Google Fiber stopped over-building fiber to the home (FTTH) to give fixed gigabit wireless a chance. This isn't even 5G. This is current non-millimeter tech.
AT&T is trying to get BPL (broadband over power lines) to work with Project AirGig. Will it work this time? The power infrastructure is still pretty old/antiquated, ut technology has gotten better.
API isn't talked about like that. Integrations are. UCaaS as a stand-alone platform is not that impactful to the employee work day. Integrated with CRM, email and other work day applications is. [All About API is at ITEXPO.]
Intelepeer just announced a platform that integrates with Cisco Spark. Hope they demo that at ITEXPO.
The IDEA Showcase is Thursday evening. I always get amped at startup events because there is great energy (hope, promise, excitement) that we kind of lack in telecom.
If you like startup stuff, the week of Feb. 13 is Startup Week! Techstars runs that globally.
Channel Vision Expo is collocated with ITEXPO again. This is the first channel partners event of the year. And it is collocated with MSP Expo. Should be interesting because more and more referrals and indirect sales are making a difference for cloud providers. 8x8 notes, "New monthly recurring revenue (MRR) sold to mid-market and enterprise customers and by channel sales teams accounted for 60% of total new MRR booked in the quarter."
I don't understand Blockchain. (There I said it!) Maybe I will get a chance to see what that is about on the show floor next week as well at the Blockchain Event.
WebRTC is still a thing, according to Andy Abramson. We'll see as Real Time Web Solutions has a section of the ITEXPO as well.
Most of the noise in my email is about HPBX/UCaaS, SD-WAN or IOT. The IOT Evolution is happening at the same time in Ft Lauderdale but it is a separate show. Verizon, Amazon, Gogo, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cisco (but no AT&T) are speaking and/or exhibiting.
That is a lot of tech to take in at one time, but it also in one place. Where can you get that much info/demo/prezo in one place?
Some interesting stats from 451 Research Group.
Overall IT Spending vs. Cloud Spending. Cloud spending remains strong, and the growth rate continues to outpace overall IT spending. A total of 44% of cloud users expect spending to increase over the next 90 days, while 4% expect a decrease. In comparison, 38% expect an increase in their overall IT spending vs. 11% expecting a decrease.
Cloud Adoption. SaaS (64%, up 1-pt) remains the most popular type of cloud computing in use, followed by Infrastructure as a Service (43%, up 4-pts) and On-Premises Private Cloud (34%, down 2-pts).
On-Premises Private Cloud Vendors. The most popular vendor for on-premises private cloud is VMware vCloud (65%), with Cisco (33%) and Microsoft Cloud OS (30%) a more distant second and third.
Key Attributes. The most important attributes for on-premises private cloud vendors are Platform Reliability (66%), followed by Value for Money/Cost (47%) and Technical Expertise (36%).
If you are in Ft Lauderdale next week, let's grab coffee! Or join us for dinner on 2/7 HERE.
]]>TOS: "If you provide Feedback to Net2Phone, then you grant Net2Phone a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, fully paid up right to publicly display, broadcast, transmit and distribute the Feedback (and derivative works thereof), including but not limited to Your name and company name for attribution purposes. During the beta trial period, You will receive 1000 free inbound minutes per month calculated from the date of sign-up; provided that, if You do not use a minimum of 25 minutes per month, then Net2Phone reserves the right to close Your Account. Once Your free minutes have been used during a month, Services will be suspended until the next month begins. Net2Phone may terminate your beta trial service for any reason or no reason without prior notice. Once the beta trial period ends, Your free 1000 minute per month plan will automatically convert into the then-commercially available 100 minute free plan."
It looks like they are just lab testing. A 100 minute inbound plan seems like it would be for a very small business. That's less than 2 hours per month. Oh, well.
