are thinking about cloud. Partners see businesses every day that will not be changing anything.
It appears we will be dragging businesses to the cloud kicking and screaming, but slowly.
Heck look how many businesses are still on TDM (POTS) and use faxes.
]]>AT&T with its DirecTV buy and its grab for TW is basically following Comcast's playbook. Comcast bought NBCU, is becoming an MVNO (cellular reseller) and has a $6B Comcast Business division that is going to chase enterprise (much to the dismay of CenturyLink and Windstream).
Verizon is busy selling off wireline assets and buying up as much spectrum as its AMEX card will allow in a heavy bet that 5G and IOT will solve all of their revenue and cable issues. In a move bizarre move, VZ bought up AOL and Yahoo as content plays. This playbook is solely Lowell C. McAdam's.
Frontier, Fairpoint, CenturyLink and Windstream are RLECs looking to get out from under a heavy debt burden without cellular assets and without a content play. Each has its own playbook.
Windstream buying EarthLink almost makes sense especially at a $1.1 Billion all stock deal. (This move doesn't hurt the channel since both providers were pro-channel.)
CenturyLink buying Level3 is not only surprising; it is disheartening. Level3 has its problems certainly. Yet its management understood the business it was in and what it took to win business. For a partner, that is a plus.
To fuel that $34B deal (total value of stock, debt, etc), CenturyLink is selling its data center business (Qwest and Savvis) for $2.1B to a coalition of PE firms headed by the former CEO of Terremark. This coalition is also buying 4 cyber-security firms to build a global cyber security business. Partners are curious if they will still get paid on deals already sold. And what the future holds here.
FPL getting acquired by Crown Castle also makes partners worry about commissions, since CC doesn't have a channel and doesn't retail its fiber.
The CLEC industry is practically gone now. After nearly one trillion in investment money dating back to 1996 or so, most of the CLECs we have come to know and sell are pretty much gone.
What does that leave the Channel? IOT, Cloud, UCaaS, SD-WAN, security - basically selling managed services. Network is going to be tough to sell and make a living on as prices continue to erode. SD-WAN for the win!!!
Network is easy to sell and there is demand for it. You really can't say that for any other product in the portfolio.
Data center is still alive and well. Long live colocation!
]]>I wonder back to when AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011. That Obama Admin said NO. Despite the fact that AT&T was actively helping the NSA and other 3-letter agencies since before 2006, when Klein exposed Room 641A.
Then there is the other program that AT&T runs for the feds: "Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud." The Daily Beast explains how AT&T is spying on Americans for profit. (It would be weirder if they were just doing it for fun.)
Barry Eisler spells out how all this works via his "fictional" book God's Eye View.
AT&T has hedged its bets since the T-Monile No. It won approval for DirecTV. It plans to get a Yes from the DOJ - and has told the FCC that they don't have a say in this acquisition.
From NEXTDRAFT by Dave Pell: "Will the AT&T acquisition of TimeWarner get federal approval? Before you place your bet, consider this data provided by the NYT: "AT&T is the biggest donor to federal lawmakers and their causes among cable and cellular telecommunications companies, with its employees and political action committee sending money to 374 of the House's 435 members and 85 of the Senate's 100 members this election cycle."
Why are they buying TW? Well, to catch up to VZ and Comcast. And because all the pies are flat. AT&T had a bad quarter. VZ has a had a couple. They are laden with debt. Cellular which is half the revenue or more is being picked apart by T-Mobile and to a much smaller extent Sprint. Cable is eating the wireline broadband lunch*. Since all of the bets were on cellular, it is now a run to use fixed wireless (LTE or licensed) for broadband deployment which will increase ARPU for them -- and the bills to consumers.
Ma and Pa Bell have spent tens of billions on spectrum. They will use it to get out of terrestrial broadband and have everything be wireless. They will still have to figure out the T-Mobile problem as well as the cable wi-fi problem.
They want content to build a walled garden - like Facebook or AOL before them. When you own the content you can be king, just ask Comcast/NBCU or Disney.
The one thing that will kill off the telco is an economic depression. When the US experiences another economic slowdown - like say 3Q2017 - consumers will have a lot less money to spend. That means ARPU will not go - and subscriber counts will go down. When you have to eat, you skip HBO and cable TV.
The auto industry is already feeling this crunch. More leasing, less sales, more discounts, interest free loans. The cars last longer. And driverless cars are coming.
One reason for immigration is to actually increase the population of the US. Millennials aren't having kids - in many cases because student loan debt and poor salaries make a child too expensive, except by accident.
