I spoke to five people in the VoIP space familiar with Fonality and none of them had much insight on why this move happened. Well, one answer: scale. Inorganic growth.
At one time, Fonality had a big dealer network with training on the expo hall floors. The HUD (heads up display) was a product spotlight. Voicemail in the cloud was ahead of its time. (I guess you were ahead of Star2Star with the hybrid/premise model.) Then POOF! Fonality wasn't at expos anymore and the noise/attention died down.
Last year Fonality made an exclusive master agent agreement with the Alliance. Hard for that to pay dividends with an industry ARPU of $400 in less than a year. Next thing I know, I get the embargo notice about the merger with Telekenex aka Netfortris.
I'm not a fan of embargo news because it always slips out (like this did). The merger news made Facebook just after I agreed to the embargo. After it hits the social networks, it isn't worth writing much about - unless it is big. I told the PR firm it was only going to be a line item and a tweet. And apparently that was upsetting to Fonality. So they replied via the PR firm.
Marty Williams, head of product marketing for Fonality, wrote via a PR firm: "While Fonality does provide premise PBX solutions for customers who want it, the bulk of our business is cloud telephony and UCaaS. Fonality's top-rated UCaaS platform and its telephony management network are internally developed. Owning this intellectual property and the opportunity to expand IP development for the future is critical to leading the evolution of state-of-the-art, secure cloud communication and network services that increases productivity for our valued customers."
Fonality was founded in 2004 and grabbed "$50.4M in 6 Rounds from 6 Investors". It looks like they were at $45M in revenue in 2015. Fonality has over 200 employees. The deal was probably worth right around $100M because hardware revenue is worth less than recurring service revenue. It also begs the question how did Netfortris finance it?
Yeah, I am a skeptic. If this IP was award winning and awesome, why didn't you knock it out of the park? You were ahead of the pack a couple of times. Did you get tired? Discouraged? It sounds like money men wanted to cash out. (Nothing wrong with that.)
Again, yeah, I am a skeptic. The VoIP industry is more than 15 years old and is still just a dial-tone replacement. Billions in investment in this industry and it takes non-VoIP companies to do interesting things with it (thanks to the technology of WebRTC).
Even Microsoft has done more in the UC space in a short time with Skype4B than most providers have done with their product bundle in ten years.
There are over two thousand me-too companies offering up pretty much the same Hosted PBX service. RingCentral wrote, "The promise of UCC needs to go beyond multi-modal communications in one place. Rather, it should be about what the cloud can do to transform the way people work. I've said before , that it's about unified experiences, not just unified communications. Our vision of this is coming to fruition by combining best-in-class UCaaS, team messaging and collaboration, video and web conferencing, cloud contact center--all served on an open platform, at global scale."
There is a distinct difference between selling basic voice service and selling UC. When selling UC, you are selling CHANGE. And selling Change is F***ing HARD. People hate Change.
But for a business to improve in productivity and efficiency, they have to do things differently; they have to Change some habits. They need to leverage the technology that our industry has made available to any business anywhere and any time. That is the Magic the cloud is offering. It isn't about the cheapest seat price to get the deal. That's dial-tone.
Look at that chart above. No one is crushing it. How many Cisco partners are there*? How many Microsoft partners? (They are doing better than shown here.) Metaswitch has over 700 customers. Broadsoft has over 400. Why hasn't the pie been eaten yet?
Despite the Avaya bankruptcy, premise PBX sales have only dropped roughly 3% per year. That isn't a whole lot of rip and replace with cloud comms!! It's kind of embarrassing.
In the Tidbits article, I mentioned that the most interesting move I saw was Atlassian buying task management provider, Trello. Now you have Project Management with collab and chat via Hipchat (like Slack). Voice and video calling can be done via WebRTC. Even screen sharing. All that is needed is a Dropbox. That kind of bundle is more interesting to me. Consolidating 2 of the 2000+ just isn't interesting to me. I understand that scale is important; and consolidation in this space is needed, but that doesn't make it interesting - to me.
SIDE NOTE:
In 2014 there were 70 Silver and 20 Gold and 2000 partners at the Cisco event that year. No clear total number. Microsoft's online directory lists over 30K partners.
]]>Google Fiber stopped over-building fiber to the home (FTTH) to give fixed gigabit wireless a chance. This isn't even 5G. This is current non-millimeter tech.
