The Next Billion Dollar Telecom Player

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

The Next Billion Dollar Telecom Player

GTT has been on an acquisition tear lately. They bought Perseus and Giglinx in the last month. "Perseus specializes in the ultra low latency connectivity used by the high frequency trading community," according to Telecom Ramblings. The purchase price was $37.5M plus the assumption of $3M in capital leases. Perseus comes after GTT bought Hibernia Networks in January.

Then the announcement came that GTT had picked off Giglinx Global, a wholesale reseller of IP and network. Details were not disclosed, but revenue was assessed at $16M.

This morning, GTT announced that they were buying Global Capacity from Pivotal Group. [Pivotal Group acquired GC from Bankruptcy in 2011.] "Under the terms of the agreement, GTT will pay $100 million in cash and issue 1.85 million shares of GTT common stock, to the sellers at closing. GTT said it expects that Global Capacity's annualized revenue will be about $200 million at close," according to the press release.

GTT is a stew consisting of WBS Connect, PacketExchange, N-layer, Tinet, UNSi, MegaPath, One Source Networks, Hibernia, and these 3. It has a Tier 1 network according to Dyn. And it is looking more and more like GTT is the new Level3, as L3 goes quietly into the closet of CenturyLink.

Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO has repeatedly expressed that he expects GTT to achieve the "financial objectives of $1 billion in revenue and $250 million in Adjusted EBITDA."

No idea what the magic is with $1B in revenue for the sake of it. Intermedia Communications hit the Billion dollar mark in 2000 - and collapsed in 2001 selling to Verizon. PAETEC hit $1B in revenue before being scooped up by Windstream. No clear idea who would buy GTT if they hit $1B in revenue.

GTT's revenue last quarter were $182.4 million, which is $700 million annuallized. Add in GC at $200M and GTT will almost hit a billion in revenue (with a billion in matching debt by the way.)

Another company striving to reach a Billion first is RingCentral. (I think Vonage will hit it first, since they have Consolidated Revenues of $243 Million in the last quarter. Vonage Business revenues are expected to be $486M in 2017.) RC's quarterly report says Total revenue grew 29% year-over-year to $111.8 million. This makes RC revenue about $450M, a little behind VB.

RC's CEO Vlad Shmunis says, "As we look ahead, we are excited about the market opportunity for cloud communications as enterprise customers empower their global and distributed workforce to work anywhere, any time, and on any device. This market transition will fuel our growth to $1bn by 2020."

RC is riding high after Synergy Research marked them as a Leader in the 3 spaces of UCaaS: Retail, Wholesale and Cloud Comms.

"With a 19% market share by revenue, RingCentral is growing twice as fast as the overall UCaaS market, according to Synergy Research." So where does that put VB? It isn't even listed. RC is followed by 8x8, Mitel and ShoreTel in the report. That's why I just love analyst reports. P2P Baby! P2P!

I wish instead of spotlighting the revenue, they could spotlight customer care, trouble free deployment, retention, and ease of doing business. Instead it is a race for revenue, gobbling up companies, and a mess to deal with. Integration is a Myth in Telecom. It is smoke and mirrors with duct tape, foil and pink slips.



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