You got my attention. I already had one go around with Convey and LSI over this.
Convey Services is SAAS company that runs a portal for master agencies. LSI and ByteGrid hired Convey to handle their portals and an event. Convey did a poor job on the details of this. The email came from them, not LSI or ByteGrid. The email didn't explain clearly anything actually.
Convey tracks agent usage of the portal. Where they go, what they look at. I figured they scraped my email from that. Convey says it was provided by LSI, who got it from a LinkedIn connection with one of their executives.
Everything about these 4 or 5 emails has been the showcase for the Lazy Marketer. Quick, Dirty and Hurried.
It was a blast email, but the emails were CC'ed instead of BCC'ed. (So I will likely get even more spam.) If you can't Blind CC, do I really think you can handle Compliance issues?
For your own education, HIPAA is not HIPPA. This does not exude confidence.
I asked to be removed from the email twice - both to Convey and LSI. No idea how ByteGrid got it. I have never done business with any of these companies.
Also, it takes one minute to look at my website or my twitter or my LinkedIn profile to know that I reside in Tampa Florida. Why do I get invited to so many events in Atlanta and Miami? One is a 7 hour drive and the other is 4 hours. From companies I have no relationship with?
If you aren't careful with my email, why I would I trust you with my client?
I know you think I made a mountain out of a molehill, but I get tired of the pile of email I get that is this or even more irrelevant.
I understand you want to get the word out. It's a fun event. Let's Blast it out! NO!!! STOP!
It's like when a Channel Manager from a carrier I quoted but never sold, does the musical chairs to another company and pings me from there. I shake my head.
3 Things:
Don't Be Lazy.
]]>Deloitte acquired most of the assets of Day1 Solutions Inc., a cloud consulting firm to provide deeper cloud expertise. CIO Magazine explains, "Deloitte needs Day1 for the same reason Accenture needs Genfour, Genpact needs Rage Frameworks and Infosys needs Panaya. The problem for Deloitte and for every traditional services company is that their clients do not believe they have the digital skills to lead the digital transformation journey the clients want their business to undertake."
Think about that yourself. Do you provide proof of your digital chops to your clients? Would they be comfortable coming to you for cloud migration plans or strategy or advice?
Item 2:
The Lookout Breach Report: "With over 1.45 billion compromised accounts, emails, social security numbers, dates of birth, and other data types, March was the biggest month for exposed data this year." Yes Cyber-Security is indeed needed. I personally am tired of all my data being hacked from companies that don't protect it.
A 451 Research survey on Security Pain Points and Concerns showed that "User Behavior is a top concern across companies of all sizes - while other issues such as Endpoint Security present a bigger problem for smaller companies. In contrast, Cloud Security and Data Loss/Theft pose a greater threat for very large organizations."
Item 3 is SD-WAN announcements
Coredial and Cincinnati Bell are the latest Velocloud wins. I find it funny that Zero Outages re-branded as the first SD-WAN company at their mostly unmanned booth.
Windstream is wholesaling SD-WAN now. Probably Velocloud. At this rate SD-WAN is already a commodity and Cisco/ADTRAN need to be afraid. The CPE isn't coming from them any more. It isn't being distributed by Tech Data either!
Westcon-Comstor Adds Viptela's SD-WAN Portfolio
Item 4: M&A:
After buying Hunt Telecom and Uniti Fiber scoops up pure-play fiber company, Southern Light to move itself away from just being dependent on Windstream. UNITI also bought Tower Cloud and PEG. Maybe Alpheus or FiberLight will be next.
Item 5: More M&A:
Broadvoice bought a company to add in analytics and user experience. "XBP's core strengths is in deep reporting and analytics integration, enabling customers to better understand user behavior. For example, tools like Advertising Analytics allow users to measure and follow through on outreach campaigns, from local to nationwide. Other tools like voice recording on-demand and voice-to-text conversion provide solid, searchable data that enhance successful client relationships."
]]>"Only two months into 2017 and already 13 million people have had personal information compromised. Attackers breached 15 companies in February alone. Among them, the biggest names included popular music festival Coachella, restaurant chain Arby's, and the InterContinental Hotel Group."
I was one of 393,430,309 people pwned in the River City Media Spam List data breach. The Compromised data consisted of Email addresses, IP addresses, Names, Physical addresses.
