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.
]]>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
]]>Lots of consolidation - just ask Birch, Level3, Windstream, GTT, Zayo or CenturyLink. But really has anything changed?
There is a lot more fiber in the ground. AT&T just announced 500,000 miles. Lots of lit buildings. Birch just said they touch more than 80,000 commercial locations. I would imagine any of the Top 5 MSOs touch at least that. The one thing that has changed is who owns the small business market. Today, that is the cable company, not the ILEC (at least in NFL cities, maybe not in rural America).
The small business voice market seems to belong to the independent OTT providers like 8x8, RC, Grasshopper and Vonage.
But the CLEC sector borne from the TA96 seems anorexic. VZ and AT&T have more than $75 Billion in Quarterly revenue, which is more than all the CLECs annual revenue combined. In a Quarter. The billion dollar CLECs - XO, Intermedia, Paetec - are all distance memories. Yeah, XO hasn't been bought yet, but it has faded from memory. The DLEC group that actually started the business DSL market all went bankrupt and were acquired by the Big Telcos.
The fiber pioneers - Yipes, Cogent, MFN, Williams - all went BK at some point. So did MCI after a spectacular financial mess.
The UNE-P players - Supra, Z-Tel, IDS, ITC, MacLeod - all gone. The largest IXCs - MCI, Sprint and AT&T - are no longer. MCI is now VZB; AT&T was bought by the Baby Bell, SBC that consolidated most of the Baby Bells back into AT&T a little more than 20 years after they were broken up by the Judge.
Remember when FREE was a threat? AOL, Bluelight, NetZero, Muni Wi-Fi (from EarthLink). Today, free is a model! Ask Facebook, twitter, snapchat, Whatsapp, Skype or almost any SaaS company.
Zayo, Level3, Birch and let's include Wind and C-Link ($2Z + $8L + $1B + $6B + $18C) - throw in the $1B from EarthLink (which will be less since shedding the IT business) - and you still only have $19B in a year. All of the money is flowing to the Big 2 RBOCs and the cablecos - still. And since AT&T bought DirecTV, yeah, still.
Unlike Howard Homonoff in his review, I think that the upstarts have been the ones who pushed the establishment forward. The ISPs and CLECs that forced the Duopoly to learn to compete, who did the real work of bringing the Internet to the people. It was also the upstarts that taught real world lessons to the Duopoly - lessons about fiber and DSL and business Internet - and yes even about Converged Networks.
As we start the next 20 years, it will be Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft who define some of the race. IOT may change things, but you still need a network. As much as the Big Two Telcos hate to be dumb pipes,they will take your money. (And provide crappy support.)
A couple other points.
Wireless porting between Sprint, AT&T and VZW is done in hours via Syniverse. Wireline porting is still anyone's guess and is measured in weeks, not hours. Why?
Cable went from the lowest margin business - TV - to the highest - voice, while telcos did the opposite. And probably should have left TV alone.
Comptel changed its name to Incompas. CEO Chip Pickering talks about the anniversary here. " I want to point out the incredible benefits of the legislation to the economy and society -- from the creation of new companies, new technologies and entire new industries to the technology solutions that have risen from the Act to help share information and reshape our world."
The sharing of the network elements is all but gone. It is a race at either Layer 1 (network plant) or Layer 7 (apps). No one owns both.
No ENUM. No VoIP Inter-connection. Oh, well.
For the channel, it used to be all about voice. Now it is mainly about data, Internet and cloud.
TA96 was about a resale model - unbundling or wholesale - that would lead to facilities based competition. That didn't happen so much. It was all about voice though. Now way more about data/Internet/Network than voice.
Gary Kim shows the decline of access lines graphically here.
There was frame relay and ATM networks that were supplanted by IP-VPN, MPLS, VPLS and soon by Ethernet private line if cable has their way.
It was AOL and Yahoo 20 years ago. Now VZ owns AOL; Yahoo is for sale and Google is the giant.
Gary Kim point]]>
Comcast Xfinity, Verizon, Boingo, DISH (Sling TV) have joined Hulu, HBO, Starz, and CBS with streaming TV services. It will all move to IP -- not necessarily over the Internet. Netflix has been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to be treated like a cable channel on cable networks. WOW accepted the challenge.
On Sunday morning, Yahoo exclusively streamed an NFL game from the UK. Yahoo paid $17 million for the privilege and had about 13.5 million unique visitors. The experience had mixed reviews. "Why, it's almost as if people were using different connections, technologies, hardware and transit routes to connect to the same source! Interestingly, the stream appeared to fare much better for set top (Roku, etc.) and mobile devices than it did for traditional browsers, though I've yet to see a comprehensive explanation why," reported DSLR.
I find it interesting that the Roku is a common denominator in these deals (not Cisco).
Roku allows consumers to (1) own the set-top box; (2) save money (as much as $10.95 per month on set-top box rental); and (3) one portal for all TV choices. This may be the wave of the future; moreso than the Internet TV due to the ease of updates to the Roku.
NPR has a story about cable nevers and cable cord cutters. It seems the big reason is money.
