hosted pbx

Masergy Buys Broadcore

I knew Broadcore was in play, just like many of the Cloud Communications Alliance members. Masergy has a strategy to be more than an MPLS reseller. Picking up Broadcore gives Masergy "Demand for business-class cloud communications is growing at a rapid...

8x8: The Channel View

I spoke with a sub-agent of 8x8, Tom Palmer, President of Adrena Speed Solutions. Palmer has been selling 8x8 services for a while. He told me about the time (around 2006) when Packet8 was the service brand of 8x8 that...

Talking with the CMO of 8x8

8x8 has hit $100 million in annual revenue, making them one of the top 3 Hosted VoIP providers in the US. I had a chance to interview Debbie Jo Severin, Chief Marketing Officer of 8x8 this week.My first question was...

Easier to Use

"Collaboration, mobility and social networking are hot topics for enterprises, but the complexity of unified communications technology is contributing to low adoption rates, according to CompTIA's second annual Unified Communications and Collaboration Market Trends study." [source] The whole idea of...

Broadsoft Enhances Trunking

Besides the stock price changing, Broadsoft is enhancing SIP trunking. "BroadSoft, Inc. has announced the release of an enhanced SIP trunking solution, enabling service providers to add unified communications and mobile applications to their SIP trunking offering with speed and...

The New VoIP Giant

8x8 has hit $100 million in annual revenue making them the number 2 hosted VoIP provider (behind Comcast). 8X8 put up some good numbers last quarter.At $100M, the company has proven that they can organically grow revenue. The churn is...

No Traction in Hosted PBX Market

According to Insight Research, independent hosted PBX providers should be able to take some small business market share from the Duopoly over the next five years.The small business market size is more than 40 millions lines, says Robert Rosenberg, INSIGHT...

A Lesson in Value Proposition

This came across my twitter stream this week:"Must-read for founders: A VC explains how to build a killer value proposition" on VentureBeat by Michael Skok, a Venture Capitalist at North Bridge Venture Partners. His slideshare page contains a couple of...

Big Mac versus Hamburger

When selling Hosted PBX and other unified communications, it's a lot like giving someone a Big Mac. Extra sauce, more calories, cheese and an extra patty for your customer, but all he wanted when he hit the drive-thru was a...

WOW! to acquire Knology

More cable consolidation. Southeastern Knology is being acquired by WOW!, WideOpenWest LLC for about $1.5B with debt."The acquisition increases WideOpenWest's customer base and will help give the operator more leverage in programming contract discussions with content providers." This statement makes...

What is the Value Prop of VoIP?

"It is happening and no one seems interested in stopping it - that hosted voice services are rapidly becoming a commodity service," Dave Michels"According to the Telecommunications Industry Association, wireless has become the preferred voice-services option. Wireless revenue in 2012...

EarthLink's Sweet Spot

I learned a few things at the EarthLink training today in Tampa. EarthLink has 175K business customers and about 3 Million consumers, most of them dial-up customers, providing $20M in free cash flow per month. So of the $1.3B in...

I Can Do It Myself

I hear this all the time: "I can do it myself!" Backup solution? No, I'll build one myself. Outsource your email? No, I can run my own email server. White-label VoIP? Nope. I'm going to spin up an Asterisk box and...

What About Selling Cloud?

At The CPZ, the rest of the panel were cloud guys (VAR's and Hosted UC). This is a snippet of the conversation where the panel is talking about how transactional telecom sales are dead, long live the Cloud! People deemed...

So Can You Re-Use Those Cisco Phones?

From a VAR:"At the risk of sounding like sour grapes, in my experience no one who has tried to use old Cisco phones and bring them current with their Smartnet coverage so they can use them on a new call...

Why Did ShoreTel Buy M5?

Recently, M5 Communications was acquired for about $160 million by ShoreTel. The premise PBX vendor had a bad quarter and caved to the pressure of Hosted PBX. Avaya, Interactive Intelligence and MITEL have hosted offerings. At some point, ShoreTel had...

Educating the Channel with Certifications

One of the panels last week at ITEXPO was titled Educating the Channel with Certifications. When you consider that as a founding board member and current VP of the Technology Channel Association, education is a primary objective, this topic was...

Day 3 at ITEXPO

An eclectic mix at dinner at The Forge tonight. Greg Nielsen at Data Foundry who is celebrating both being a nominee for Austin 40 Under 40 and selling out the 1st phase of floor space in Texas 1. My cranky...

Making Hosted UC Simple

Simple Signal sketches out Hosted UC on a napkin at ITEXPO. I guess it is that simple. ...

M5 Bought by Shoretel

So news at ITEXPO is that Shoretel bought M5 Networks last night for $145M, which 3x revenue. Hope shines anew in the Cloud Comm Alliance.UPDATE:According to the WSJ, the value of the deal is up to $162M, including $84M in...

The Trouble with UC Sales

In a recent study, titled IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Unified Communications Voice Infrastructure 2011-2012 Vendor Analysis, IDC analyst Rich Costell wrote that “Customers still struggle to justify the deployment of UC and calculate its overall ROI.” The conclusion: “educating potential customers...

Another Broadsoft Merger

In a surprise move (to me anyway), Megapath acquired IP5280 Communications, a Colorado ITSP. Both Megapath and IP5280 utilize Broadsoft, so that will make some of the transition easy. (And likely was a factor in the acquisition decision.) IP5280 had...

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