"In January 2017, a massive trove of data from River City Media was found exposed online. The data was found to contain almost 1.4 billion records including email and IP addresses, names and physical addresses, all of which was used as part of an enormous spam operation. Once de-duplicated, there were 393 million unique email addresses within the exposed data." [source]
This warning came with the notice: "When financial information is in question, it's important that data breach victims monitor their bank accounts and credit cards for fraudulent activity. Contact your bank or credit provider if you see anything that looks odd." But I didn't get a notice of the breach from River City Media or anyone. I got the notice from a monitoring system I signed up for.
Also with the notice: "Why are you only hearing about this now? Whilst the breach occurred in January, sometimes there can be a lengthy lead time of months or even years before the data is disclosed publicly." Like Yahoo or any of the EMR systems.
I just found out about the September 2016 breach to NetProspex. "In 2016, a list of over 33 million individuals in corporate America sourced from Dun & Bradstreet's NetProspex service was leaked online. D&B believe the targeted marketing data was lost by a customer who purchased it from them. It contained extensive personal and corporate information including names, email addresses, job titles and general information about the employer." The Compromised data: Email addresses, Employers, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses. Did D&B or NetProspex contact me? NO!!
Currently there is a successful GMAIL phishing scam going on. See more at LifeHacker. We need more user training on how to handle email and data.
One Tampa firm, BayCare, did an assessment of their workers' knowledge of scam email. It went sideways. But you SHOULD be checking to see if workers follow safe email procedures, since that is the Number 1 way that hacks occur!
There is more:
Privacy hawks in Congress call on Homeland Security to warn Americans of SS7 hacking threat.
You Won't Believe How Many Organizations Have Experienced Large Cyber-attacks by Rich Tehrani
For its 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (available for download here), Verizon used a final data set of 64,199 security incidents and 2,260 data breaches.
The problem with selling cyber-security solutions is (A) the cost; and (B) no one thinks it will happen to them. You have to sell it like Life Insurance. Sir, one day you will die. Then what?
No one is immune.
From VZE: "Take a look through the list of published data breaches and one thing will immediately strike you: no location, industry or organization is immune from attack. Even with the strongest defenses, you can't bank on not being breached. But you can deter the criminals."
]]>Content and ad money is the only area of growth for the Duopoly.
An analyst is projected that Cable companies will be the Incumbent Phone company in 2017 due to the number of cable phone lines sold compared to telco. The RBOCs have been trying to get out of the incumbent label for years, much to the chagrin of their ILEC brethren like Frontier, Windstream, CenturyLink and Fairpoint, who wish that the RBOCs would shut up.
The RBOCs have cellular, voice, data, broadband, big pipe, managed services, data centers and cloud in the catalog but the cash cow was the consumer triple play. Much like EarthLink and AOL floated on dial-up revenues for years, ILECs float on wireline revenues. Unfortunately, cable is eating their lunch in the broadband market.
Easier to dump a billion or four into a company that will provide some top line revenue than spend $24 billion on fiber to the home, where Verizon lost money.
Telco has pension and union liabilities that cable does not. These liabilities are now mainly under the RLEC umbrella in the form of CenturyLink, Fairpoint and Frontier, who purchased assets from many other ILECs and RBOCs, including the pension liabilities. It is quite the financial burden.
Content is the next revenue stream for the telco, following in the footsteps of cable, who have owned TV stations and content for years.
No idea how the telcos arrived at advertising as a viable revenue stream (maybe they are following Google's model). Yet "AT&T reports $1.5 billion and growing in annual revenue for its AT&T AdWorks division. That unit aggregates 14 million households and 35 million set-top-boxes nationwide, managing ad inventory across national ad-supported cable networks. AT&T claims it's the largest addressable advertising network in the industry, thanks in large part to its acquisition of DIRECTV." [telecomp]
It looks like we will soon be back in the days of AOL and Prodigy, where your ecosystem will be defined by your cell phone operating system (Android or Apple) and cell provider and broadband provider. The cellcos are providing free bandwidth for staying inside the ecosystem, making it tough for companies like DISH/Sling, Netflix and Layer3. Captured users, eyeballs, viewer habits, buying habits, ads, etc. will result in big money per user. It is a similar model that Amazon uses with Prime and Kindle. Users of a Kindle device buy Prime and spend more than 3x what a non-Prime member spends. And we keep it in the ecosystem. Google, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all competing for you.