AT&T is trying to get BPL (broadband over power lines) to work with Project AirGig. Will it work this time? The power infrastructure is still pretty old/antiquated, ut technology has gotten better.
API isn't talked about like that. Integrations are. UCaaS as a stand-alone platform is not that impactful to the employee work day. Integrated with CRM, email and other work day applications is. [All About API is at ITEXPO.]
Intelepeer just announced a platform that integrates with Cisco Spark. Hope they demo that at ITEXPO.
The IDEA Showcase is Thursday evening. I always get amped at startup events because there is great energy (hope, promise, excitement) that we kind of lack in telecom.
If you like startup stuff, the week of Feb. 13 is Startup Week! Techstars runs that globally.
Channel Vision Expo is collocated with ITEXPO again. This is the first channel partners event of the year. And it is collocated with MSP Expo. Should be interesting because more and more referrals and indirect sales are making a difference for cloud providers. 8x8 notes, "New monthly recurring revenue (MRR) sold to mid-market and enterprise customers and by channel sales teams accounted for 60% of total new MRR booked in the quarter."
I don't understand Blockchain. (There I said it!) Maybe I will get a chance to see what that is about on the show floor next week as well at the Blockchain Event.
WebRTC is still a thing, according to Andy Abramson. We'll see as Real Time Web Solutions has a section of the ITEXPO as well.
Most of the noise in my email is about HPBX/UCaaS, SD-WAN or IOT. The IOT Evolution is happening at the same time in Ft Lauderdale but it is a separate show. Verizon, Amazon, Gogo, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cisco (but no AT&T) are speaking and/or exhibiting.
That is a lot of tech to take in at one time, but it also in one place. Where can you get that much info/demo/prezo in one place?
Some interesting stats from 451 Research Group.
Overall IT Spending vs. Cloud Spending. Cloud spending remains strong, and the growth rate continues to outpace overall IT spending. A total of 44% of cloud users expect spending to increase over the next 90 days, while 4% expect a decrease. In comparison, 38% expect an increase in their overall IT spending vs. 11% expecting a decrease.
Cloud Adoption. SaaS (64%, up 1-pt) remains the most popular type of cloud computing in use, followed by Infrastructure as a Service (43%, up 4-pts) and On-Premises Private Cloud (34%, down 2-pts).
On-Premises Private Cloud Vendors. The most popular vendor for on-premises private cloud is VMware vCloud (65%), with Cisco (33%) and Microsoft Cloud OS (30%) a more distant second and third.
Key Attributes. The most important attributes for on-premises private cloud vendors are Platform Reliability (66%), followed by Value for Money/Cost (47%) and Technical Expertise (36%).
If you are in Ft Lauderdale next week, let's grab coffee! Or join us for dinner on 2/7 HERE.
]]>In this podcast, I sit down with Omar Paul, co-founder of Zilkr, a platform for communications APIs and SDK. In the Age of Integration, the Age of the API, UCaaS providers have to start building an ecosystem. When apps like Slack and WhatsApp are enabled for voice and video calls, UCaaS providers have to offer value and integration or be marginalized to sometimes used dial-tone.
CPaaS is hot. Twilio just IPO'ed. Nexmo was just acquired by Vonage. Apps like Uber, Slack and so many more are adding comms. But not from the VoIP provider, from the CPaaS platform provider.
If you can't see the podcast player above, you can download the mp3 or listen over at Soundcloud.
]]>We went from TDM to VoIP to Hosted PBX to UCaaS to UC&C.
We went from T1 to cable broadband to Gigabit.
The consolidation of cable will tighten the market in 15 to 18 months. (It takes that long for integrations to take hold.) Now if the integrations are not a big fail, then cable - New Charter/Spectrum, Comcast, Altice - will ratchet up the competition in the small business market for triple play.
"Cable/MSOs are the fastest growing providers in the business services market, with much of their recent success in the mid-size business space," reported MarketResearch. Think about that: the mid-sized space - not just the small business segment of the market.
Of the $104 Billion total businesses spent on telecom services in the US in 2014, AT&T had the largest share (33%), followed by Verizon (22%) and the rest of the LEC band of brothers (Level3, CenturyLink, Sprint, Windstream). MSOs have more than $12 Billion of that pie, with the lion share - $5B - going to Comcast coffers alone.
SIP anyone? 54% of business cable subscribers also use cable for voice, the report states. That means less than half the businesses using cable are buying voice from another provider. That is a shrinking opportunity for the 2000 Hosted VoIP players in the US.
