WPP is one of the largest advertising and marketing firms in the world. They are a conglomerate of a number of acquisitions of agencies globally. WPP was hit with a ransonware hack that disabled its network (see HERE and HERE). It shut them down.
No one think it will happen to them, but the ease at which hackers are able to assault ANY computer or Internet-connected device makes EVERYONE susceptible. This gets exacerbated by 4 things that are easy but users are too lazy to do: (1) have a strong password policy; (2) update operating systems as well as anti-virus software and RUN it weekly; (3) back-up data; and (4) stop opening attachments!
You should be on top of your customers today pushing those 3 things: password policy; Managed IT or at the least anti-virus software; and cloud backup. Go make some money while this is still fresh. Or go help your customers so they aren't helpless tomorrow!
BTW, this would qualify as Disaster Recovery
]]>Deloitte acquired most of the assets of Day1 Solutions Inc., a cloud consulting firm to provide deeper cloud expertise. CIO Magazine explains, "Deloitte needs Day1 for the same reason Accenture needs Genfour, Genpact needs Rage Frameworks and Infosys needs Panaya. The problem for Deloitte and for every traditional services company is that their clients do not believe they have the digital skills to lead the digital transformation journey the clients want their business to undertake."
Think about that yourself. Do you provide proof of your digital chops to your clients? Would they be comfortable coming to you for cloud migration plans or strategy or advice?
Item 2:
The Lookout Breach Report: "With over 1.45 billion compromised accounts, emails, social security numbers, dates of birth, and other data types, March was the biggest month for exposed data this year." Yes Cyber-Security is indeed needed. I personally am tired of all my data being hacked from companies that don't protect it.
A 451 Research survey on Security Pain Points and Concerns showed that "User Behavior is a top concern across companies of all sizes - while other issues such as Endpoint Security present a bigger problem for smaller companies. In contrast, Cloud Security and Data Loss/Theft pose a greater threat for very large organizations."
Item 3 is SD-WAN announcements
Coredial and Cincinnati Bell are the latest Velocloud wins. I find it funny that Zero Outages re-branded as the first SD-WAN company at their mostly unmanned booth.
Windstream is wholesaling SD-WAN now. Probably Velocloud. At this rate SD-WAN is already a commodity and Cisco/ADTRAN need to be afraid. The CPE isn't coming from them any more. It isn't being distributed by Tech Data either!
Westcon-Comstor Adds Viptela's SD-WAN Portfolio
Item 4: M&A:
After buying Hunt Telecom and Uniti Fiber scoops up pure-play fiber company, Southern Light to move itself away from just being dependent on Windstream. UNITI also bought Tower Cloud and PEG. Maybe Alpheus or FiberLight will be next.
Item 5: More M&A:
Broadvoice bought a company to add in analytics and user experience. "XBP's core strengths is in deep reporting and analytics integration, enabling customers to better understand user behavior. For example, tools like Advertising Analytics allow users to measure and follow through on outreach campaigns, from local to nationwide. Other tools like voice recording on-demand and voice-to-text conversion provide solid, searchable data that enhance successful client relationships."
]]>This and some other moves clearly closes the book on the era of the CLEC.
Southern Light got acquired by UNITI Fiber (formerly CS&L which was the Windstream spin-off REIT) for $700M.
The Intelisys division of Scansource finally revealed that they acquired Kingcom, the exclusive Verizon partner that they run their VZ business through. Just bringing it all in house.
There were more announcements of companies picking a SD-WAN partner: OneStream picked Versa; Star2Star chose Velocloud; Nitel chose Versa, too. This is quickly becoming like Hosted VoIP/UC. It will quickly become a commodity, faster than any technology the channel has sold.
AT&T bought Straight Path for a billion dollars for the spectrum. Any spectrum is property with a water view right now.
]]>In cable news, you get a site survey done supposedly before quoting. You get the quote; give it to the customer who says Yes. You get paperwork; customer signs paperwork. Then three days after the paperwork is submitted, the site survey comes back. "Subject: Construction required. Comments: A site survey was completed that determine there is a total construction cost of $71,972 for construction to bring service. Your organization can pay the contribution of $69,687 or we can amend the contract to 36 months and increase total MRC to $2,400." Mind you , that $2400 per month is for cable broadband - 150x10. This happens TOO often. It makes no sense to me at all.
There are new acronyms to know in Security. According to 451 Research, "Managed security services (MSS) is an emerging sector of the security and managed services market. As new security threats evolve, many organizations find they lack the expertise to protect against increasingly complex attacks and meet compliance requirements. Security is one of the IT functions that can be managed by a service provider." MSS providers are MSSPs. If the MSSP develops and delivers security technologies and services, it is a security service technology provider (SSTP). If the MSSP focuses on delivering security services, but does not develop their own technology, then these MSSPs are "pure play". There are also Hybrids that mix the two. Fun, right?