]]>Velis4 has been acquired by a company called Globalgig. Ernest Cunningham will be the CEO of the combined company, while Anthony Jett, Velis4's current CEO, becomes the COO. Globalgig brings a global vision to Velis4, who will be expanding into Europe and Australia soon.
"The one global product of interest to Globalgig is the multi-IMSI SIM, a revolutionary technology enabling Globalgig subscribers to use their own local SIM card anywhere for low rates. Traveling employees just need to turn their device on and the Globalgig system will automatically select the available IMSI having the most optimal rate and service. Customers enjoy seamless worldwide coverage."
Speaking of mergers, CB Insights has the list of the 27 worst mergers (or failed M&A).
Andy Abramson hints that Vonage is selling off its consumer business.
T-Mobile has an MVNO named Walmart Family Mobile that it sold to TracFone.
Reports say that Verizon is close to selling off its data centers for $3.5B, which is a good return on the Terremark acquisition in 2011 for $1.4B. There are 18 facilities and it looks like Equinix is the likely buyer.
Rumors at Dreamforce are swirling about Salesforce buying twitter -- for its customer service functionality.
The big news this week is Yahoo! Verizon is buying them for $4B but they just let folks know that 500M accounts were hacked 2 years ago!!! - and now it seems that they were scanning emails for the feds (3 letter agencies). Rich Tehrani does make a good point that in an Age of Cloud, US providers are now at a disadvantage globally because the feds are so ingrained in cloud providers.
A little something from Salesforce: a customer service survey infographic.
]]>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.
]]>First up is Apple versus the FBI over end-to-end encryption on the iPhone. For privacy nerds, Barry Eisler's new book, God's Eye View, was a scary realization that the NSA has too much reach -- and very little oversight.
Over at AVC, there is a discussion about privacy - or rather whether you think Apple should bother - or if all info will be hacked, why not just let it out to stop terrorists and child porn?? The way I feel: if you make the argument about those 2 extremes, you lose the argument. You don't do things like give up freedom because of a fraction of the users. 99.97% of iPhone users are not hiding, so why should the 99 be subject?
BTW, Your Toaster May Eventually Spy On You, and Your Camera Could Kill Your Kid
SAAS
5 things about the SaaS industry. (I tend to extrapolate data from SaaS to the UCaaS vertical).
CLEC
Layoffs at EarthLink AND they sold off the IT division. Layoffs at Windstream too. If you are laying people off and cost cutting and you are in the C Suite at a telco, please pink slip yourself too because you are not fixing anything!!!
Running a CLEC is not just about controlling costs. It requires a Strategic Plan that is executed to properly. EarthLink had a couple of plans that just could not get executed. Talent is important but so is Culture and a Vision that the talent (the employees) buy into and want to see succeed. There needs to be a feedback loop.
Tom Peters really needs to keynote a telecom event. Or one of these CLECs should hire him to help you over the hump of failure.
CONFERENCING
The founder of Vidtel, Scott Wharton, is over at Logitech, who just unveiled a Breakthrough Group Video Conferencing Solution, which turns any meeting room into video-enabled collaboration space.
Metaswitch just announced Accession integrates with Zoom Video Conferencing.
After buying video conferencing company, Fuze, ThinkingPhones changed its name to Fuze.
PanTerra Networks Overview in 2 minutes 19 seconds - UC, Storage, Slack, analytics and more.
Communications, Collaboration or Workflow? Forbes article. NoJitter has a similar article about adopting UC for work flow.
Patent troll sues Apple, Verizon and AT&T for $7B in Various Patent Infringements!
Avaya vs Cisco in mid-market <-- as if that was the battle! The battle is with Microsoft - and it might be with Slack in 2 years.
WHY TIDBITS???
I write columns for Channel Vision magazine, Internet Telephony and Cloud Computing magazine plus this blog, plus work as an agent and consultant. Not everything that happens is worth 350+ words. Sometimes just listing the stuff that is crossing my desk helps me to tick off the puzzle pieces so that later I can write 700 words about a trend or an idea or whatever. So there have been a lot of tidbits posts especially in the last year, but it is so that you can quickly consume some industry news and I remind myself of stuff happening.
Thanks for reading!