In the midst of this noise 2 things to note: (1) ABRY is selling Masergy to Berkshire Partners for about $1 Billion dollars. The reports say $900M; I was told it is more than that.
(2) Google Fiber is laying off. The CEO of Google Access, Craig Barratt, is also stepping down. Too few subscribers, too many hassles means they will try fixed wireless then probably call it a day. The Duopoly of cable and telco have successfully squashed competition. And for all the little guys cheering, it could be you next!
Please note that in the middle of all this, despite the skyrocketing analyst forecasts, cloud computing is not mentioned in this scenario. Why? It amounts to peanuts in revenue for the Duopoly. "Total SaaS/PaaS revenues of top 50 software companies globally are $22.4B. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Symantec, EMC, VMWare, HP, Salesforce and Intuit are the top ten software companies worldwide," according to Fortune and PWC. Unless they were to buy Salesforce to gain $5.5Billion in revenue, they have to go content. Microsoft bought LinkedIN for $26B!! And LI revenue isn't even $4B dollars.
IOT isn't even a billion dollars in revenue for VZW yet. So how do you move the revenue needle at the former Bells?
* Per telecompetitor, "The number of U.S. fixed broadband subscribers dropped by nearly 200,000 on a net basis in 2Q 2016, a decline of 0.2 percent, according to the latest market data from Point Topic."
]]>You can get some more detail about the service in the PR HERE.
SAAS companies frequently use the Freemium model (like Dropbox), but UCaaS providers usually forget that Voice is just an app in the bucket of UC. So this was an interesting marketing move by a pretty progressive company.
If you are having trouble seeing the flash mp3 player, you can listen at Soundcloud or download the mp3.
]]>NoJitter did a reader survey about Skype4B. Gary Kim has the break down HERE. "Of the 224 respondents that say they are using Skype for Business on-premises, 33 percent said they are using Enterprise Voice as a PBX replacement."
Office365 is taking the business market by storm - and S4B comes with it. How many will use it for a full PBX replacement? No one knows yet.
If they release a version of Sharepoint that resembles Slack, that penetration could go up. We will be back in the days of a Microsoft monopoly, which if you remember correctly sucked.
This includes ALL Microsoft packages, including Win10. Salesforce had 2016 Full Year Revenue of $6.67 Billion, up 24% Year-Over-Year. In fiscal 4Q16, Microsoft's cloud offerings - Microsoft's core cloud offerings: Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and Azure - grew to reach an annualized revenue run rate of $12.1 billion.
SRG's survey begs the question where are the competitors? Google for one is not on the list. There are a number of UC&C providers - and none of them made the list. It is all the big names in enterprise software - IBM, Oracle, SAP, Citrix, Adobe, Workday and NetSuite.
"As long as Microsoft can offer $5/month SharePoint and $8.25/month (per business user) Office 365 subscriptions, Microsoft will continue its dominance in the fast-growing online Collaboration software segment." And when I read that sentence, I realize why agents are selling SAAS. At $13.25 and 10 points, it is $1.32 per user per month - even with 100 users it is $132 per month. Yet you have to project manage a migration that is challenging even for the experts. Too much to go wrong for too little pay out. And if that is supplanting your data backup or even your conferencing revenue, why?
That is the dilemma facing cloud: the giants own the market; the channel can't wrap a business model around it yet; and the giants will take more of the pie.
]]>Both sides will need to adapt. Most of the servers being bought now are being bought by the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, Facebook and Microsoft. They are not buying through Ingram or Tech Data. That affects their business in yet to be seen ways.
Tech Data's business model is predicated on two things: logistics of demand and co-marketing dollars. TD and Ingram (and their siblings) live on razor thin margins for hardware. They are pure distribution logistics for hardware and software licensing that is in demand. In a purely cloud world, those warehouses scattered around the globe may have to be refurbished into data centers to house SAAS gear. If they can even pivot that way.
Just to showcase the difference in mindset between a true VAD like Ingram and a amaster agency that calls itself a VAD, look at this article: UCC Solutions: What's Trending in 2016? by Ingram Micro. To Ingram, Logitech ConferenceCam Connect, Sennheiser Presence UC headset, Jabra EVOLVE and Plantronics Voyager 5200 UC. Is that what is trending in UC&C? Or is that what hardware is selling (or more likely being promoted)?
For years, we have waited to see if Insight or D&H or SYNNEX would buy a master agency in order to ramp up the shift to MRR. It hasn't happened yet.