"Last year the Cable/MSO share of businesses with 100+ employees rose to 17%, reports TNS. "The main driver behind this growth was a heavier reliance on internet service and the need for greater bandwidth; two areas where larger cable providers excel."
Telco broadband has not kept pace with cable in speed and price. Egged on by Google Fiber - and a declining market share of businesses - ILECs have started tentatively rolling out faster fiber based broadband - 100MB to 1Gigabit depending on the ILEC (Windstream versus CenturyLink or AT&T).
UPDATE: Google just rolled out Gigabit Fiber to small business starting in Charlotte in July of 2016.
The ILECs have made a tremendous CAPEX investment in TV - just as OTT TV is hitting its stride. They spent big to supply triple-play, when they could have spent the money on FTTx projects for faster bandwidth. That was just uncreative thinking. [More of that Me-too mentality ingrained in telco.]
All of this will stress ILECs, some CLECs and even some OTT VoIP players. When cable takes about 35% of the SMB market, there won't be much room left for anyone else.
In March of 2016, "During the fourth quarter, Verizon reported that total broadband connections dropped to 2.1 million as it lost more DSL subscribers after losing 94,000 DSL customers," according to Fierce media.
Verizon is transitioning. Verizon is now betting on mobile ads (AOL acquisition and Yahoo bid); 5G fixed wireless broadband replacement for wireline services; and IoT (including connected cars) to add to its coffers.
A point I make often is that the debt that the ILECs carry is crippling with flat revenues.
Think about this: Vonage has taken $800M worth of voice revenue. Twilio gets $240 million in voice revenue. This is revenue that typically would go to Level3, Verizon and AT&T (and it probably does terminate to them eventually for a smaller percentage of that money).
WebRTC is being used in so many apps to allow for video and voice calls - bypassing the traditional voice network. [And bypassing the cellco text system and dollars.]
Then, we have Cable beating Telco in broadband bandwidth. Always has in fact. Gigabit fiber will be the real winner if the telcos decide to pursue that route for real (versus in just press releases).
We have telco getting in the data center - and now we have telcos looking to get out of that business without embarrassment.
There is a Talent problem, too. There are too many musical chairs. Not only can't you set a strategy when you shift personnel that much, you can't execute on a strategy either if the cogs are constantly being replaced. (And I don't mean cogs in a bad way. It takes a lot of talent to keep the wheels spinning.) The talent drain has also resulted in a domain knowledge drain as well. Quite frankly that means they don't where things are and how things have been done to keep things working. It isn't all documented, especially fiber maps!
Let's face it, for many companies that started with an A Team, they are now running with a B or C team. Why? As Steve Jobs said, "A Players hire A Players, B players hire C players. Get it?"
People move from company to company in teams. The same routine and team may work once, but it is not often a repeatable experience. There's a reason the Cavaliers recruited LeBron back to Cleveland - and didn't hire the whole Miami Heat starting line up.
The telco organizations harbor stifling factors: monopoly mindset, legacy systems, federal accounting and regulations, departmental silos and competing internal interests. These factors do not lend themselves to attracting more A Players.
There is also a surprising lack of talent for the new services and skills needed for omni-channel marketing; omni-channel customer service; cloud, managed services, migration and integration. This lack of skill will choke growth and brands.
We see outages and hacks every day. The worry is only about getting a customer. There is little concern for retaining that customer; data security; or a resilient network (4 Nines is good enough).
Many people are choosing smaller organizations to work for. The reasons are numerous but I would think that impact and voice play a major part. In smaller businesses, any one person can have a voice and can see the impact that they are having on customers, culture, and the company. That isn't the case in larger organizations.
Flat organizations (and smaller companies) have less meetings, fewer silos, maybe more transparent governance.
Most financial experts are predicting an economic slump in 2017. It won't matter which candidate wins the Presidential election, a slump is coming. We have under-employment; increasing number of freelancers; and a stagnant wage. None of these components inspire an economic engine that is fueled by consumer spending.
ARPU for cellular, cable and VoIP segments have been fairly constant over the last 4 years worth of data I could find. Bandwidth and voice revenues are actually shrinking. Total telecom spending from 2013 to 2014 shrunk $6 Billion dollars according to MarketResearch.
Growth will be hard to find. We are seeing a price war in cellular accompanied by escalating customer acquisition costs.