]]>"Data Brokers Collect and Store Billions of Data Elements Covering Nearly Every U.S. Consumer: Data brokers collect and store a vast amount of data on almost every U.S. household and commercial transaction. Of the nine data brokers, one data broker's database has information on 1.4 billion consumer transactions and over 700 billion aggregated data elements; another data broker's database covers one trillion dollars in consumer transactions; and yet another data broker adds three billion new records each month to its databases. Most importantly, data brokers hold a vast array of information on individual consumers. For example, one of the nine data brokers has 3000 data segments for nearly every U.S. consumer."
The industry says that it is for targeted advertising. Ha! And it provides risk mitigation for consumers. Again HA!
The data is stored indefinitely. Consumers don't know how they are scored or any way to fix it.
How did I find this 2014 report? This article about a lawsuit: Supreme Court case pits privacy rights against Internet data brokers
]]>"There's a myth in Silicon Valley that any attempt to regulate the Internet will destroy it, or that only software developers can understand the industry. When I flew over to give this talk, I wasn't worried about my plane falling out of the sky. Eighty years of effective technical regulation (and massive penalties for fraud) have made commercial aviation the safest form of transportation in the world. Similarly, when I charged my cell phone this morning, I had confidence that it would not burn down my apartment. I have no idea how electricity works, but sound regulation has kept my appliances from electrocuting me my entire life. The Internet is no different. Let's not forget that it was born out of regulation and government funding. Its roots are in military research, publicly funded universities and, for some reason, a particle accelerator. It's not like we're going to trample a delicate flower by suddenly regulating what had once been wild and untamed." - @baconmeteor [source]
]]>ALM owns a couple of dating sites, most notably AshleyMadison.com which has the tag line: Life is short; have an affair. The hackers were mad that ALM is basically scamming its users. About 90% of the members are male; many of the female profiles are fake; and ALM charge you a pretty penny to delete your account.
The hackers gave ALM 30 days to take down the sites or the data would be released. They didn't - and it was. Last night.
"The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible--likely?--that you will know someone in or affected by this dump," John Herman wrote.
On twitter one message stood out to me: Journalists, remember that you are outing people - and suicide is a real possibility. Take care with this info.
What lessons can we learn from this hack?
Nothing is private - at all. Ever. Not Snapchat and it's disappearing images. (They don't disappear. They are stored.)
I am often amazed at the level of dumb in this country. Using government email addresses for this account instead of Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail?
"Here were millions of people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people (even if a great number of the emails are junk, or attached to casual gawkers, the leak claims to contain nine million transaction records). This hack could be ruinous--personally, professionally, financially--for them and their families," Herman states.
Keep in mind: "Readers should understand that if this dump does turn out to be legit, that just finding someone's name, email address and other data in the archives doesn't mean that person was a real user. As the above-mentioned Graham Cluley points out, AshleyMadison never bothered to verify the email addresses given to it by its users." noted from Krebs Security.
Companies do not take security seriously. It is overhead. It is a pain in the ass. They get a $100 million cyber-security insurance policy to cover approximately 65% of the Target hack.
Ubiquiti Networks was the victim of a cyber-heist to the tune of $46M. That was a social engineering hack foremost. What company even spends a little bit of money on security training and password management?
It is amazing how much data an e-commerce site collects. ALM had 37M records consisting of billing addresses, emails, passwords, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, payment history, phone numbers, credit card info, security questions, sexual preferences, and website activity. Identity theft and blackmail material for certain.
In an age of CryptoLocker ransonware, viruses, malware, key loggers, and even your ISP logging your every move, privacy is an illusion. In the name of technology, we have traded in any privacy at all for toys and convenience.
We have to be smarter about our online activity, especially Millennials and younger.
You would think that after this - and Target, the federal government and Anthem - it would be easier to sell security services. Unfortunately, everyone thinks it won't happen to them. News flash: the list of un-hacked sites is probably smaller than the list of hacked ones. Many of these hacks went undetected for up to 15 months!
Right now everyone should be changing passwords, but they won't. Companies should be scheduling password and security training, but they won't. IT Directors should be checking to see if default accounts are still active and unchanged on systems and gear. People should be updating operating systems and anti-virus software and at the very least running a malware scan, but they won't. This is why we have these issues.
Lastly, backup your critical data - to dvd or flashdrive or any of the numerous inexpensive online drives. Either take actions like these now - or pay for it later. And later is coming. You are not immune.