Now that ADTRAN is pushing its hardware-as-a-service model, VADs have to consider what that means to their meager margins, sooner rather than later.
The other shift that will affect the VADs is the shift to SD-WAN. This means white box CPE in place of routers, switches, IADs, etc. The SD-WAN appliance will be just hardware with the software control coming from the SD-WAN provider. That may affect distribution of CPE too. Does the MSO or CLEC drop ship CPE from TD or Ingram?
In the Faces of July gallery on CP, the number of companies that I have never heard of reached a new high. Someone mentioned at CompTIA that 600 new vendors entered the market. At the same time that the number of channel partners is actually shrinking.
I look around the room at these conferences and see mostly gray hair and bald heads. There are not a large number of folks under 30 in the crowds. Consider the number of mergers in the partner space as older partners ramp out or look to retire.
One joke about telecom is no one got here on purpose. Our sector isn't recruiting on college campuses or advertising the joys of channel partner life. This is a heavily sales dependent business. How many people go to college wanting to be in sales?
A lot of different pieces are on the table. It will be interesting to see how this puzzle is put together.
]]>I wasn't aware of how many vendors were pushing Office365. These include Level3, Sprint, Arkadin, CallTower, TelePacific, Velis4, BitTitan, Rackspace, Tierpoint, CenturyLink, Evolve IP, NeoNova, even GoDaddy. Partners might want to just ask their favorite vendor about it.
In just 15 minutes on this podcast, expert Greg Plum of PlumUC gives us a good look at Skype for Business and why partners should examine it for their portfolio.
If you have iOS or just can't see the flash podcast player, you can either listen on Soundcloud or download the mp3.
If you want to hear more from Greg Plum on the Skype for Business opportunity, he did a podcast with Velis4's VP Guy Yasika on soundcloud.
]]>Frontier says that the 30K people affected by the transition (and who still have issues) will get credits and should get over it as 30K represents less than 1% of their customers. The Florida Attorney General jumped on the PR bandwagon to wag her finger at Frontier. When you deregulate phones and then give a pass on an acquisition like this, you can't do more than wag a finger.
Sprint just remembered that they have a fiber network. It only generates about $600M in revenue for them currently - about the same as the revenue VZW makes on IOT.
This is offbeat: The FCC issued an Order ($100K fine) resolving a call completion investigation involving inContact.
Evolve IP took a majority investment from a private equity firm, Great Hill Partners. It is a cash infusion for growth and ramping up. " The Company's services are currently deployed in four continents and 15 countries, to more than 1,300 commercial business accounts with more than 100,000 users, licensed seats and managed end points." This investment makes it a little harder for someone like Vonage to scoop up Evolve IP.
Vonage spent most of its acquisition fund buying twilio's biggest competitor, Nexmo for $230 Million. This is CPaaS, communications platform as a service space that Twilio has owned. This is the elastic VoIP space. It will be the fourth platform that VB will be running, which is an expensive proposition. It is a business more like wholesale VoIP Orig/Term than it is about retail VoIP, which is Vonage's bread and butter. This begs the question how do their salespeople sell this versus UCaaS? Two entirely different businesses.
Diane Meyers at IHS released their Top 10 UCaaS players scorecard: 8x8, Vonage, West, RingCentral, Mitel, Verizon, Star2Star, Broadview Networks, Fuze and Nextiva. 600K seats puts you at the top of the heap. "Landing just outside the top 10 were Comcast, ShoreTel, Cox, CoreDial and Windstream."
Lenovo gets into the UCaaS space with the launch of its "Smart Meeting Room Solution, essentially a unified communications offering which allows various devices and screens to be able to collaborate in a workplace... The solution combines Lenovo's ThinkCentre Tiny desktop with Intel's Unite software."
Streaming video is a big thing for Live events like Blab, FB Live, Periscope and others Rich Tehrani takes a look at it here. Note: no telecom companies are in this space.
Telcos in the US and UK are not making enough SaaS sales. A majority of the SMB cloud revenue is going to the SaaS providers themselves, according to a report.
The Digital Divide is real: Broadband service tends to stop at the poverty line in the US.
The FCC approved Globalstar's spectrum for wi-fi. They want to create a nationwide wi-fi service and charge for it. No idea if the radios in devices can utilize it. Google of course despises this plan.]]>
In 2003, a business would have ACT! CRM installed on one computer. They probably ran Hosted Exchange from an MSP, but had MS Office with Outlook on most computers. They probably had a website and used ADP for payroll. And maybe they had a file server running either Novell or Windows NT.
