New ReportsWeb Global UC&C study:
"The global market is gradually experiencing the transition from legacy telephony services and messaging platforms to new UC&C services and platforms. We expect more number of global deployments of UC&C in coming years, driven by growing popularity of applications, such as rich collaboration, mobility, video conferencing, and telepresence." Key word is gradually.
"Business process integration and social media communications have become the primary focus of enterprises. Companies seek low-cost solutions, such as BYOD and web real-time communications (WebRTC) to deploy UC&C solutions." BPI or BPaaS - it isn't stand alone products. It will be an integrated platform to run business process that happen to include comms. (At least at the enterprise level)
And of course the growth guess: "Global unified communication and collaboration market expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% from 2016-2020," says a report by Technavio.
The news seems to miss that the different sectors of the marketplace are migrating from legacy for different reasons - like cheap dial-tone replacement, simul ring, etc.
The market is buzzing with Skype Integration news from RingCentral, MegaPath, BitTitan, even Yealink and others.
Master agencies are seeing a way to grab the attention of Cisco partners. First, AVANT teamed with Cisco to accelerate sales for Cisco Powered Providers.
Next, MicroCorp amped up its "relationship with IntelePeer, in order that certified Cisco partners can earn monthly recurring commissions on voice services for those selling the Spark and Meraki MC platforms." Cisco wants partners to get used to selling cloud and voice, because Spark, ya know.
RingCentral teamed up with Google for Work to chase enterprise. Having also integrated with Skype, RC is hedging bets or wants to be all things to all people, which never works.
Windstream, after showcasing Mitel and Avaya, teams with BroadSoft to bring customized Virtual PBX to the hospitality market. So WIND has Mitel, Avaya, BSFT, Allworx and Metaswitch. Yeah, that is cost effective.
As if there weren't a large number of service providers in the space of UC&C - from Fuze, RC, the Cloud Comm Alliance members to the LECs to the other numerous ITSPs. Now softswitch vendors have decided to become service providers, too. Broadsoft BroadCloud; GenBand Nuvia; Alianza Cloud Voice Platform; and Metaswitch MetaSphere Cloud Services are all competing with their customers and making it easier for new entrants into the already bloody ocean of Hosted VoIP. (Now even enterprises can be an ITSP).
Not to be left now. Cisco and Microsoft have jumped into the fray to compete for UC&C customers with Spark, HCS, Office365+Skype4B. The PBX vendors like NEC, Unify, Avaya and Mitel are in the mix and feeling the pinch to have a cloud component. Not only a cloud component but contact center too. Oh, how complex we must make it.
Everyone is pushing up-market, but Cisco recently did a study on small businesses. The study found "on the IT front, a majority of small companies (86 percent) are considering the use of cloud-based unified communications (UC) systems as a possible solution to their communications needs, replacing their more traditional premises-based counterparts."
Yealink has phones for Skype4B. One of the reasons that you see Jabra, Plantronics and Sennheiser at VoIP shows is because bluetooth headsets are becoming common in the call center space and more UC&C users are choosing to dispatch the deskphone.
"Yet unified communications as a packaged service, despite its relative maturity, remains far less than universally adopted, particularly outside of larger enterprise accounts. A recent survey of more than 400 enterprise and SMB IT decision-makers, performed by UBM Tech for XO Communications, found that only one-third of organizations had fully embraced UC. On the other side of the spectrum, a separate survey performed by Osterman Research for ConnectSolutions found that about as many IT decision-makers (26 percent) and business deci-sion makers (39 percent) are either "somewhat" or "very fearful" of migrating to UC. Nearly half of those surveyed admitted that they don't fully understand the full impact UC would have on their organizations. These fears and trepidations come despite the fact that 71 percent of those surveyed by Osterman believe there are "significant" or even "enormous" benefits that can be realized from the deployment of UC." This is a part of a nice piece that Martin Vilaboy at Channel Vision magazine wrote on UCaaS demand and adoption.
The role of SD-WAN in UCaaS HERE.
Good read on Churn from a former BSFT exec on LINKEDIN.
A look at UCaaS service delivery by AVNET.
]]>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.]]>
Cisco demonstrated Spark, which I thought was for SMB, but is being pitched to Enterprise especially with its big hook into Salesforce. The demo that I got at the booth was rather disappointing. Not very visual. Looked like a console.
"Cisco Spark delivers cloud-based business communications that enables customers to message, meet and call anyone, whether it be on their mobile device, desktop or meeting room end-points." [PR] Isn't this what all the UC&C platforms promise? And keep in mind that this is re-branded Squared.
Not that Slack is the end-ll-be-all, but if you can't at least offer that type of look and feel and functionality (what I refer to as UX and CX or simply user or customer experience) then what are you doing? With two million daily users in 2 years, there is something they like about it besides the way it decreases internal email that people like.
