Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

VAR

Is this a Master Agent Dilemma?

June 21, 2011

From the carrier side, Channel executives are looking to the VAR space for growth? Why is that? Has the Agent contribution to channel revenue hit a plateau?

At dinner last night, I was talking about the magic number of a tribe. For consultants, it's 100.

And So the Bankers Cheer

June 14, 2011

Intermedia is a hosted Exchange company that ventured into hosted VoIP. That venture landed them an LOI (letter of intent to buy) from a private equity firm. On the heels of that, Intermedia decided to grab Zlago to bolster the cloud channel push that Oak Hill Capital Partners wants. Combined they reach about 7000 MSP's and VAR's, according to this report.

Are VAR's the New Agent?

May 27, 2011

The Channel seems to be turning their back on the traditional telecom agent. All eyes are on the VAR space. Even Master Agents are out chasing the VAR's. (For example, Telephony Partners has a white paper out to explain why VAR's should work with a master agent like TP.)

From talks with cable execs, it appears that the traditional telecom agent scares the C-suite at the Duopoly.

TDCloud Joins the Fray

May 19, 2011

We have seen the hardware distributors moving into the cloud space. We saw that SYNNEX launched Cloud SolvUC as a unified communications play. According to the PR, the first nationwide cloud UC product. Umm, just from that marketing spin alone, I would suspect that SYNNEX did not have its finger on the pulse of this space.

Losses and Growth

May 10, 2011

The only thing really growing is debt.

Clearwire grew revenue but also its losses.

PAETEC finished swallowing CavTel to get to ~$2B in revenue but with losses. And with just 54,000 business customers. (Cbeyond has more than 58,000). Margins are 18.4% according to Rob Powell.

Centurylink is getting hit with a lot of access line loss which is adversely affecting its revenue.





The Inexpensive Cloud

April 21, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

Amazon Web Services including EC2 is down today. When Gmail has any failure my twitter stream goes nuts. Facebook collapses often.

There is one thing people should keep in mind: Building Resiliency and Survivability into a Cloud Platform is not cheap.

For Agents, used to selling TDM with five nines reliability, moving to VoIP with less than that will be a shock, especially when they find out after the first outage.

For VAR's, who have been running their own servers, and like visitors to  Vegas who tell me they are up money, will tell you about never having any down time, moving customers to the Cloud, where you lack control and transparency, will be unsettling.





A Failure to Communicate

April 6, 2011

In the Agent space, many non-telco vendors (like Conferencing and Hosted PBX providers) have tried to get traction. Sales traction from this independent sales force. It isn't going well.

Agents (and VAR's) spend about 80-99% of the work week in the comfort zone. That is, doing what they have always done.

VARs are Replacing Agents

April 3, 2011

In an article in Channel Partners magazine, Master Agents discuss how all their future growth will come from VAR's. Carriers are chasing VAR's for any growth in Channel numbers. Where does that leave the Agents?

Well, Agents can partner with VAR's to be the telecom provisioning department. Or Agents can start getting uncomfortable or irrelevant.

Exam the fact that most Agents do not want to sell cellular.



A VAR's View from the Cloud

March 30, 2011

IBM's New(er) Strategies

March 29, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

At IBM's Lotusphere this year (Feb. 1), IBM rolled out strategies for Cloud and Social Media.

IBM identified 5 ways that partners could benefit from the Cloud. They are as follows:

  1. Cloud Application Providers - deliver business apps via a subscription model through the cloud such as SAAS
  2. Cloud Builders - design, build and manage clients’ cloud needs, typically integrating with existing infrastructure.
  3. Cloud Infrastructure Providers - provide a public cloud infrastructure or Platform as a Service (PaaS) on which app can be hosted.
  4. Cloud Services Solution Providers - resell multiple public cloud services and offer complementary services such as training and integration.
  5. Cloud Technology Providers - provide the tools, services, and technologies, such as cloud management, billing metering and monitoring — that help clients use the cloud more effectively.

These are ways for VAR's to stay in the business of providing applications and associated services.

According to some PR sent my way, " IBM is the largest consumer of social technologies.

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