Businesses buy a lot of software. Office365, Google for Work, email and web hosting just being the start. CRM, UC, conferencing, digital marketing technology, Business Intelligence (BI), Virtualization, Data Storage and Database and ERP. 451 Research survey suggests that spending will be up for software in 2017.
"SAN-based Storage (67%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Arrays (59%) are currently the most widely used storage systems by companies, followed by Backup/Recovery Software and Disk Backup Appliances (44%)," according to 451 Research. "Respondents were asked which storage systems and related products, including upgrades/refreshes, they plan to purchase in 2017, and SAN-based Storage Arrays (48%) tops the list, followed by Third-party Cloud Storage Services (34%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Array (34%)."
This leads me to suggest that you ask your customers about software and storage. There is money to be made there and you are leaving it on the table.
"Only two months into 2017 and already 13 million people have had personal information compromised. Attackers breached 15 companies in February alone. Among them, the biggest names included popular music festival Coachella, restaurant chain Arby's, and the InterContinental Hotel Group."
I was one of 393,430,309 people pwned in the River City Media Spam List data breach. The Compromised data consisted of Email addresses, IP addresses, Names, Physical addresses.
"In January 2017, a massive trove of data from River City Media was found exposed online. The data was found to contain almost 1.4 billion records including email and IP addresses, names and physical addresses, all of which was used as part of an enormous spam operation. Once de-duplicated, there were 393 million unique email addresses within the exposed data." [source]
This warning came with the notice: "When financial information is in question, it's important that data breach victims monitor their bank accounts and credit cards for fraudulent activity. Contact your bank or credit provider if you see anything that looks odd." But I didn't get a notice of the breach from River City Media or anyone. I got the notice from a monitoring system I signed up for.
Also with the notice: "Why are you only hearing about this now? Whilst the breach occurred in January, sometimes there can be a lengthy lead time of months or even years before the data is disclosed publicly." Like Yahoo or any of the EMR systems.
I just found out about the September 2016 breach to NetProspex. "In 2016, a list of over 33 million individuals in corporate America sourced from Dun & Bradstreet's NetProspex service was leaked online. D&B believe the targeted marketing data was lost by a customer who purchased it from them. It contained extensive personal and corporate information including names, email addresses, job titles and general information about the employer." The Compromised data: Email addresses, Employers, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses. Did D&B or NetProspex contact me? NO!!
Currently there is a successful GMAIL phishing scam going on. See more at LifeHacker. We need more user training on how to handle email and data.
One Tampa firm, BayCare, did an assessment of their workers' knowledge of scam email. It went sideways. But you SHOULD be checking to see if workers follow safe email procedures, since that is the Number 1 way that hacks occur!
There is more:
Privacy hawks in Congress call on Homeland Security to warn Americans of SS7 hacking threat.
You Won't Believe How Many Organizations Have Experienced Large Cyber-attacks by Rich Tehrani
For its 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (available for download here), Verizon used a final data set of 64,199 security incidents and 2,260 data breaches.
The problem with selling cyber-security solutions is (A) the cost; and (B) no one thinks it will happen to them. You have to sell it like Life Insurance. Sir, one day you will die. Then what?
No one is immune.
From VZE: "Take a look through the list of published data breaches and one thing will immediately strike you: no location, industry or organization is immune from attack. Even with the strongest defenses, you can't bank on not being breached. But you can deter the criminals."
]]>Just as they are getting acquired by Windstream, EarthLink finally gets its stuff together. ELNK announced that in six months they have deployed SD-WAN functionality to about 1700 offices for 41 customers. That is pretty impressive but the technology (SD-WAN) is best deployed at small offices, rural and branch locations. It is where the tech gets the best ROI.
FYI... SD-WAN, like WebRTC, is a technology NOT a product. Stop trying to sell the tech!!!
IPO's are on the horizon. Fuze got another bag of VC cash and hired a CEO to take them to the public land. I hear that Star2Sar is thinking the same thing.
Speaking of cashing out, my client, Hunt Telecom in Louisiana, got acquired by CS&L aka Uniti Fiber. Congrats to Jason, Kevin, Robert and Troy!!!
LUMOS Networks got grabbed by investment firm EQT for $950 million cash.
One weird acquisition: Atlassian spent $425 million on task management provider, Trello. Altassian owns Hipchat (a Slack competitor) and JIRA. It seems like a good combo.
A head scratcher: Fonality got bought by Netfortis. Asterisk and Genband.
ARRIS is buying Ruckus from Brocade because "Every carrier will need to be in wireless."