Hosted VoIP is experiencing a similar battle for customers that is increasing the cost of customer acquisition. Rising SPIFFs and other compensation are being used to grab both market share and channel partner attention.
PBX vendors are NOT crashing and burning as many had predicted. Premise PBXs are still being sold and installed by a robust band of vendors - Mitel, Shortel, Avaya, 3CX, Fonality, Zultys, Panasonic, NEC, Siemens and more.
We are half way through 2016. No big winners. The Twilio IPO was a surprise. Vonage spending all of its acquisition money for the year on Nexmo, Twilio's competitor, seemed strange, since there were Broadsoft clients they could have picked off instead to take a big step forward in the race. Slack and all the Skype4B hype are little surprises.
2016 is half over - and so many companies have either done M&A or played musical chairs that I expect nothing magical to happen in the rest of 2016. And I look at all of this and wonder what 2017 holds.
ASIDE: telco versus cable consumer data.
]]>The Telecom Channel Partner Long Tail. 95/5 off-setting Pareto's Principle of 80/20. However, effort and real dollars are spent on the unproductive 95%. That is money and energy that could go into producing partners or marketing.
I talk about what an Aligned Partner is in my Channel Playbook.
In 2006, Alec Saunders and Chris Wood had a discussion about the Voice Long Tail (see here and pdf). To me, 10 years later it has played out as written. 80% of the money and voice lines are still either Centrex, POTS, POTS replacement or SIP trunks of some kind. It may be even more than 80%. Windstream has 1 million SIP trunks off its Broadsoft and XO has 2 million. Add in the voice lines from cablecos which are generally SIP trunks or some VOIP POTS replacement. The Hosted PBX, UCaaS, UC&C and whatever we call it next amounts to 20% of the sales (that is an estimate). It probably is more dollars per sale by far.
Where would gaming VoIP put us? Where does in-app video and voice calls put us?
The thing that is just catching up is that for it to be more than POTS replacement it has to be specific and useful to the user who is going to make a change. Slack and Skype4B are examples. 8x8 with its Allstate integration is a niche app. We need more of those.
We need more turn-key packages like Slack-CRM-WebRTC-Gmail-Zendesk-Mailchimp in a single window. [What I like to call Business Process as a Service.] Cisco is trying with Spark. But for the vast majority of small businesses under 99 employees, they would need a package that was turn key, easy to use and specific for their industry. Niche. Vertical. We aren't there yet.
]]>I wonder if Polycom saw the writing on the wall that the battle is going to come down to Microsoft versus Cisco? Motley Fool thinks that is why the OTT ITSP 3Some - 8x8, RC and Vonage - all had a bad day at the stock market. That would be funny, since who pays that close attention to the space? Not even analysts in the space really pay that close attention to detail.
Certainly, Skype for Business gets a lot of press. SfB is the Donald Trump of UC&C. But that doesn't mean that the OTT ITSP 3Some is going away - or won't add 20% revenue next quarter. There are other candidates for a company to use for UC&C, phones and dial-tone.
With the new Windows 10 update came a pin called PHONE on my laptop. So maybe there IS something to worry about.
The MS Connectors and Groups seems like MS is taking cues from Slack, even though SfB is integrated with Slack.
When the Fool says this: "RingCentral and friends are now facing challenges from Microsoft and many other titan-sized technology experts. The proof is in the pudding, and these VoIP experts must continue to show that they can deliver healthy business results in head-to-head competition with true giants." It makes me wonder if the Fool knows that the Giants ARE in VoIP -- Comcast, AT&T, Verizon. I mean, VZ has Cisco HCS, VCE, Broadsoft - and after buying XO will have more Broadsoft plus Genband.
Granted, no one is putting on seats as fast as SfB or Slack. And that, I think, is why the analysts are crying. In ten years of VoIP, it just hasn't crushed it yet.
I don't know if the analysts have looked, but customer acquisition is expensive - and hard - in VoIP. Far easier to include Lync with Office and Email than to try to sell it. Remember how MS included a shitty browser for free on the desktop? Or how they gave away Sharepoint?
VoIP Providers have to pay salespeople, build a channel, give away phones (and other hardware), SPIFFs, free months of service, just to get a customer. The cost of that acquisition is being questioned apparently on the stock market. OR it may all be a fluke and stock speculation going awry.