ADP at one time said they were the first cloud application. Email was probably the first public cloud application that most people used. (There were others before that.) The website is on a public cloud. So there are 3 apps running in the public cloud arena.
The file server and ACT! are running in the local LAN - or what we call today servers in the data center, even if that data center is a closet. That is the private cloud. The MSP is running MS Exchange in his data center on his private cloud, sotospeak.
Today, SAAS like Salesforce and Microsoft Office365 are public cloud apps. The data center is now a colocation in a data center. The company might use AWS or S3 for file storage. Azure or Google Compute for storage or apps. The Hybrid Cloud scenario is more defined today and a little more complicated,e specially if you throw in some VPS or IAAS platform too. But the WAN today has to connect all of these parts and pieces into an efficient network. That is where you, the telecom expert, come in.
Where is the Upsell?
Just asking the questions will put you in a different light. But asking the questions let's you see the whole picture, not just the Internet pipe at 2 locations. You can add value (and upsell) if you see the whole picture.
Hybrid Cloud has been around for a while. The concept is not complicated. And after you map it out, it isn't that complex. Make it simple. That is where the money is.
]]>What is the big deal about SD-WAN? Good question because you are going to be hearing a lot more about it. Smart carriers are already testing it.
Basically, SD-WAN is an orchestra layer on top of the network. In its best form, SD-WAN means that each location can BYOB (bring your own broadband). Instead of a MPLS-over-DSL at a remote office, it can be fixed wireless, 4G cellular data, DSL or cable modem - or better a combination of 2 or 3.
The SD-WAN appliance can act as anything - switch, router, firewall. The SD-WAN appliance helps monitor the circuits and the traffic. If latency or jitter increase, the appliance can route traffic over the better circuit. The analytics and monitoring mean that when the customer has SLA violations, the customer will have data to support it.
In the long run, this will mean that only network owners will be selling network -- and they will have to run a very good network. A good example is the Netflix ISP Index. What if every SaaS provider, Google, Amazon and Apple starting an ISP index?
"What if a network could anticipate and address issues like a massive influx of traffic as it happened, adapt and expand in real time to handle the traffic and then, when the surge is over, revert back to routine operations?" [see TR article here] This is what SDN promises the carrier. SDN is the parent of SD-WAN. Without a software defined network architecture, you can't deliver a software defined wide area network to customers.
Dynamic bandwidth is the simplest product delivered under the SDN umbrella. Client wants a 100MB pipe, carrier delivers 1 GB port and client can turn it up -- burst if you will - and pay for usage.
Take that further to performance monitoring, analytics, routing, failover, application service delivery improvement and more - and THAT is the promise of SD-WAN.
With the average medium sized business utilizing Azure, AWS, Rackspace, Office365 or Google for Work, VoIP, Video, conferencing, Salesforce, other SaaS apps, it isn't just about the size of the pipe. It is also about the quality and health of the pipe. Is the carrier directly connected to the clouds you utilize? Is the SaaS application performing well? If not, then your employees are frustrated, inefficient and wasting time and money.
Channel Partners should jump on to this early. Start with this podcast: The SD-WAN and Why You Should Care Podcast # 1.
Stay tuned for more this month on SD-WAN.
]]>Have not heard this brand in a while: BROCADE. Where have they been? I guess they needed to make some noise, so they are buying Ruckus Wireless for $1.2 Billion. "Brocade now has the ability to offer expanded Wi-Fi services to its customers, and given that Brocade is a fairly major name in networking, having that extra service to offer should be regarded as a value point." Managed wi-fi is a big money maker for Brocade competitors Cisco and ADTRAN.
Good read about Apple becoming a services company. IBM and GE learned this years ago: You can't be a consumer products company, I guess (unless you are P&G). All about the M-R-R, but more about creating an ecosystem to compete with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Despite being acquired themselves, Ingram Micro is still buying companies. Following the NETXUSA buy, Ingram is now snatching up ENSIM. This will boost its cloud applications business that rides on Parallels, a company they at first invested in, then acquired. And cloud apps is where the new money is.
One regional acquisition today, 2 CLECs I know well got married:
Hunt Telecommunications, LLC, a regional fiber optic and cloud services provider, and Nexus Systems, a regional integrated communications provider, are pleased to announce a definitive agreement to merge companies. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2016. Both boards have approved the agreements. Now just waiting on regulatory approvals.