Atlassian HipChat has a similar UX. The room or container or locker or folder or whatever you want to call the holding space for documents, conversations, recordings and notes around an event - sales call, project, meeting - is about organization and working on it when I want to or can as well as a depository for everything about the event in one easy to use, share, store space. This is a long time coming - and it still needs some improvement but it is getting better.
I still am waiting for a single inbox for email, texts/SMS, IM, etc. One place for all my comms. Maybe some day. Right after SSO (single sign on), which we haven't heard about since FOWA 2007.
I did hear more talk about APIs, SDKs, and integrations. Zapier and IFTTT weren't there but maybe in spirit.
Genband had some news. It has re-organized its product portfolio under Kandy. Now fring and other products that are monthly recurring revenue are under Kandy. Genband is in a patent dispute with Metaswitch that some have speculated leads to a merger. Genband is also doing co-marketing for its customers - see here.
And XO touted that it is using GenBand for advanced real time communications. When XO becomes Verizon in 2017 that means Alex Doyle will have one more platform to deal with!
ThinkingPhones came out as Fuze at this show with a marketing campaign playing on Unified.
NETSCOUT has a platform to measure service delivery issues in a multi-vendor environment. This platform looks at Voice and video media performance; Call signaling and UC server performance; as well as Network and enablers' infrastructure performance.
One big announcement came out before the show: Switch.co re-branded as Dialpad. Craig Walker was a keynote speaker at the show. Dialpad was in the Sprint booth talking about mobility and enterprise. (They gave away nice jackets.)
Another big deal was Avaya launching Zang.io, in what at first glance looks a little like Kandy's logo (and font and colors) and at second glance looks like they are trying to put one up on twilio. It is kind of a mixture of the two. "Zang connects popular collaboration apps like Google Hangouts with business solutions like Salesforce.com or SAP for a seamless user experience. Zang comes with simple SDKs, sample apps and the ability to use other third-party communications apps, which speed adoption and value creation." (You can read the rest here.)
This either works for Avaya and they move beyond premise PBX - or it fails and they file BK. Those are the only 2 options because while telcos like Windstream still sell Avaya, from what Avaya partners tell me, it is more about old logos, not new logos. And there is too much competition in the Enterprise space. Lot of big booths (20x20 and larger) at the #EC16.
One cool toy came from Oblong. "The result of more than 20 years of research at MIT Media Lab, OblongĀ“s flagship product, Mezzanine, is an immersive visual collaboration solution defining the next era of computing: multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, multi-location." It was a total immersion telepresence system that could be controlled by something like a Wii game controller or an IOS device. It was a nifty toy that brings Minority Report to life.
Voxbone was serving up international DIDs, right alongside Belgian chocolates and expresso! Thanks!
Yesterday (3/8) was International Women's Day, so here are some forgotten women in tech history.
Today's GapingVoid cartoon is about silos in organizations and collaboration. Ha!
]]>No one makes voice calls any more. It is all text and chat. These simple communications have been enhanced to include peer-to-peer video calls in the same vein as Facetime and Skype. WebRTC has allowed WhatsApp and Facebook to add calling features to their messaging apps, pulling even more minutes from carriers. (Most of this revenue is now in mobile data buckets, which means just 2 carriers get most of the money.)
The real disruption in business communications, the last bastion of good revenue for carriers, is being done by non-telcos. Twilio is just one example of elastic communications from a non-telco. The bigger news was the Slack-Skype integration.
I saw a list of forward thinkers of VoIP and it was a list of CEOs. Only one company on that list is making any noise at all. The rest are just staying the course, while the course is changing around them.
If comms is all about mobile, shouldn't the forward thinkers being making a dent in mobile, SMS, chat, IM, presence?
Video, security, analytics, APIs - see the lies of Highfive, Redbooth, Ringio, RogerVoice and Sinch - are the key components to be adding to the standard UC product offering.
In CIO magazine, "Given the cost and complexity of implementing UC&C .... When making those decisions, CIOs and other IT leaders listed these factors as the most important when selecting a UC&C vendor:"
Nice infographic about the CIO UC&C study.
Reviewing those 4 factors, forward thinkers would be looking at encrypted chat, better deployment, improved user and admin portals, and APIs / integration.
There are apps that you can add to your offering for encrypted chat, like Wickr or Signal or OpenFire server or Pidgin. For API, you could utilize a service like Zapier to help your users mashup tasks for productivity.
Or on the small business side, the rise of Personal Assistant apps in the past two years along with the tsunami of information, means that a better unified inbox, search, curation, prioritization are all things that users are looking for.
Have you looked at Cloze, billed as a relationship management software that "keeps track of your email, phone calls, meetings, documents, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. And everything from dozens of other services." Unified messaging beyond just the concept.