Either way, it doesn't shake the fact that the cost of acquisition is similar to cellular right now. The cellcos are buying customers for over $650 each!!! Imagine that!! The Street always watches the wrong numbers.
Meanwhile, in the handset market, Polycom probably peaked in market share at 38%. Yealink and many others are running into the space --- at the same time that many seats are being deployed without a handset! Softphones, mobile apps and even bluetooth headsets are taking market share from the handsets. Not just Polycom, but all of them!
This merger announcement was not taken well by many SPs. Fuze (formerly known as ThinkingPhones) has already announced inter-op with Yealink. A few others I spoke with are looking at Grandstream, Obihai and others -- because MITEL competes with them!
Now Windstream, AT&T and Verizon may not care with phone, because they sell MITEL and Avaya also. The rest of the players are tired of competing against their vendors! (BSFT should hear that last comment again and again!)
It wasn't even a good deal for Polycom. "The transaction will comprise $447 million in cash (23%) and $1.51 billion in stock (77%) and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Mitel doubles in size--reaching revenue of $2.5 billion (2015 pro forma)--paying a relatively underwhelming 1.2 times trailing revenue (EV of $1.5 billion) and 7.3 times trailing EBITDA for a videoconferencing vendor," writes William Blair of Equity Research.
Also, Polycom's relationship with Microsoft for video was supposed to help Polycom's video business, especially for video enabled phones. I could see Microsoft relenting and using there own version of WebRTC to do video and calls inside Lync/SfB in the near future.
MITEL probably should have bought SLACK! By the time it closes this deal, Polycom won't be worth as much as it is now (diminishing returns).
There is a brave new world here. It is ruled by mobile apps - Facebook, Instagram. Snapchat, WhatsApp, twitter, Slack and others. (3 of those are owned by FB!) We know in the consumer play, FB has plans to be a trojan horse in payments and transactions. However, who takes the business desktop? So far it is Office365.
Cisco just launched Spark. It's integration with Salesforce is a highlight, but its ability to integrate with many other apps is why the folks at 170 West Tasman Dr. in San Jose think they will get some market share back. They are counting on Spark working well, the channel embracing it and the Cisco ecosystem still being valuable.
Customers buy ecosystem for integration, ease of use and sameness of GUI for the employees who utilize this stuff. Ultimately, BPaaS is where Spark is heading, with everything happening inside of Spark instead of a number of windows.
That is the one thing that MS and Cisco have: a certified channel that drinks the kool-aid. And these 2 companies are already ingrained in the Fortune 5000.
This space keeps getting interesting. The market thinks that MS/Cisco won already. You could say that Polycom cashing out admits defeat -- or the investors wanted the cash. Makes it harder for the ITSP market.
]]>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!
]]>Switch/Dialpad is now nicely packaged for sale, something both Andy Abramson and Craig are good at. The product has a bunch of features that allow a buyer to check off the boxes including integration, the necessity of all VoIP platforms going forward.
Rich Tehrani has a write up about it.
Random facts:
Slack added WebRTC to allow for video and voice calls without Skype.
64% of U.S. Android smartphone owners use chat or VOIP apps [source]
RingCentral Connect Announces 1M API Request Milestone -- told you API integration is key to relevancy.
TopBox to Sell OrecX Call Recording in Partnership with its analytics software
]]>Citrix bought the auto-attendant in the cloud company, Grasshopper, earlier this year for about $161.5 M per 10Q filing. Grasshopper revenue was about $50M if you consider ARPU of $11 and about 350K users. That is like 3.2x revenue. Not bad for the boys in Boston. Now of course Citrix is in the midst of a huge re-org. Good luck with that in 2016.
A good read on cyber-security and strategy in this article.
Additional material from Jon Arnold to accompany the Open Source podcast we did and the Open Source for SP ITEXPO session coming up in January.
The Motley Fool spends a lot of time analyzing telcos for stock reasons (like in this one about AT&T's prospects in 2016). I am unsure if they actually understand the business though. Gary Kim explained that IoT hype has more to do a must-have revenue stream for the cellcos. Then Gary takes a dive into the change in revenue for the US carriers in the last dozen years. VZ, AT&T, Frontier and C-Link all have different growth strategies, notwithstanding the fact that all these pies are flat or shrinking - and with increasing competition which means price pressure.
In the UCaaS space, despite the competition, there hasn't been a price war. It could be because there just are any clear winners - and less than 15% of the market has gone to UCaaS so far. Maybe once it hits 40% penetration, it will become like SIP Trunking.