This merger creates a significant provider of core communications infrastructure services in the state of Louisiana. These services include fiber to the business, IP connectivity, next generation voice services, colocation and cloud services provided to leading businesses, schools, government agencies, and carriers in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf Coast.
]]>First up is Apple versus the FBI over end-to-end encryption on the iPhone. For privacy nerds, Barry Eisler's new book, God's Eye View, was a scary realization that the NSA has too much reach -- and very little oversight.
Over at AVC, there is a discussion about privacy - or rather whether you think Apple should bother - or if all info will be hacked, why not just let it out to stop terrorists and child porn?? The way I feel: if you make the argument about those 2 extremes, you lose the argument. You don't do things like give up freedom because of a fraction of the users. 99.97% of iPhone users are not hiding, so why should the 99 be subject?
BTW, Your Toaster May Eventually Spy On You, and Your Camera Could Kill Your Kid
SAAS
5 things about the SaaS industry. (I tend to extrapolate data from SaaS to the UCaaS vertical).
CLEC
Layoffs at EarthLink AND they sold off the IT division. Layoffs at Windstream too. If you are laying people off and cost cutting and you are in the C Suite at a telco, please pink slip yourself too because you are not fixing anything!!!
Running a CLEC is not just about controlling costs. It requires a Strategic Plan that is executed to properly. EarthLink had a couple of plans that just could not get executed. Talent is important but so is Culture and a Vision that the talent (the employees) buy into and want to see succeed. There needs to be a feedback loop.
Tom Peters really needs to keynote a telecom event. Or one of these CLECs should hire him to help you over the hump of failure.
CONFERENCING
The founder of Vidtel, Scott Wharton, is over at Logitech, who just unveiled a Breakthrough Group Video Conferencing Solution, which turns any meeting room into video-enabled collaboration space.
Metaswitch just announced Accession integrates with Zoom Video Conferencing.
After buying video conferencing company, Fuze, ThinkingPhones changed its name to Fuze.
PanTerra Networks Overview in 2 minutes 19 seconds - UC, Storage, Slack, analytics and more.
Communications, Collaboration or Workflow? Forbes article. NoJitter has a similar article about adopting UC for work flow.
Patent troll sues Apple, Verizon and AT&T for $7B in Various Patent Infringements!
Avaya vs Cisco in mid-market <-- as if that was the battle! The battle is with Microsoft - and it might be with Slack in 2 years.
WHY TIDBITS???
I write columns for Channel Vision magazine, Internet Telephony and Cloud Computing magazine plus this blog, plus work as an agent and consultant. Not everything that happens is worth 350+ words. Sometimes just listing the stuff that is crossing my desk helps me to tick off the puzzle pieces so that later I can write 700 words about a trend or an idea or whatever. So there have been a lot of tidbits posts especially in the last year, but it is so that you can quickly consume some industry news and I remind myself of stuff happening.
Thanks for reading!
]]>"SaaS is getting increasingly competitive." You think? Look at all of these marketing apps. How many CRM platforms are there? There are 2000+ Hosted VoIP providers. Teah, you can say it is hyper-competitive. (Partly do to a low barrier to entry today.)
Key: "Make a product customers are always in love with that also gets high retention from them." If users are not playing with your features or portal, then they are likely not a good fit for your product. It is like selling Hosted UC to a business that just wanted cheap dial-tone or a key system replacement with door buzzer. Not a good fit = churn (or at best low margin to no margin customer.
You have 3 things working against profit: (1) the cost of customer acquisition increasing; (2) the cost of support is not cheap; (3) price compression. You need targeted customers who engage with your product.
"You've got to constantly build the best possible solution that ever existed for your customers." With the rapid adoption of Lync (now SfB) and now the integration of SfB and Slack, VoIP providers cannot stay static in what they are offering. The product bundle has to go beyond just a managed Voice service -- or you need to re-brand as just a voice replacement company, an alternative phone company.
The article had a link to this story about the 2016 Sales Stack - and the challenges facing salespeople. One of the challenges is the prospecting and lead generation -- and the technology around it. Today, there are web conferences, video calls, email automation, MasterStream, portals and other software that you need to spend time with in order to do the job. That is a lot more than the days of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Want some helping Competing? Join the webinar.
]]>AT&T saw a direct benefit of $15 per U-Verse subscriber with the DirecTV content contracts. And despite that, they are raising rates. Cord cutting will commence.
