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A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.
My latest guest article for TeamMate has been posted to their site, and it’s perhaps a contrary look at the “other side” of Operator Connect, and the realities faced by cloud providers as their customers decide to go with Teams.
The momentum behind both of these Microsoft offerings remains strong, but having success with both may be harder than it seems. I hope you give it a read, and as always, comments and sharing are welcome.
Got another guest post to share - this is Part 2 for a short series I’m doing with TeamMate. The article is running now on their blog page, where you can also find Part 1. I hope you find the posts helpful.
I’ve started doing some guest blogs for TeamMate, a company that helps integrate telephony with Teams. My first post ran last week, and am just getting a chance to do a shout-out about it now.
This is actually a two-part series, and the second one will run in a few days. There’s a bigger picture to consider with Teams and telephony, and I hope you give my writeup a read.
Am on a roll with my writing at the moment, including some guest posts that are coming to market around this time. My latest is on No Jitter, where the focus is on POTS replacement - something pretty much every business will have to deal with as Copper Sunset unfolds.
As you may know, switching over to VoIP for desktop telephony is fairly straightforward, and most businesses have done that already. Mission-critical applications, however, is another story - fire alarms, elevator phones, etc. - and this needs an entirely different solution.
The good news is that there are vendors with viable offerings, but they’re harder to come across than VoIP providers. Before getting to that, though, businesses need to understand the nature of mission-critical communications, and risks that arise, both for simply staying the course with POTS for as long as possible, or trying to cobble together a solution from parts unknown. That’s the gist of my story - I’m sticking to it, and I hope you read the rest here on No Jitter!
I’ve started doing some work with Ooma, a company that I have been close too since its earliest days. By earliest, I mean back when they were strictly a residential landline offering, just like Vonage. Way before cloud, way before social media, even before smartphones. That’s a long time ago, folks, but guess what? They’re still here, and have a made a nice transition to the business market, and not just SMBs.
Just did my first guest post for them, and stay tuned for more on other topics. This one is a bit tricky to find on their site, but here’s the link, and I hope you like it.
With 2022 coming to a close, I just have one public writing piece for December, and it starts an exploration of a new topic for me - more to come in future writeups.
Telemarketing Fraud Presents an Unacceptable Risk to Businesses, No Jitter, Dec. 20
This is stop two of three during my current travel run, and it sure has been good. I’ve been involved with SCTC for a few years now - Society of Communications Technology Consultants - and even though I’m an analyst, there’s a lot in this community that’s good for my business.
Their annual conference is mostly for members, so it’s not really a public event, but the challenges facing consultants aren’t all that different from mine as an independent analyst. The trends that I follow in my research, are the same ones they’re living with as they try to get their clients to adopt new technologies. Lots of good learning here, and the caliber of speakers and panels sessions has been very high, as always. If you’re an independent consultant working with communications technology, this is a community you should be part of - and if you want to learn more, just drop me a line.
That’s the story from the conference here in Dallas, and I’ll leave you with a few photos.
Below - SCTC President, Denise Munro, and our Bitrix guru, Bobra Bush. Later, my lock note talk.
Definitely the most impactful session - 911 guru/advocate Mark Fletcher brought Hank Hunt to speak and share his story for how Kari’s Law came into being. Mark is the driver who made this happen, and Kari’s Law is named after one of Hank’s daughters, who would still be alive today if 911 service worked the way it’s supposed to. Photo on right - at the White House in 2018, when Kari’s Law was signed into law.
Best for last? Maybe. I’m part of the SIPtones (mainly for keyboards), and we got to play on Monday night. Fun, yeah - wish we could do this at every conference, but we’re not quite ready for that. Pictured on right - it was a two-band bill, where local band Southern Flight opened, then joined us at the end for a lively jam. Photo credits - on left, Cyndi Crews, and on right, Donna Leaden - thanks!
If you don’t know us, the SIPtones are led by Rick Hathaway on sax, Steve Leaden on drums and Chuck Vondra on guitar. We were also lucky to have Rebecca Cihak - long-time musical comrade of Chuck’s - be our vocalist, and we hope can do this again soon. Also, missing in action was Joe Rubio, our regular bassist, who wasn’t able to make it this time. In due time, I’ll have more pictures and video to share, and otherwise, I keep an archive of photos and video clips from earlier shows on my website - here and here.
One more item to share before Thanksgiving. I was a guest on this long-running Channel Futures podcast - Coffee with Craig and James - Craig Galbraith and James Anderson. The topic was a current one for me - Copper Sunset - talking about the implications for when copper telephony networks are finally decommissioned.