I'm not saying if you have to do this stuff, but I am saying that you should be trying new stuff. New ways to deploy, to remove friction in the sales side or the implement side or the admin track. Analytics to the call logs. Endpoint management. Business Process Improvement. Security for no other reason than terms like HIPAA, PCI and Sox. Encryption of data at rest whether that is call recordings, vociemail, faxes to enable peace of mind for the HIPAA/HITECH admins. (Rackspace has a way to encrypt databases here.)
Otherwise you will be selling cheap voice against a real disruptor.
Another reason to add something to your product offering is to have an upsell opportunity with your current clients to make them stickier, more productive and add some ARPU.
]]>So Google is bringing Hangouts to your living room or your office. Google has launched a hardware package for video conferencing that is $1000. TechRepublic breaks it down, but simply it is Intel i7 processor in an ASUS computer with an HD camera, a combined speaker and microphone, and a remote control.
The service costs $250 per year and has connections to Vidyo and UberConference. It will compete with AVer and Tely Labs, who both offer a video conferencing set-up for sub-$1000. At ITEXPO, I was told that Lifesize will soon be joining the $1000 party as well.
For channel partners that like selling hardware, now is the time because you get to sell network right alongside. (You can't make a video conference call without some good, reliable bandwidth.)
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Fast Company has an article about Amazon and its distribution system:
"Those 10 million Prime members (up from 5 million two years ago, according to Morningstar) are practically addicted to using Amazon. The average Prime member spends an astounding $1,224 a year on Amazon, which is $700 more than a regular user. Members' purchases and membership fees make up more than a third of Amazon's U.S. profit." [FastCompany]
Lesson 1: Make it easy to buy - make it easy to buy more. There is no sales friction at Amazon - 1-click and done. Working on a project recently, the technology itself creates a lot of friction in the sales process. Remove all friction in the sales process as well as in the description and use of the service.
Lesson 2: Reward your loyal customers! Amazon's Prime is really a Loyalty program.
"It's all content! It's just story!... They want stories! They are dying for them." - Kevin Spacey's Brilliant Speech [source] Give people what they want, they way they want to consume it. Take the friction out of the sale!!
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If you remember Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, you might want to look at this Bill Wasserman cartoon. A Job Title and Salary are not the sole measure a person's worth. If your passion is your work, you never have a J-O-B!
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AVer and Vidtel Announce Joint Video Conferencing Solution for Any-Size Business Delivers low-cost, high-quality cloud video conferencing in an easy-to-acquire solution. AVER's claim to fame is a really nice sub-$1000 video system. However, like a lot of tech companies, they do very little to market it.
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ATT's Project VIP will bring fiber to 1 million businesses - and the plan is to sell them wireline with wireless combinations! I thought they should have been doing that a while ago. And sad to say that Sprint is actually ahead of the top 2 in M2M (machine-to-machine) wireless solutions. I guess they were too business building monopolies.
additional commentary:
If you are a VP at a company, shouldn't you be able to talk on stage for 20 minutes about your services to fill in for another VP?
]]>BTW, Best Coming Of Age Story - The Winners: BlueJeans and Vidtel - I guess the TelePresence mag thinks that cloud video conferencing is turning 16.
]]>Clary makes a white board called Icon that is a 32" 60" TV with touch screen, a cart, a camera, speakers, and it runs win7. It is a PC, a TV monitor, a white board, and a video conferencing unit all on wheels.
InFocus makes a mondopad which is a 55" screen running win8 and Office apps along with video conferencing and whiteboarding. You can even annotate Office documents and email the screen shot.
These devices (I don't want to call them gadgets although they are cool tech) are under $10K. Both use Vidtel for the video conferencing. Vidtel has me in their booth this week at the expo.
I remember being at a Tech Data show for XO and seeing Hitachi unveil its electronic white board. I was astounded. Nice tech, cool idea or expensive toy??? Today, with all the added functionality, meetings should be better. It's step away from Power Point, right?
Think of how much better a presentation can be with a white board, touch screen, computer and video calling center all wrapped together. Of course, now the users have to catch up to the tech, which means they have to get better at presenting info/data than slide after slide.
If I had a Clary Icon in my house, I would use it all the time. I would do cooking shows, training, webinars, live video calls all day long. (It's on a cart, so it can go from room to room). Maybe I should do a Kickstarter for the $7K. Anyone want to chip in?
]]>VidTel's MeetMe service is an any-to-any cloud-based video conferencing service. To better explain that, it means that a customer can get video conferencing in the cloud, with no complex, costly bridges to maintain on-premise; even better, the Vidtel service also supports any-to-any, so in addition to supporting Cisco/Polycom/etc video devices, it also supports Google Talk, Skype.....and now, attendees calling in directly from a web browser via WebRTC.