Every time there is a merger -- like AT&T-BellSouth, CenturyLink-Qwest-Embarq -- we are told how it is for the consumer benefit. Even when there are merger conditions, the entity finds a way to skirt delivering on its promises.
With all of the rate hikes and merger promises we should have Gigabit internet to every home in America. How is that working out?
The cablecos are looking to form one large entity - Charter-TWC-BrightHouse. For the consumer benefit. It is a big decision for the FCC.
The DOJ and the FCC have just one mandate: protect the consumer. Both have fallen on that mandate for most of my time in this industry. The DOJ hasn't done anything since 1982.
In Canada, Shaw is making moves after completing the $1.2B acquisition of data center company ViaWest. "Canadian broadband giant Shaw Communications has announced that it's buying Canadian wireless operator Wind Mobile in a deal worth around $1.6 billion." [press release here].
Interesting to note that Shaw used to own US cable interests that today Bright House Networks owns [according to wikipedia].
There is a report that Freshdesk, a SaaS customer support firm, buys mobile engagement startup Konotor in an acquisition that will help Freshdesk's mission to deliver omni-channel customer service.
]]>The move to the cloud is about being agile and competitive. Good things. However, it doesn't happen in silos.
Gartner writes, "Organizations are undergoing major transformations - to shift to digital business, become more customer-centric, and keep pace with regulatory changes. Any transformation impacts business processes, often requiring dramatic changes to how people work. Yet over 70% of transformation initiatives fail. Process management practitioners can change that and directly contribute to the success of their organization's initiative by applying the latest process thinking, techniques and technologies to innovate and drive change."
You see, you don't get competitive and productive by moving the software from a server in the back room to AWS. It doesn't work that way. Certainly, moving your email to Office365 or Hosted Exchange or Google for Work means less headache and your IT department gets a break. But the productivity comes from time saved.
Email and shared calendar are one thing; but what about an EMR system or HRIS system or a practice management system? In telecom, service providers are looking for a softswitch based on features and integration into existing billing systems. Everything touches everything, right?
Packaged software is long gone. Businesses making decisions about the cloud have to consider a number of options: private, public, hybrid, PAAS, IAAS. Most likely a combination of these will be adopted in most environments. This leads to other issues - like Integration.
Integration is the Bane of software deployment. It is one thing to have all of the latest applications, but quite another for these apps to share information. Quite another for these apps to improve workflow.
Many service providers build out CRM, billing and provisioning systems themselves. They want it customized. They don't want to pay a million for it. The shrink wrapped versions need too much customization. That customization is integration, work flow, user experience. Those 3 factors are what make the business agile and competitive.
After SAAS in the string of services comes BPaaS - business process as a service. This is a service oriented delivery of not just an application but a system or work flow. For example, there are a couple of companies that offer provisioning systems to overlay on your Broadsoft softswitch to allow for a single data entry point to flow through to billing and CRM. That is a business process as a service.
For years, you have seen the ads for UPS as Big Brown, the logistics experts. It is BPaaS. UPS and its army of experts are not just doing the shipping, but the logistics, the transportation and the efficiency studies for companies like COSTCO, Ford, Frito-Lay.
As Adweek explains, "UPS went public at $50 per share--the biggest IPO Wall Street had ever seen. Its corporate pockets suddenly bulging with $5.47 billion, the company went shopping, snapping up a slew of finance, brokerage and international trading firms. Eventually 40 companies melted into UPS, a consolidation that transformed the corporation from a package-delivery brand into a behemoth of logistics (a fancy term for moving both goods and information through a supply chain)."
BPaaS doesn't have to be that extensive (or outsourced). Broadsoft is trying to deliver on more than just a hosted softswitch with BroadCloud. IDEA2 is deploying more than a SugarCRM replica with its Sasquatch.
The next step isn't to just jam your software in a cloud computing environment and call it done. The move to cloud should be the opportunity to improve on the business, getting efficient, re-imagine, digitize and innovate the customer experience and the employee experience. What do you think about that?
The clash of titans we are seeing is the one side (A) replace what we have with a cheaper version in a cloud clashing with (B) most software deployments fail to delivery desired outcomes. Disruption in every industry is happening while companies deal with talent (human resources) acquisition/retention, technology (deployment, skills, training), sales, price/revenue compression, Wall Street demands, and much more.
You are doing yourself a disservice if you simply take your current software and jam it into a container in a data center. This is the time to examine your processes, work flow, systems to see what can be done differently, better, efficiently while matching business goals with user experience (customers and employees). Tall order. A Collision of Titans.
]]>