They did buy some functionality via the acquisition of LiveNinja. "Net2phone will combine LiveNinja's customer messaging and live chat service with PicuP, which gives small/mid-size businesses a self-service platform to deal with inbound calls, including auto-attendants, customized welcomes and voicemail to e-mail."
"LiveNinja offers a messaging application that facilitates companies and their customers having seamless conversations across multiple messaging and chat channels including live chat, SMS and Facebook Messenger," according to SeekingAlpha. Riddle me this: why would Google Voice service with 100 inbound free minutes need multi-platform chat integration? It seems that this should have been integrated into Net2Phone's Hosted VoIP offering instead of the stripped down PicUp service. It is a crowded space. Not sure they have product-market fit yet.
A similar service to PicUp launched from 3 VoIP veterans. David Walsh and Evin Hunt (from Shango); and Jason Tapolci (from VoIP Innovations) just soft launched their hosted VoIP service that is a mobile app only called Vocaly.
Launching an offering isn't cheap but it isn't that expensive either. There needs to be more experimentation in the space. A bunch of failures before we get some new, fresh ideas that work.
I give Verizon credit there because One Talk is an experiment with their Broadsoft platform that is powering other traditional offerings. We need IDT, Verizon and start-ups like Vocaly and Fone.do to experiment and see what happens.
]]>The premise for the panel is as follows: "The way telecom, managed services, cloud, and hosting purchasing decisions are made is changing. Today, because IT influencers and decision makers are doing so much upfront research, often 70 percent or more of their decisions have already been made before you're even looped into the conversation. This can put you at a huge disadvantage if you haven't drawn their attention through market differentiation. Likewise, for those MSPs that have, this change in decision-making theory presents an opportunity to earn a seat at the table as a highly-differentiated trusted advisor. This session will detail how to ensure you get found early enough in the buyer's journey to matter, stand out from the crowd, command premium pricing, and attract world-class clients and talent."
As I have often written here, positioning, differentiation and USP are the key to value and standing out. We will discuss this during the session.
The IDEA Showcase Startup Event is Thursday at 4.
]]>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.
]]>Companies hire me to visit, talk to their employees, listen, poke, prod and report back what I am seeing. This gives the business owners an extra set of eyes without the filter of the familiar (you see it everyday so you may not recognize it, like paint on the wall).
Here are some pieces of advice for non-startups (or companies that want to re-energize or act like startups):
Present clear mission and vision statements. Why? Exactly. As Simon Sinek says, Start with Why. People want to work with purpose, for more than just the dollar. You give them a Why with a clear vision and mission.
"No matter the state of the current fundraising environment, presenting a strong business plan can be the difference-maker that convinces someone to take a chance on your business." I often hear mentors say that a business plan is a waste of time. Huh? You need one to take to the bank. The whole underlying purpose of business planning is to be strategic, get clear and think through the idea. That is never a waste of time.
Zeroing in on customer needs. This is the tough one. We just saw a fiber company go BK because there just wasn't enough customer demand. You have to sell something that people will buy from you. In Hosted PBX, it took almost ten years to get traction.
Mentoring helps. Coaches, mentors and master mind groups are all designed to help you grow. "Wealth is a team sport," says Loral Langmeier. You can't do it alone.
Now this may be aimed at startups, but it is solid business advice: "Barring a broader economic slowdown, we don't expect a secular decline in venture capital markets. That being said, we would encourage every tech startup CEO and decision-maker to tread carefully in the months ahead. To succeed long term, the name of the game will be financial prudence, careful growth and a customer-focused approach to innovation," from Jaidev Shergill, Managing Partner, Capital One Growth Ventures.
Ben Evans writes, "There are very strong deterministic forces that drive the industry forward - Moore's Law, network effects, economies of scale, migration of value up the stack and so on. But there's also a strong element of chance and luck. Great talent and execution and great ideas are part of the mix, but sometimes you're also in the right place at the right time." Timing is just as important !!!!