I was interviewed by Edward Gately, and our conversation begins at the 8 minute mark. I hope you enjoy it, and for more on this topic, you can check out the current episode of my Watch This Space podcast.
We're living in a cloud-based world in which there's a lot of change, as well as opportunities. There's room here for newer companies, innovation, and we're seeing lots of it from all ends of the value chain.
For this blog post, I want to put a spotlight on that and bring in SIPPIO. It's a company I've been following for some time and which I've written about on multiple occasions. SIPPIO is a good example of the kind of innovation driving digital transformations.
SIPPIO offers technologies that make life better for carriers and channel partners trying to bring efficiency and scale to their customers. Recently, SIPPIO introduced Partner Portal, a partner-centric application that provides carriers, managed service providers (MSPs), telco resellers, and system integrators with a single portal to sell, deploy, manage, and support their entire global customer portfolio while growing a sustainable, healthy voice practice.
Partner Portal automates the entire quote to cash process to increase revenue, maximize profits per user and offer cross-sell/upsell opportunity by reducing sales admin, operations, and support overhead.
I recently spoke with SIPPIO Chief Operating Officer, Dawn-Marie Elder about Partner Portal and how the company is helping carriers, resellers, MSPs, and integrators capitalize on demand for solutions that support hybrid working.
Jon Arnold:
Dawn-Marie, one of the reasons I’m keen to talk with you today is to hear about the traction you’re seeing in the channel community. It's a really good story that highlights opportunities many people may not realize are out there. In addition to hearing your take on the wave of companies transitioning from prem to cloud for telephony, can you touch on what I believe is the biggest change: organizations migrating and adopting technologies that aren't just about voice and phone systems, but the whole collaboration space? What are you seeing in the market as companies try to make that transition?
Dawn-Marie Elder:
Thanks Jon! First, I think it's interesting to note how the telecom and unified communications worlds are merging. With the continuing adoption of different collaboration platforms in hybrid work environments, these once disparate ecosystems have now converged. For us, the past two years have been an explosion of growth; partners and carriers have an appetite for solutions that let them help customers derive maximum value from their collaboration applications.
One of the most significant features is voice-enablement. As companies develop their strategy for going back to work and hybrid environments, we're seeing people leave legacy telco behind in favor of voice-enabled Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Some implementations have been in place for decades. They're not only dated, but also need continuous upgrades or are beyond the scope of maintenance agreements.
So, as partners look to help customers get more value out of their collaboration solutions, we're seeing very strong demand for native voice capabilities. Businesses need their employees to use a single platform for making outbound calls with people outside of their organization and for internal collaboration, chat, video meetings, etc.
Jon Arnold:
I'm with you on that. Just to add what I see out there, it's very easy to think one can just deploy UCaaS and have all bases covered. We've become so video-centric that it's almost like we've forgotten about telephony. But the reality is that voice is still the most important mode for communicating and getting things done. Would you agree?
Dawn-Marie Elder:
Absolutely. Video fatigue is real. Most people try to multitask, which when you're on video, is pretty apparent. I believe that just being able to, "pick up a phone," and call somebody for a quick, one-on-one conversation is still the desired modality for business communications.
Jon Arnold:
Agreed. There are different models of working and different use cases where you absolutely need voice, either on its own or with complementary features. People can't just forget about telephony, as it’s a critical part of the UCaaS story. While that's a challenge for some, it’s also an opportunity for others. That's where SIPPIO has taken a leadership role. I see Partner Portal as a bridge that connects the telco and UC worlds, and lets partners solve a lot of headaches for businesses. Seems like a big opportunity for the channel.
Dawn-Marie Elder:
Partner Portal enables carriers and channel partners to successfully manage and grow their voice practices from a single “pane-of-glass.” We’ve made it simple and efficient for partners to provide quotes to customers, place orders, and then collect on new streams of monthly recurring revenue. Partner Portal is designed so that any level or role within an organization has access to the things that matter to them.
For example, an executive might want to see a summary view of all the opportunities that they have quoted to examine the difference between quotes and activations. There's also an opportunity for sales folks to utilize Partner Portal in their quoting operations, and for project managers to keep track of what’s happening within their customers’ environments. Certainly payables, looking at your credits and your receivables in terms of getting money in the door and improving your AR. Also, the full functionality of automated activation is a tremendous value-add.
Jon Arnold:
That strengthens partners’ sales pitch, doesn't it, because now they can offer a complete solution. I'm sure it's very easy for a partner to just provide telephony, but you can't make a living doing that anymore. So, while UCaaS is what you must run with, most services aren’t built with all those pieces natively. In such a competitive marketplace, how does this help them bring a complete offering to the end customers?