TelePacific is coming into 2017 with its acquisition of UC provider DSCI. They will be re-branding the new nationwide managed services provider at the Vegas CP show. Yesterday at a partner event, TelePacific CEO Dick Jalkut told the room that they had spent $500K on ITx and UCx demo centers around the country as well as building out a SOC (security operations center) in St. Louis. Any current TelePacific partner can visit the SOC. You might want to ask if they will pick up the airfare. TelePacific isn't giving up on network - it is what made them the regional giant that they are - but all bets for the future of the company lie with the strategic products - like security, managed IT, Office365 and a Broadsoft UCaaS offering - that DSCI strengthens with their own experience and products in those areas..
OTT UCaaS provider, Panterra, has inked another distribution deal; this time with VoIP Supply.
]]>I think about this in terms of cyber-security and disaster planning. No one wants to spend on it. (They don't like buying insurance either.) But when (not if anymore) disaster strikes in the form of outages, hacks, breaches, malware/ransomware, severe weather, floods, tornadoes, etc. many businesses are unprepared and fail.
Personally I don't know how to change someone's bias. It's like the worldview that on-premise hardware is better than cloud.
]]>Many people use the same password on multiple sites - even banking.
With cloud and app usage increasing, more and more personal data is available to hackers, from credit card numbers at any online store to medical records. Add in all those contests and tests you see online and hackers have a full profile of you. Apparently, not many worry about this - until your identity is stolen and then it is too late.
THE SCOPE OF IDENTITY THEFT. "The 2016 Identity Fraud Study, released by Javelin Strategy & Research, found that $15 billion was stolen from 13.1 million U.S. consumers in 2015, compared with $16 billion and 12.7 million victims a year earlier."
Much of this was used for Government documents or benefits fraud. However, "Eighty-six percent of the 17.6 million Americans who had their identity compromised during the last year said fraudsters tried to open up credit card or bank accounts in their name soon after, according to the report."
"Yahoo's priorities clearly did not include proactive protection of user information," said Chenxi Wang, chief strategy officer at San Francisco cyber-security firm Twistlock. Truthfully, does any company have a clear priority for security?
Cyber-security is an expensive game of cat and mouse. Yahoo "invested more than $250 million in security initiatives across the company since 2012," according to Reuters. Many companies opt for insurance instead of spending the money on the game. Yet companies don't even do the basics, like force password changes every 90 days. Do they train their employees on phishing and other social engineering techniques that are the number 1 avenue for hacks?
LA County is just the latest event in a year that saw colleges, healthcare, Verizon, Y!, Oracle, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Cisco, dating sites and more got hacked. It isn't IF, it is WHEN. And then it is: What will you do about it? Do something with the barn door before all the animals flee.
]]>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!
]]>CenturyLink just sold off its data center business that was a combo of Qwest Cyber Centers and SAVVIS to a group of PE firms for $2.15B in cash and C-Link keeps a minority stake worth $150M in the new company. CL bought Savvis for $2.5B in 2011. Buy High; Sell Low. Bell-Head Mentality.
The PE coalition that bought the data centers also grabbed 4 cyber-security firms in order to announce this global security co, to be run by Manny Medina, former CEO of Terremark Worldwide.
Wired's headline says it best: The World's Telecoms Are Under Threat From All Sides.
Broadband, cellular and voice are all flat or declining markets.
IAAS and PAAS are ruled by Amazon, IBM and Google. Microsoft only got into the game recently and is doing better than all the telco's combined.
PE firms are buying up data centers as the world adjust to cloud computing, an app market and streaming TV and radio.
DDoS attacks are happening too often. So are Hacks. There are not enough fingers to fill all the holes in this dyke.
UCaaS is ruled by 8x8, Vonage Business, RingCentral, Fuze and a bunch of other providers that are not a telco. The PBX market may be shrinking but not fast enough for the other Hosted VoIP players. Cisco and Microsoft have chunks of the enterprise UCaaS business that the telcos don't.
Comcast Business is at $6B in annual revenue, which makes it a bigger CLEC than almost all that are left. WIND does $5B. EarthLink less than $1B. Birch and TelePacific are private. Level3 does $8B. CenturyLink does $17B (much of it ILEC revenue). Zayo is $2B.
Apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype and Slack are replacing voice and SMS and even email. It is a topsy-turvy world. What's a telco to do? Well, merge! Get bigger because bigger solves nothing, but it makes money for top execs in the C-Suite and the Board room and on Wall Street.
Our economy spins on e-commerce and the Internet. When the companies that provide that Internet are too clunky to do it properly, what happens to our economy?
We went from a five nines voice network of reliability to cell phones and VoIP that quite frankly can't be more than three nines. Have you noticed the number of outages lately by telcos and cablecos?
There is a lot going on. There are many areas of opportunity, but the fall back from these guys is "more of the same", "do what I know" and "one more quarter!". None of these transactions is good for the industry, the economy or the consumers. They are stop gap, short term money movers. We are going to wake up shortly and realize that it is 1970 all over again. It makes the NSA job easier when there are few players, but what about the customers?