Looking at the failures at RIM and Nokia, Evans says that the failure was a decision made 5 years earlier as they mapped out what the company would do / become. That decision is what missed the boat. Interesting because he mentions AOL and Yahoo falling asleep for 10 years. And I look at the ILECs to see how they made a pivot to cellular not realizing cable was going to eat their lunch. Bell Labs was gone. They were busy consolidating, not watching their ass or planning for the future.
Good luck!
]]>Did you see that Apple had a revenue problem? Not as many iPhones are selling. "Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) says the mobile wave, which is split between mobile phones (voice/SMS) and smartphones, is coming to an end, and the next obvious market for growth is cars." Ben's blog is here and the slide deck is here.
The Autonomous car has big investment from everyone from GM to Apple to Google to Tesla to hundreds of other companies. It is where we are heading. (It is just another robot!)
Robotics. Global investment in robotics doubled from 2014 to 2015 to almost $600M, according to Financial Times. Robotics is going to replace a ton of workers.
Life Science (or biotech) is still healthy. From cancer treatments to testing, investment in this sector is still good, largely because R&D spending at Big Pharma has shrunk in total dollars due to consolidation. Also, Big Pharma drug pipelines are lean; they tend to buy new drugs, treatments and tests these days.
The ancillary to this is the IoT Healthcare sector which saw a rise of 20% in 2015 investment, according to CB Insights. One problem being faced is clinical efficiency, which is tracking treatments to boost the effectiveness of healthcare providers as well as to improve the delivery of healthcare in hospitals and clinics via connected devices/objects. That takes us into wearables, ingestables, brain sensors, home monitoring and more. A lot of cool stuff in this space, especially happening here in Tampa Bay.
In Colorado and California, cannabis startups are the rage. Legal marijuana sales are tracking at 3x Coke's bottle water sales.
Education technology is also seeing investment, but our education system sucks, so I am ignoring it for now.
CHATBOTS, PERSONAL ASSISTANT and Other forms of AI
Matt Swanson, Paula Bernier and others think that "chatbots will cause a near-term disruption in how businesses interact with consumers, and a long-term paradigm shift in how people interact with machines." See Matt's article on VB.
Paula writes about Facebook, chatbots and customer service here. Thomas Howe wrote, "As alternatives to websites and to mobile apps, Chat bots, digital assistants and intelligent agents are the quick and efficient way to connect your employees and customers to your business." Companies like BizTexter and KISST are already shipping services (and they did it before Facebook!)
Financial Technology is looking good. When there is a best of list of conferences for a sector, you know there is money there. The Fintech startup scene, according to CB Insights, has been healthy for a while. Pretty much the way Craigslist sucked a lot of revenue out of newspapers, banking startups will suck some profitable lines of business from Wells Fargo and other large banks. Hopefully.
BTW, Payments startups saw a shift in the last two quarters. Digital wallets like Apple Pay are here. Investments will slow as winners start to emerge (like in the ride sharing space).
SIDE NOTE:
Latency Arbitrage is why latency matters to anyone in financial. Listen to why. ]]>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?
]]>It is a challenge to change the culture of any business, let alone a global company with 300K employees. Remember that Mayer tried to change the culture at Yahoo when she arrived there.
The only companies that emphasize culture are Rackspace, Amazon and Zappos. And they have it built into the bricks and mortar as well as the hiring, promoting and peer review.
Tampa has two companies that help companies innovate; they add a startup department and an innovation center to the company. One is called Dabble Labs that will work with many industries. OccamMD only works with medical companies.
This is more like bringing Special Forces advisors to help you take care of a problem. It isn't changing the culture. Or making a permanent modification.
Tampa also has Thunderdome, which is where US Special Operations Command works with acadmia, local businesses and inventors to keep the military arm innovative and competitive.
Many companies are trying to be more innovative and more like a startup. Some of it is to be innovative and competitive; some of it might be to retain talent. And maybe a little has to do with company valuation / stock price.