We are in the midst of a fight for the middle class, a living wage, et al. What gets lost in that over and over is that our economy is based on service industries. Look at any major thoroughfare in the US: it contains grocery stores, dry cleaners, restaurants, drugstores, coffee shops, etc. RETAIL and SERVICE. This only works if consumers have disposable income. Income has been flat for a long time (while expenses have increased).
Henry Ford knew it. Today's CEOs do not get it.
I have always looked at financial reports thinking that most companies have peaked organically. VISA, Mastercard, NFL, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon. Without inorganic moves, these companies have peaked and the revenues have one way to go: down.
Take Sprint for example. Softbank dumped like $20 Billion into Sprint. It is losing ground to T-Mobile. It never got close to Ma and Pa Bell (ATT, VZW). Now it is in cost cutting mode. Organic sales/growth just have not happened for Sprint. So revenues go slip, sliding away.
"Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next few years. Every industry and every organization needs to transform itself...or fade away." - Tim O'Reilly
"The pace of change is unprecedented--and staggering. ... From a business--and, for that matter, government--perspective there is, in a sense, only one overarching strategy: constant, high-speed innovation." - Tom Peters
]]>McDonald's revenue plunged 30%. Coca-Cola is flat. IBM< Verizon and AT&T are all off. Wall Street just isn't forgiving. (The communications sector is down.) Maybe in today's economy - global and US - this is the best they will see.
The Street doesn't like Angie's List either. Is that because they have earnings even if they are losing money?
In the midst of all this, MITEL took a swipe at buying Shoretel. According to rumors at Connections, by this time next year, quite a few payers will be gone, acquired. One rumor is that RC will buy up a small Cloud Comm company just to get into the enterprise space. That would mean that the enterprise space would have to be redefined as 50-100 seats (as even this is a large deal for many HPBX providers).
Companies are sitting on a lot of cash, revenues are flat, but Wall St. still wants to see revenues grow. How when disposable income is declining? How when sales is changing? When the advertising machine is broken, mass marketing lost its influence. Hard to sell to the masses when you can't reach them.
Social Selling and Content Marketing are new and despite all the gurus giving advice to the Fortune 500, to quote Gary Vee, "This shit is hard." They are having a tough time adjusting to:
Everything is changing. The best examples of how hard it is right now is to look at HP, Dell, Oracle, Cbeyond and EarthLink.
]]>A search found not many female tech CEO's. According to this article, "Safra Catz has been one of Oracle's presidents since 2004 and started her second stint as CFO this year. Sheryl Sandberg is COO of Facebook after being a VP at Google. Linda Sanford is a Senior VP at IBM for enterprise computing. Weili Dai is co-founder and VP of Marvell Technology Group."
There is a big crop of women entrepreneurs in tech (some are here) that are in their 20's and in ten years are going to be kicking some serious butt. I hope I am around to see it.
Good luck to Marissa Mayer!
*(And in politics but that's a different rant.)
]]>Although analysts suggest that Motorola has left the iDen technology behind, NII uses the iDen network in Latin America. There is enough of a subscriber base to look at investing in improving that technology. To do a forklift upgrade to the iDen network would be expensive -- it means replacing all radios and handsets. I don't know how much upgrading you can do on that spectrum though, especially when Nextel is losing some of that spectrum in the US. That's why a nationwide safety network makes more sense.
"Sprint included a letter to Keith Cowan, an executive in charge of strategy and development, offering him a $1 million bonus for "the strategic resolution of the iDen network."" - Nice bonus! Hey, Keith, call me!
]]>Icahn is busy messing around with Motorola. He owns most of the debt at XO -- and won't allow a re-finance which would actually help XO. I understand that he is a Corporate Raider looking to make big buck as fast as possible, but how about helping America out, Carl? By screwing every company you touch, you aren't helping anyone but yourself.
Your kind has not helped the economy one bit. Have you ever actually built anything? Or do you just use companies as Arbitrage pawns for your hedge fund games?
At Wikipedia, these are the companies that Icahn has a hand in: "He has taken substantial or controlling positions in various corporations including: RJR Nabisco, TWA, Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, Western Union, Gulf & Western, Viacom, Uniroyal, Dan River, Marshall Field, E-II (Culligan and Samsonite), American Can, USX, Marvel Comics, Revlon, Imclone, Federal-Mogul, Fairmont Hotels, Kerr-McGee, Time Warner and Motorola." How many of those companies are doing well or still exist?
Icahn actually states that Microsoft could do more with Yahoo: "I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet." Ha! Microsoft search, Ask.com, Infoseek, AltaVista, et al have all tried to make a dent, but most couldn't even make a dent in Yahoo let alone Google.
One reason: Google is simple and clean. Y! and MSN are cluttered portals with screaming ads. Another reason: Google is a verb. Yahoo never reached that status even when they were buying big media advertising.
Icahn's proposed board is a collection of pirates that have never run anything more than hedge funds. The exception is Mark Cuban, who made his fortune selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo before the bubble burst -- or Cuban would just be a footnote in history. So basically the new board will come in, buy up stock, sell it to MS at a premium, bank the mullah, and then watch Y! disappear. Sad.
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