In the data center space, one master agency contacted me after the C-Link announcement to tell me that the folks at CenturyLink have no details about the sale. How can that be when Monroe has been trying to sell the DC division all year? Great planning, guys!
Whose customer is it? Will the agent still get paid? Will the customer see a price increase? Who is the billing entity? Who will the customer be paying? These are good questions that bothered some TELX customers when Digital Realty took over.
I keep seeing executives at master agencies say these deals are good. Do they say that in print because they have to?
Don't forget that you can leave a public comment with the FCC on any of these mergers. You can voice your opinion here. You will need a docket number but you can google it after the filings are in the system.
]]>Krebs experienced an IOT botnet attack earlier this month. An ISP client was under two DDoS attacks in August.
These attacks are increasing in frequency -- and are not going away. This will be normal business soon.
Email and iPhone hacks are in the news.
What are you doing to protect your clients?
Quite a few data centers offer a DDoS Mitigation service. (So does Level3).
There are a number of managed security service offerings - from firewall to IDS to UTM* - available from a number of providers.
In a time when bandwidth pricing is decreasing -- and customers want to spend less -- someone needs to bring up the topic of security and redundancy. Why not you?
*Intrusion Detection Service and Unified Threat Management
]]>Velis4 has been acquired by a company called Globalgig. Ernest Cunningham will be the CEO of the combined company, while Anthony Jett, Velis4's current CEO, becomes the COO. Globalgig brings a global vision to Velis4, who will be expanding into Europe and Australia soon.
"The one global product of interest to Globalgig is the multi-IMSI SIM, a revolutionary technology enabling Globalgig subscribers to use their own local SIM card anywhere for low rates. Traveling employees just need to turn their device on and the Globalgig system will automatically select the available IMSI having the most optimal rate and service. Customers enjoy seamless worldwide coverage."
Speaking of mergers, CB Insights has the list of the 27 worst mergers (or failed M&A).
Andy Abramson hints that Vonage is selling off its consumer business.
T-Mobile has an MVNO named Walmart Family Mobile that it sold to TracFone.
Reports say that Verizon is close to selling off its data centers for $3.5B, which is a good return on the Terremark acquisition in 2011 for $1.4B. There are 18 facilities and it looks like Equinix is the likely buyer.
Rumors at Dreamforce are swirling about Salesforce buying twitter -- for its customer service functionality.
The big news this week is Yahoo! Verizon is buying them for $4B but they just let folks know that 500M accounts were hacked 2 years ago!!! - and now it seems that they were scanning emails for the feds (3 letter agencies). Rich Tehrani does make a good point that in an Age of Cloud, US providers are now at a disadvantage globally because the feds are so ingrained in cloud providers.
A little something from Salesforce: a customer service survey infographic.
]]>In the world of Anti-Virus, two Czech companies are merging. Avast made a $1.3B offer for all the public shares of AVG.
Jon Arnold has a nice write up from MoNage - Messaging on the Net - about messaging and comms. Interesting stats. It explains the Slack phenomenon.
From 451 Research Group, Colocation vs. Cloud: "Many providers claim that SMBs are skipping colocation and going straight to the cloud. However, 451 Research studies show that this isn't so black and white. In the 'S' portion of the SMB market (<249 employees), companies are more likely to have some sort of cloud-based service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS or hosted private cloud) than colocation services, but only by a margin of about 19 percentage points (49% to 30%). In the 'M' segment of the SMB market (250-999 employees), the numbers are about even between cloud and colocation services (38.2% to 38.9%, respectively)."
]]>Chris Richter, Level3 SVP of Global Security Services, did a great job as the keynote for Microcorp's One on One event. He talked about the very real threat of cyber-security. It is a heavy weight prize fight. Nation states are involved. It is high stakes because it is about Money.
Richter said that the Dark Web is 85% of the traffic on the Internet. It has cash transactions in excess of the drug war.
Ransonware is a 10-person company that makes $60 Million per year. There is revenue attached to cyber-crime. That makes it more tangible if you will. Certainly more motivation.
It isn't just marketers who ruin everything. Hackers turn your own gun on you. Every piece of software to check a system has been used to enter a system. Boom!
Richter gave some sold advice: Practice good data hygiene. For an experiment, the NSA dumped flash drives in a parking lot to see how many people and employees would use them. Almost all. All contained a program to call home and alert the NSA.
Humans are the weakest link in security. Social engineering is how hackers get around most security. Change passwords often and do not share them with anyone!
You can't patch stupid! (You have to fire stupid.)
Highlight slides:
The periodic table of cyber-security start-ups from CB Insights. It is a chart of the 121 companies, VCs, corporate investors, and acquirers defining the cyber-security industry.]]>