It is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal to change culture in a global corp to be like a start-up.
In telecom, service providers could do this by trying more things (and failing at some). It works for Google.
No on asked for the Model T or the iPod or the iPhone. Experimenting allows for your company to find the next penicillin. [Penicillin was found by accident. Slack wasn't on purpose either.] Companies need more dabbling, more experimenting, especially in a time when you can analyze the results. Then learn from them and repeat the cycle.
This is part of the lean startup cycle. So a company doesn't have to go crazy; it just has to start with the experimenting, which will have to slog through years of meetings, politics and anti-brainstorming. It will have to allow for quiet time, reading, playing, being creative in a safe zone, and talking to customers. Not things that most companies do. (That's why many outsource it.)
Certainly the culture has to embrace experimenting and failing before it will actually work. So good luck to Samsung. [Samsung already made improvements to their sales channels.]
SIDE BAR!
In thinking about the difference between telco and cable today, one big difference is that the cablecos don't compete and have an R&D arm, Cable Labs. Telco used to have Bell Labs but after Lucent plummeted, the telcos lost their R&D arm. Cable has had DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 while telcos wait for something better than VDSL2 (g.fast!)
]]>For investors, they get to see a transparent view of Google versus the rest going forward. For the co-founders, I think they get to stop worrying about Google and go do other things, the other things that Google funds. They have been running Google since 1998 and probably thought after hiring Eric Schmidt in 2001 and the IPO in 2004, they could have stepped back, Now they can about 2 feet. Good luck!
Meanwhile, a lot of noise (in my social feed) around the abrupt closing of Zirtual, a virtual assistant service. The 400 employees were emailed this morning about the company pausing-- as were the customers. It seems that they had $1M per month burn rate and revenues running from $8M to $11M -- the math doesn't work.
Snarky comments I have seen: (1) foreign labor is cheaper. Well, I haven't seen any complaints about the pricing or the work product for the VA's. There are other company's out there, including RedButler. So the model can work.
(2) It can't be done in California. Well, it wasn't. Zirtual was a Vegas startup.
They had US-based employees instead of contractors. They grew really fast.
I feel sorry for Zirtual CEO Maren Kate Donovan, because she was in the media leading up to this and now they are going to pick her to death.
You know what? Startups fail. SunRocket, anyone?
You know how many CLECs failed or went bankrupt? LightSquared, PSINet, NetRail, Birch, MCI, Norvergence and Adelphia to name just a few.
Growth is a challenge to manage, especially the cash flow side of growth. Because growth means hiring and hiring means CAPEX for office space, furniture, laptops, cell phones, etc. Who knows what happened? Certainly not investor Jason Calacanis. An autopsy would be beneficial to other startups I am sure.
On the one hand, one of the largest tech companies re-orgs without a peep -- a big re-organization actually, while a startup closes without a tweet.
]]>On blogging, Wilson remarks that it helps him articulate what he is thinking (at 48 min). He also later talks about how many people worry if they will end up in his blog
At 19 minutes Wilson speaks about NYC startups. Doubleclick was the first big NYC startup. Now there are more startups in NYC. Today, people realize that not being in Silicon Valley doesn't mean that you can't do a startup (or find VC money).
At 30 minutes, he is discusses mesh networks. In Portugal, buses are installing access points by Veniam that are creating a mesh wi-fi network for the town. Wilson invested in Veniam. It was mentioned in a TED talk.
"You have to have the Hustle."
Wilson comments on building a great product. He mentions tumblr at 24 minutes as an example of a company focused on delivering a great product. Wilson believes in the value of having a really great product! Engineering and product teams are a requirement for a sustainable company. Importance of a Product team should not be overlooked.
Learn more about the internet of moving things here.
]]>This is big for a number of reasons. It is one of the largest investments in a women-owned start-up in Florida. It is early stage money for a Tampa Bay based start-up, which is almost unheard of in this community.