Dawn-Marie Elder:
It's really about increasing their own productivity so that they can keep their margins at a level that makes sense. Because when you have everything that you need to support customers in one place, it’s only natural that you’d be more productive. For partners, this is a distinct competitive advantage.
As you stated, many partners aren't situated to deploy this model, and they lack the means and knowledge to manage a monthly recurring business. Partner Portal removes the guesswork from bringing voice into their business, as well as managing the cut-over. SIPPIO help partners ensure a seamless transition for end customers.
Jon Arnold:
I want to pick up on something you mentioned earlier - about tapping into pent-up demand. As companies go to cloud, they start to realize that it's just not that easy to bring telephony along if you have a premise or a legacy-based system. How are your partners addressing demand?
Dawn-Marie Elder:
Many opportunities that come in the door are initiated by customers – not partners. Subsequently, resellers with traditional telephony backgrounds start to panic, raising their hand and asking for help because their customer is now telling them, "We're going to retire what we were doing with you and we're going to go down this path now."
However, many of our partners are quite successful because they understand the benefits of combining cloud communications with their collaboration platform. Knowing that value proposition and being able to talk about specific business outcomes, and the benefits for customers, sets those partners apart in a very crowded marketplace.
Carriers and partners that proactively market voice-enablement and initiate those conversations reduce time to sale from six months to 30 days. Leveraging automation, SIPPIO empowers partners to provision, onboard and activate users in a matter of minutes.
Jon Arnold:
And I assume the value that you're bringing in this case is to make that all kind of seamless and transparent for them, right? They have the answers and can bring the time to market, right?
Dawn-Marie Elder:
You are correct. This is an area where I counsel partners on how to guide the customer down the migration path, showing them how quick and easy it can be to activate voice in Zoom and Microsoft Teams. The quicker they can deploy, the faster their customers will realize the benefits of modernizing their business communications. Customers benefit from consolidating communications onto a single platform and from having a single partner that handles everything.
Voice can be a very profitable practice and SIPPIO has made it easy for carriers and partners to get into the voice business.
Jon Arnold:
That’s a good example of how Partner Portal makes life better for the end customer. Further, it also lets partners manage and grow voice practices while establishing themselves as a trusted partner.
Dawn-Marie Elder:
That’s exactly right. If you can make the hard stuff easier, that affords you an opportunity to focus on the fun stuff that might be little bit more lucrative and provide more value.
Voice has long been one of my core focus areas as an analyst, and while it’s easy to take for granted, the technologies behind it have evolved substantially over the years. There’s still a lot of telephony-centric thinking about voice, and while that remains a valid connection, with today’s technologies, voice has become so much more.
I explored that recently with colleague Chris Fine in our History of Telephony micro-course with PulveREDU, but there are many tangents that need their own track. One is the idea that voice is bigger than ever, and while it’s a big claim, I believe it’s warranted. My latest No Jitter post helps make the case, and if this piques your interest, I’d love to hear back.
Jeff Pulver is a long-time visionary, entrepreneur and community-builder in the communications technology space; especially around VoIP, which he had a direct hand in establishing as the successor to TDM. He keeps moving with the times, and PulveREDU is his latest venture. In short, he’s developed an accessible, affordable platform for learning and knowledge-sharing - think along the lines of The Learning Annex, but online.
PulveREDU’s model is to offer one-hour courses/programs, led by established experts, and at a $20 price point, it’s an affordable way to get up to speed on a topic and engage directly with the educators. This isn’t about earning credits or completing a curriculum, but it provides richer learning than just consuming content from the Web. Plus it’s live and interactive, so there’s lots of room for dialog.
The programming calendar is a work in progress, as this is still pretty new, but as the track record builds, enrollment for courses will grow, as will the roster of educators. That’s the leadup, and here’s the pitch.
Our inaugural PulveREDU course is coming soon - it runs live, on Thursday, May 13 from 11:30-12:30pm, EST. I’ll be co-presenting the course with long-time colleague and Watch This Space podcast partner, Chris Fine. Our topic is close to home for us, titled: The New Voice - Exploring New Worlds Beyond the Phone Call, and registration details are here. We really hope you’ll join us, and if you think others will be interested as well, please pass this along.
Got a new webinar shout-out here - am back with another RingCentral engagement, and it’s on Tuesday, December 8 at 2pm ET.
Heading into the last month of the worst-year-ever, we’re all looking ahead to hopefully better things in 2021. For businesses still going with their premises-based phone systems - the value proposition is weakening, and with many workers happily entrenched at home, it’s going to be difficult to keep supporting them this way in the year ahead.