Canadian carrier, Allstream, is coming to the US with a UC&C offering from Cisco. Allstream is being acquired by Zayo. Onvoy is a subsidiary of Zayo.
Of all the UC lists, the only take-away is that there is a distinct line between buyers wanting UC&C and dial-tone. The key is to distinguish, but of course we don't. Most businesses just want key system replacement or cheap voice, but we shovel a UC solution at them HOPING they will adopt it. That is like someone wanted a smartphone and you sell them a laptop with UC-One installed.
The UC&C crowd will need to pivot to Workflow or some other name that represents something like the Office365/Lync/SfB that it will be competing against. Packaging conferencing with Hosted PBX is just not going to work.
The interesting thing is that no one talks about the effect that Twilio and Flowroute are having on some carriers.
This was the year that was supposed to be WebRTC, instead it was API, because again innovation in our space is anorexic.
There was a lot of consolidation in UC from ThinkingPhones, Vonage, Onvoy. There were other deals, the strangest being Alteva-Momentum due to the RLEC piece. Birch and TNCI made inorganic growth moves (that likely won't amount to much of anything). The biggest problem -- as so many know -- isn't the buying, it is the integrating. It is being able to execute on an order from quote to billing. And most of the companies that done acquisitions have done a piss poor job of integrating anything and being able to execute on much. Cable would have eaten their lunch with pricing and capital any way, but these carriers made it easier by screwing up so many things that no one wants to use them any more.
The poor folks at TWC and BHN have spent another year in limbo waiting to be bought. That sucks!
AT&T took over DTV now what?
What happens with XO, ELNK, Integra? CLECs aren't exactly killing it these days.
Windstream will still struggle. All year in 2016. Cable pressure will ease up a little while the acquisitions of Cablevision, Suddenlink and Charter-TWC-BHN happen. But Mediacom, Cox, WOW! and others will make it difficult for CLECs through 2016. That in turn will make it difficult for the Channel.
BTW, Voxbone quietly got Acquired by Vitruvian Partners on August 20, 2015 according to Crunchbase.
"Autotask Corporation has agreed to acquire Soonr, a provider of enterprise secure file sharing and collaboration services for IT business managers," per Channel Vision mag as we close out 2016.
Happy New Year!
]]>I talk about Integration all of the time. Why? No one wants apps that don't stand alone. Just look at an app on your smartphone like Uber. It integrates with the GPS, the phone, maps and more. Your app -- YES, VoIP is just another app for business! -- must integrate into the Inbox. No one wants to check 5 or 6 inboxes - or log into portals all day. It is a time waster.
Powered by a strong base of Skype and Office365 users, Microsoft is everywhere! And if you are not integrating with Skype or O365, then what are you thinking? Even if it is just click-to-call or unified messaging. And if you aren't with M$, then be with Google for Work.
Did you miss the announcement that Amazon has voice? Yeah, the folks at AWS realized that voice was just an app before you did, so they launched the Alexa Voice Service. "Amazon is investing up to $100 million to support developers, manufacturers, and start-ups of all sizes who are creating unique and innovative experiences designed around the human voice," says the webpage.
How about how companies are going to add voice and video to almost everything because WebRTC is ready for market?
You don't offer an SMS-enabled number! Even Frontier does that. Now we have services like Thomas Howe's KISST that is bringing intelligence to text for businesses. The peops don't want to use voice. They want to text your business customers - either help them with that or close shop.
Many small businesses like Buddy Brew and Black and Denim in Tampa have retail operations powered by iPads. How do you services fit into that culture, ecosystem?
So Integration, SMS and the power (and money) of Amazon are the top 3 threats to your business right now. It really boils down to two things: your sales and innovation - which really boils down to sales. You think you are selling Voice, replacement of the 3 P's - POTS, PRI and PBX - but you are not. You are selling a communications platform to power a small business to communicate with its customers and employees.
]]>This is a premise based system although a few ISP's have used Icewarp to sell to its customers. The server has 3 parts - email, VoIP and IM servers all in one. They like to talk features at Icewarp:
The Cisco UCS integration with IceWarp Directory Service is designed to make management simple. "It works the very same way as ActiveDirectory synchronization does. After binding the domain with a specific Cisco BE3000 device, the accounts from BE3000 are periodically synchronized into IceWarp Server. As a result, each BE3000 user has immediatelly his/her own account created in IceWarp Server with the same credentials for email, webmail, groupware, instant messaging, voice and mobile access." [source]
Icewarp was calling itself Unified Communications in 2010, when Tom Keating reviewed it.