GR8code is a school to learn how to code. It is a 9 week course. The start-up community in Greater Tampa Bay has been expanding the last few years. Notably, Eventjoy, a two-year old start-up in Tampa that launched at Startup Weekend Tampa Bay was acquired by Ticketmaster recently.
At the Startup Surge event a couple of months ago, over 80 startups attended to speak with the mentors. Many of these startups -- and existing businesses in the Greater Tampa Bay area -- seek coding talent, which GR8code could potentially provide.
I know this is outside the telecom window, but I'm kind of proud of Tampa Bay's tech scene right now. As co-founder of IGNITE Tampa and BarCamp Tampa Bay, it's nice to see the tech community get invested.
]]>"In 1980, McKinsey & Company was commissioned by AT&T (whose Bell Labs had invented cellular telephony) to forecast cell phone penetration in the U.S. by 2000. The consultant's prediction, 900,000 subscribers, was less than 1% of the actual figure, 109 Million. Based on this legendary mistake, AT&T decided there was not much future to these toys. A decade later, to rejoin the cellular market, AT&T had to acquire McCaw Cellular for $12.6 Billion. By 2011, the number of subscribers worldwide had surpassed 5 Billion and cellular communication had become an unprecedented technological revolution." (article via @trengriffin)
Innovation is a funny thing. In many cases, these meshed start-ups (like Uber, AirBnB) combine many elements that go beyond just replacing a previous service (like cabs, hotels). They enable anyone to leverage their assets (sofas, guest room, car) to make money, meet people, help out a stranger - all enabled by cellular, GPS, databases, a website and apps.
The car didn't replace the horse. The Blue Ocean of the car eclipsed the horse and the railroad.
Uber doesn't replace taxis, so much as it creates a separate sector. (I am seeing people replace their cars with Uber.) The same can be said cellalar data - it can't really replace wireline broadband, although there are those that use it this way.
Innovation today (I think) is being powered by economic stress. Etsy, eBay, eLance and other platforms allow people to turn hobbies or skills into extra income or even replacement income. All of this is driven by economic need. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The laws need to catch up to innovation, because AirBnB doesn't follow hotel regulations (neither does VRBO) and Uber & Lyft don't follow cab regulations (and probably not commercial insurance either).
Just some thoughts running through my head today.
]]>New and improved isn't really innovation. Innovation isn't something that government or anyone else can jump start. Innovation - really invention - takes creativity, quiet time, weird, environment of failure and failure.
Start-ups and Entrepreneurship have been the glow sticks that city leaders have been shaking since 2008 as they all try to emulate Silicon Valley. It doesn't work that way. The city needs to foster an environment that allows Richard Florida's Creative Class to bloom. then it needs to make it easy to do busy in that city. Then government should get out of the way.
Tampa Bay was lucky that in the 7 years since the seeds were sown for start-ups and entrepreneurs to get together in a safe place and play, things have progressed well. Not as fast as everyone would like but these things take time.
One of the cool things the county did in Tampa Bay (Hillsborough County) was to fund tech, hacker, makers and start-up events. Libraries are becoming a hub for makers groups (especially for kids, which takes the whole idea of STEM education to a granular level by giving them hands on experience in a safe environ.) That's how government can innovate - re-think how monies and facilities can be used to incubate inventors, makers, thinkers, start-ups and founders.
It's like billiards. You want these groups bouncing off each other because that's where the magic happens.
Innovation also takes re-investment. So the winners need to give back to the community with time, money and knowledge.
3M, Google, HP (in the old days), Richardson-Vicks (before P&G bought them) - all provide the environment where innovation can happen. You have smart people bouncing ideas around in a place where failure is an option.
When I worked in R&D as a chemist for a major manufacturer, innovation was copying the competitors. That's not innovation either. Innovation to me is taking the path less traveled (to paraphrase Frost for a second). It's seeing something not there yet. It's working on a new formula for Oil of Olay to remove all color, dye, grease. It's working on tanning lotion before there was a market for it (1990-92).