So I had an (email) conversation with Alex Doyle, a long-time pal and the VP of Marketing at VidTel. Here's why this is blog worthy :), and why WebRTC in general, is important.
"Impediment Buster" - Doyle thinks historically, there have been a few key impediments to the take-up of video conferencing. End-point cost is high and management of video conferencing gear is complex and tricky. [High bandwidth circuit costs too.] Traditionally, Doyle says, "there's long development and R&D time in bringing out video end-points, and video has been relatively siloed. With WebRTC (plus cloud-based video conferencing), you can make the argument that these impediments have vanished - the bridge is in the cloud, and the "end-point" is just the browser. (There's not even an app or a plugin to download - unlike some of our competitors.)
"New Markets" - Doyle states that traditionally it's something that has been accessible only to the large enterprises - companies that could afford tele-presence rooms. With WebRTC and cloud based video, all of sudden there's an opportunity for the mid-market to benefit from video conferencing.
"Innovation and New Apps" - Doyle continues, "If you think about it, every HDX (health data exchange) on the market is basically the same thing. Building custom video end--points (like a tele-medicine "cart") is pretty expensive and takes a long time to get to market. But with WebRTC, if you think about it, the cost of building a new video app has been driven down to the cost of building a web page. Video suppliers can build custom apps like video interviewing, video health checkups, video consulting, etc as easily as they can build a web site. I think there's a huge opportunity here for innovation." So do quite a few pioneers in the WebRTC space, many of whom were at TMC's first WebRTC Conference.
I still think that video conferencing (like HD Voice and Cloud) is more hype than actual revenue. However, for a telecom agent or VAR, it takes multiple streams of income - and many tools in the toolbox - to make a successful business.
It looks like service providers are starting to see video conferencing (and collaboration) is a must-have instead of a nice-to-have. PBX-Change launched miMeeting, a simple-to-use, feature-rich web and video conferencing tool organizations can use to host interactive and engaging online meetings, webinars, training sessions and events.
]]>My brother works for a Microsoft integrator who has 135K seats deployed. I'm not even sure what that means, because Lync isn't being used exclusively as a landline or PBX replacement. It has many uses and not all of them are apparent. For example, it is can be deployed just for Presence and IM/chat. It can also be used for a conference bridge (like in the Office 365 bundle - does that constitute a seat?).
Sure, it CAN be deployed as a voice replacement BUT you still have to have SIP trunking from a voice provider. (Lync is not a dialtone provider; that will come from the SIP Provider.) Lync will act like a PBX in this setting.
Remember that Lync is the 3rd edition of Microsoft's Office Communicator Server. IMO, MS has not decided what they want from it yet.
Skype, mobile apps, messenger, Presence, PBX, conferencing -- it is all very cludgy. By that I mean, it isn't straightforward; it isn't user friendly.
My fears lie in the fact that Microsoft can't make a product that doesn't have to be patched every day due to too much bloated code and too many unnecessary features. And Lync has a lot of features. (Adobe is giving it a run for its money in patching Flash though.) Then by the time the user has a stable operating system (like XP SP3), Microsoft rolls out a new one - and we start all over again (from unstable and what many would call beta!)
My brother likens Lync to Sharepoint. Once people know what it can do... Well, more like, once it is thrust upon the users.
When you try to be something to everyone, you end up lost.
]]>As an aside: BigMarker.com is a different concept. More like G+ Hangout, BigMarker is about community collaboration.
One thing for agents to think about: IF there are hundreds of providers out there in any sector, then there IS demand for conferencing - video, audio, web. You should try to grab a piece of it.
If you wanted tips on selling conferencing, the TCA had a panel of conferencing channel execs give pointers in October of 2011. TCA members can watch it on-demand from the archives.
In the video conferencing space, it is becoming a buffet - wholesale, white-label, reseller, and retail; hardware and appliances; gateways and translators for interoperability; smartphone apps and softphones; API's; recording; and webcasting. I guess since airline travel is getting more expensive (and more of a PITA), video conferencing use is increasing. Moreover, with companies cutting the workforce for "synergies", the stranded employees have to do more and more (with less and less). Technology has to provide some productivity gains - the holy grail of cloud communications (of which, video conferencing is one component). Add to that the price of entry for video conferencing has dropped significantly. Sure you can buy a $100K telepresence room, but even $500 laptops come with decent webcams. Smartphones even have high resolution cameras that make video conferencing possible (if there is a strong enough 3G/4G connection and you have enough bandwidth left under the cap).
While video conferencing will not replace face-to-face or a live handshake, it definitely has its use during the sales process.
]]>Polycom is in the process of remaking themselves from a hardware IP Phone company to a video conferencing solution provider. This was a way to get some cash and start selling off pieces of the business that don't fit that focus.
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