]]>But having used WebRTC with people (users), I can tell you that there is a support cost associated with the free WebRTC. There is a support cost with everything.
Speaking with Amdocs yesterday about support and customer experience, we discussed the costs with inactivity from the service provider (to fix problems); and the high cost of support of advanced devices (like smartphones).
A service provider was discussing the costs of a third party softphone. It was high. Well, there are costs to not having a mobile app. There are also costs associated with a cheaper alternative.
There are plenty of free options, but would you run your business off them? Is it mission critical? Does that technology scale? How much will it cost to deploy that cheaper alternative and to integrate it into your current business environment?
There are costs. Whether the costs are in software dev, engineering, hardware, software licensing, or support costs, there are always costs associated with service delivery.
There are also costs associated with not delivering.
]]>DISH hasn't given up on wireless. It has done terrestrial LTE trials with nTelos. DISH is still looking to buy LightSquared or T-Mobile. Now DISH is doing LTE trials with Sprint in Texas. Poking the bear with that since Texas is SBC-Land, home of the death star (ATT).
Broadsoft bought another service provider. This one is in Germany for $9M. "BroadSoft today announced it is further extending its BroadCloud(R) unified communications (UC) services in Germany with the completion of the acquisition of finocom AG, a leading provider of cloud-delivered UC services." [marketwatch]
It costs real dollars for the telcos and cellcos to store all the data that the NSA expects. However, these carriers are charging the government to recoup those costs.
Someone in the EarthLink marketing department has renamed virtualization as FlexCloud Hosting.
Over a year ago DukeNet started playing with SDN (software defined networks). Now they have announced a live demo. DukeNet "is conducting a software-defined network (SDN) proof-of-concept demonstration that will illustrate SDN orchestration across the wide area network (WAN) and the data center. "Conducted in a real world multi-vendor environment, the event validates our ability to dynamically spin up data center virtual machines (VMs) along with virtualized network resources for customers," said David Herran, Vice President of Network Architecture and Technology Planning."
A few weeks ago Verizon bought Edgecast. Video delivery is important for VZ, especially on FiOS and with its deal with Redbox.
The FCC did provide some relief to CLECs: WCB suspends AT&T special access tariffs for investigation
Juniper is buying WANDL to get a handle on SDN. $60M deal.
]]>Another take on the Metaswitch survey demonstrates that the speed of a quote (and knowing what you are talking about) are factors to the sale.
Two interesting stats: "According to the latest snippet from Infonetics Research, the number of OTT VoIP subscribers is set to head near one billion by the end of 2013." And the second: "Myers added: "In 2012, the average revenue per user was a meager US$7.13 annually. Since this alone is an unsustainable business model, most providers are turning to advertising, third party apps and wholesale arrangements with traditional operators.""
A perspective on WebRTC for the next-gen of real time comms.
Pulver is back in comms with a new start-up: Zula. Maybe he will be pitching at Startup Camp Comms at ITEXPO in Vegas next month.
BTW, Woz is the keynote in Vegas at ITEXPO.
And since we are constantly in conference season now:
ATTENTION PR PEOPLE!
]]>WebRTC is just a tool; it is a programming package like HTML5.
How do you monetize Scala? You make twitter with it.
How will you monetize WebRTC? It's a tool, a lot like how twitter is a tool for marketing.
At the Expo, one session mentioned that the telcos don't see webRTC as new revenue, it will be a tool used to retain revenue. Unfortunately, it will also be tied to IMS, according to Lucent's AT&T Labs. UGH!
Right now, the javascript programmers have a new sandbox to play in - HTML5 and WebRTC - to do a bunch of new stuff. It is early yet. This is like where SIP was in 2004.
Where can this really take shape? Smaller VoIP providers can scrap the IP Phone to instead offer softphones, apps and Chrome as SIP endpoints. What, you say, am I talking about? I was speaking with Voxbone at the show, both of them do not have a desk phone. The cell phone is the primary phone today. Tablets will be next. IP Phones are hardware. VoIP Providers are not in the hardware business, but they are. They should be in the software business -- VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, softphones, Bria apps. That is the future of VoIP. That is how a VoIP Provider gets the advantage today.
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