Think about Twitter. Even the owners weren't sure what it would become but it was a platform that they released so others could play with it.
Uber and Lyft have done to cab service what AirBnB has done to hotels. Sure, a lot of this is driven by a crappy economy and people wanting to leverage assets they have to trade time for money but the ideas are innovative. The regulations are being bent and broken in the process -- that's how you know it is a good idea!
Dropbox didn't invent file-sharing but it did innovate the user interface to make it stupid easy! And they hacked the marketing to make it grow like crazy.
Unfortunately, a lot of folks equate innovation with a new app doing the same old thing. Innovation can be anywhere, but from my experience innovation is largely done in an environment accepting of innovation and failure (because they go hand in hand). Look at pharma: 95% of experimental drugs fail to get to market. What can you do, stop trying?
]]>Y Combinator's Paul Graham shared some numbers this week. "Harvard researcher Shikhar Ghosh revealed in 2012 that at least 95 percent of startups fail to meet a projected return on investment." That means start-ups should focus on building a sustainable business.
My experience lately has been that founders have this idea that their start-up will launch after a 54-hour startup weekend, pitch a couple of times, land mad money, and the rest is easy street. This couldn't be further from the truth.
My experience is that most founders think their idea is gold -- without much though into a go-to-market plan. And sometimes without much thought into how do I build this plan either.
I was surprised at Wearable Tech Expo by the number of companies that were funded by Kickstarter. That's right, prototypes and everything funded lean by a kickstarter campaign. Then these companies did market research and went to market. How novel is that?
Just think about the Apple app store. How many apps actually make money? Start-ups are like that.
Another example is music. You have probably seen the story of the poverty of royalties paid out to musicians by Pandora and other online music sites. Albums don't sell the same volume they once did. It's like cloud services. The income starts very small after a large capital expenditure.
Look at Dell, Intel, AMD and other hardware companies that are gyrating to stay afloat as the industry shifts to mobile and cloud (in place of desktops and premise). I understand how start-ups hear about billion dollar valuations of Instagram, snapchat and twitter and think that can be them. The reality is: that's hitting lotto. The majority of startups fail (or at best pivot a few times to stay afloat). A minority make it a sustainable business.
If you are dropping the w-2 job to found a start-up on your savings in the hopes of grabbing some fast cash from VCs and then cashing out big in 3 years, you are misinformed. My I suggest that you drop by Startup Camp at ITEXPO in Miami at the end of January to speak with start-ups. Reality is very different from "The Social Network".
Don't take this as discouragement. Most start-ups are a fierce plodding along, slowing building a business every single day. You will trade in your w-2 for a commitment as big as a baby.
I think everyone thinks they have great ideas, but the tires meet the gravel in sales. Just look at the anemic sales most VoIP companies have. Money doesn't grow on trees and very few folks actually hit the lottery.
]]>Vidtel, based in Sunnyvale, CA., was founded by former Broadsoft CMO, Scott Wharton, in 2008. Alex Doyle, another Broadsoft alum, was Vidtel's VP of Marketing.
Vidtel was a channel focused technology service provider. (I was working there this year on channel marketing). The Wainhouse report tells the story of how this startup took a different path from its bigger competitor, Blue Jeans, who was all about raising money. Vidtel was about raising revenue through strategic partnerships with ClaryIcon, InFocus, IntelePeer, Providea, ACT!, and others.
You know I like channel focused service providers, but even more I like a focused service provider. "Furthermore, the company avoided scope creep within its service offering." That is a key takeaway for other SP's or startups.
I agree with Wainhouse, 'We view this acquisition as a real-world example of how hard work, perseverance, and intelligence can really pay off."
Good luck to Scott, Dan, Dagan, Bruce and the rest of the staff at Vidtel on the next phase of the company's growth with Fidelity.
]]>