SIDEBAR
Troy Hunt has good read and a way to check if your email is in the data and you were pwned.
]]>Did you know that there was an FTC Robocall Challenge in 2013. (Thanks to M. Leblanc for filling me in.) Nomorobo came out fo that challenge. It works with VoIP providers to block robocalls.
Are you on that list? Sonic is. Why aren't you?
Privacy and security are BIG issues today. Reliable and dependable are table stakes. There are many ways that you can be the privacy advocate for your customers -- and make a splash doing it.
I am amazed that some service providers I know care about freedom and privacy but don't use that as a benefit for their customers today.
]]>As Trustwave claims, "Threats are growing more hostile. Budgets are tight. Skills are at a premium. And business imperatives like mobility, social media, web applications and big data can pose risks as well as inefficiencies if they're not properly managed." CIO's in study after study put security as the top priority. Spending on security increases each year, in a cat and mouse game with hackers.
There are specialists like Solutionary, a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), which provides information security and compliance monitoring services. And there are the Big Boys who provide managed firewall/IDS/monitoring service in their vast portfolio.
Netwolves writes, "Securing SMB data networks is at its most difficult and presents more risk than ever before. 2014 was the worst year thus far for commercial security breaches, and 83% of enterprises have difficulty finding the security skills they need." The skill set is tough to acquire and retain for any network. Outsourcing it falls under the "Let it be their problem" or "We can blame them later" buckets.
Netwolves is partnering with IBM Security Solutions and Palo Alto Networks to offer a complete managed security portfolio. (No one can do it alone.)
EarthLink is putting press out as "Managed network and cloud solutions provider EarthLink Holdings Corp. has unveiled a new Managed Security Monitoring Service designed to actively monitor customers' network, servers, routers, point of sale (POS) devices, laptops and desktops to detect security events before they turn into disruptive and costly data breaches." [pr] Goofy re-branding aside, this is another offering aimed at the retail space, so ELNK is right on target to re-brand as the Managed IT Provider for Retail.
Masergy launched a cloud router that using some unique marketing around the green movement and SDN. "Our software defined networking platform makes it easy to quickly provision a new Cloud Router." "Moving your managed routing to the cloud supports your environmentally-sustainable IT initiatives by eliminating the space and power needed for on-premise equipment."
Mycroft and CA Technologies bundle identity and access management and application, which is a subset of a subset offering.
Frontier has a subsidiary called Frontier Secure. (shakes head) They launched a new Identity Security Bundle for consumers. Good offer for a broadband package.
Level3 launched a DDOS Mitigation service with Terabit strength. It has the "ability to ingest attacks as large as 4.6 terabits per second." "The new service is designed to detect attacks in process, scrub affected traffic and return it securely to the affected enterprise." DDoS attacks are pretty prevalent actually. This should be a home run for L3 - except for the budget squeeze for security or insurance like this.
[ As an aside, Level's blog has a good read on ABTs here.] Netwolves is partnering with Riverbed to offer WAN Optimization. That is certainly a far cry from the days of reselling pipe.
Overall, managed security is all about "Your Mess for Less" as an friend said this morning. And that might be the problem: No one wants to own the security responsibility and treats like overhead or an after-thought, despite the millions and billions stolen regularly. It isn't an issue of IF you get hacked; it is more the issue of when you get hacked.
Bigger clients, bigger worries -- are you just offering the same stuff you do to SMB?
]]>On the one hand, a US company losing a big contract in Europe is a bad thing. On the other hand, it is the bed that they made years ago to regain monopoly standing and become a company too big to fail.
Kind of funny for Germany to be so upset; they spy on every one too.
Snowden's NSA reveals have gotten in the way of a lot of cloud deals for US companies. This mistrust doesn't bode well for global expansion of US companies.
And why do these companies want to expand outside the US? So many reasons.
Unions and pensions are unsettling for their balance sheets.
The US markets are flat -- cellphones, voice, broadband, TV. It's all about scale and getting more efficient.
Consumer spending is flat (or declining) so they can't squeeze more money out of this US bedrock.
Lots of competition from OTT, Netflix, Amazon Prime and other ways for consumers to spend money (that isn't with them).
Declining revenue in wholesale and other sectors due to price compression.
Customer acquisition in the US for hosted VoIP and other services has increased.