That’s the gist of the webinar, and I’ll be addressing it at greater length then. I’ll be joined by a RingCentral customer who will tell their story first-hand - and will update you once they’ve been added to the roster. Details are here, and if you want to join us, it just takes a moment to register.
Since our paths crossed at Enterprise Connect 2020, I’ve been building a rapport with Smarsh, a very interesting company mostly in the financial services space, but also other sectors that are highly regulated. Their forte is helping companies better manage electronic communications in a landscape where the technologies are changing quickly, and the regulations are getting harder to comply with. Lots of challenges there for IT, as well as compliance folks, and it touches on the collaboration space in many ways.
Smarsh provides lots of great resources to help educate the market about these challenges, and I just completed my first guest blog post for them, and it was just published on their Blog a few days ago. I hope you give it a read - here’s the link - and if you like their content, you can subscribe to their Blog. We’re talking about doing more posts, so stay tuned, and I’ll update you when the next one is running.
This is the last in a three-part series I produced for Digitcom, in partnership with France-based Centile. The series is for Canadian businesses, providing guidance on cloud migration, and how communications technology needs to be part of their thinking about digital transformation.
Part 3 has been posted now on Digitcom’s website, and here’s the link to register for downloading. Once there, accessing Parts 1 and 2 should be pretty easy, and if you like what’s there, I’d be happy to hear from you.
Things definitely are not business as usual now, but I’m keeping plenty busy, and being home-based, I really haven’t missed a beat. Not quite as productive as normal, but am still getting some public writing done. Here’s my latest one, running now on the BCStrategies portal.
This post is one in a series sponsored by Yealink, each authored by different BC Experts, so watch for those soon. This is actually a pretty interesting topic given the rise of remote working, as well as more forms of small, ad hoc meetings in offices. These are prime use cases for speakerphones, and, it’s a problem set that Yealink has looked at pretty carefully.
Here’s my first shout-out for this webinar, happening on Tuesday, Dec. 4. It’s based on a white paper I just completed for 8x8, focused on educating SMBs about how the cloud can take them much further than just replacing premise-based telephony.
There are many stories to be told, and I’ve addressed a few of them here following some industry-based research. The white paper will be available for download soon from 8x8, but the webinar is free for all. More details are here, along with the registration form - I hope you can join us.
October is zooming along, and this will be my third webinar for the month, so things have been pretty busy lately.
This time around, it’s another Ziff Davis/Toolbox.com webinar, with a topic that anyone in the telephony space should be interested in. For digital natives, the PBX has about as much utility as a fax machine or a home phone line, so Captain Obvious isn’t needed here. For everyone else, however, the PBX is still a mainstay, and the installed base - for better or worse - is still pretty large.
While the vendors aren’t making ‘em any more, the IP phone business is still going strong, so the “death” thing is a bit overstated. That’s the setup for my webinar, and if you want in, here’s the registration page. We’re doing this next Tuesday - Oct. 30 - at 2pm, and hope you can join us.
Told you it was a busy month. I've got two webinars coming up this month, and this one is with my mainstay, Ziff Davis. Being January, I've got another 2018 outlook theme, namely how three trends are now driving collaboration - chatbots/AI, messaging and the changing role of voice.
They're all connected, but each is having its own impact, and I'll be breaking that down, along with a review of the major consolidation moves from last year that are setting the table for 2018. Here's the registration page, and I'll do a couple more shout-outs to keep it on your radar.
I've lost count tracking the time for getting this done, but it's finally launched. Many of you have signed up to get my JAA update newsletter, and the first one was sent moments ago via Mailchimp. Thank you all for subscribing, and many of you have been signed up for a long, long time.
Now that I've got this in place, you can look forward to regular updates, hopefully monthly, and things will definitely evolve as we go. I'll soon be adding a short podcast where I'll review current trends in tandem with a guest, and if you have ideas for topics, please let me know.
If you aren't a subscriber, I hope you sign up, and it's not hard to find a reg form here on my site to do so. Many of you follow my blog via RSS - nothing wrong with that, but I don't know who you are, and by subscribing, you'll get exclusive content that I won't be sharing on the blog. Your call!
For my subscribers, I hope you find the content interesting, and would love to hear your feedback, as well as any business challenges I could help you address.
Another month, another webinar. My busy-ness continues, and I've got another Ziff Davis webinar coming up. The date is Tuesday, June 27, and based on the title above, the topic should be self-explanatory.
It's easy to say we're in a post-PBX world, and if you've moved on to other things, you might be surprised to see that innovation is alive and well with desk phones. That's what I'll be addressing during the webinar, and with interest already strong, thought I'd start getting the word out now from my end. For more detail and how to register, here's the link, and I hope you can join us.
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
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