If you look at the bigger picture, the telcos haven't innovate or bought innovation in 50 years. All the value they bring is in pipe but all the bigger value is in what happens at the end of that pipe. And because they were the plumbers and got into bed with the government (and received favorable treatment ever since), they are now paying some of that price.
]]>PGP was created in 1991, per Wikipedia. 22 years later, businesses are catching on.
If cloud providers wanted to differentiate themselves in 2014, adding encryption to email and data storage as well as hyped up security and privacy would be the way. And you could charge for this luxury.
PGP is not only free, it is open source, which means it is no cost, but probably requires some hand holding to get going. That hand holding is where the gold is. Can you say Managed Services? The $300 Billion pot of gold.
Personally, I haven't noticed an increase in PGP. It could be that my email is benign. Or it could be that the NSA flags encrypted emai. I also haven't installed it because I'm too lazy to take the time to figure it out. (See I need an MSP).
ASIDE
New HIPAA/HITECH rules went into effect in 4Q2013. Cbeyond passed its exam for compliance for these rules. The money is still in healthcare, since not everyone has gone to electronic records or payments yet. Security, encryption, privacy -- buzz words that can mean money for the right service provider in 2014. Just make sure you spell it HIPAA, because when I see HIPPA, I know that you are clueless!
]]>Another article mentioned that Israel is having a water shortage. People joke about water being what we fight the next world war over, but it isn't much of a joke.
And another article noted that Saudi Arabia was deporting immigrants. It's nice to see that it isn't just the US, right?
So I started thinking about what trends were going to affect Telecom in 2014. We know that it will be more cloud, but what we will also see is more security breaches. The first trend is that companies do not take security seriously. (Privacy even less.) As more corporate data moves to the cloud -- and it doesn't matter if it is private or public cloud -- companies will only spend enough on security to tell themselves that they are fine.
In 2013, we saw a few cloud storage companies get out of the business. We aren't done. There are too many players in cloud services, a CAPEX intensive business, that are not getting a return on expenditure. Think about this: some debt tied to the equipment costs, a little revenue, bills for collocation and bandwidth, and payroll costs. Cuts will come - in the form of security, labor (skills), data back-up, maintenance, etc. The trend will be toward more security breaches and some consolidation.
The nice thing about consolidation, it gives rise to the trend of more unemployment. As we enter the age of robotics, the trend toward automation will continue, resulting in leaner (over-worked) staffs, less customer support and ultimately more churn (due to support and security issues).
If the Target breach taught us anything, it should be to ask what companies are doing to protect our data. Seems obvious in an environment running into the cloud. "This isn't so much a technology issues as it is a people and policy issue." Security is not a priority for corporations. Maybe the 100+ lawsuits and fines will change that going forward. That would be a trend I would like to see.
A lot of the security and privacy argument centers around the same thing the minimum wage argument does: prices. When companies focus solely on the price of goods and services and their margins, all is lost. It's a commodity game. No thought to the Value at all. That is a trend that will continue, since as a nation we reward profits above all else. Just ask the execs at HSBC, who laundered drug money but were fined 5 weeks pay!
With ARPU not rising fast enough for the Duopoly, raising revenue will need to come from adding more subscribers (also known as Organic Revenue). How do the carriers do that? Most markets are just take-aways -- another carrier is gaining revenue or subscribers at the expense of another carrier. Whether it is FiOS or U-Verse gaining TV subs from DirecTV or Comcast or its ATT or VZW gaining subs from Sprint, this is a trend that won't end.
Smaller players will have organic revenue issues as well. Smaller cell companies (and MVNOs) are losing customers due to the smartphone models that they can offer. Smaller VoIP companies are losing deals to providers with brand names.
We hear about customer engagement and social media -- and we will hear about it in 2014 starting at ITEXPO in Miami next month -- but many service providers forget that value and branding are the necessary ingredients to revenue. I don't see many companies jumping on the marketing wagon in 2014. For many it is a lack of funds. I'm not certain that executives think an investment in Marketing is worthwhile. Just like they don't think an investment in security is worthwhile. It's not a smart way to do business.
The trend is to keep an eye on revenue and not much else. We will hear the same stuff in 2014: WebRTC, UC, cloud, wearable tech, video, Big Data, XaaS, spectrum, channel and even some SDN. Lots of more of the same. Happy New Year! Hope to see you in Miami Beach at ITEXPO!
]]>