A Look at the Competition

VZ stopped selling Naked DSL. VZ will also stop selling DSL where FiOS is available.

Bright House has started advertising their IT crew for small business. It seems that BHN has a Nerd Herd of their own. Plus BHN is offering Remote Data Backup, Mail Storage, Web hosting, Managed VPN and some security. BHN also rolled out Home Automation (see here). And we are not done! Two more. One: BHN is now offering Ditech's PhoneTag voicemail-to-text services to both residential and business customers. Finally, BHN is delivering the communications services for the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August.

EarthLink had $344M in quarterly revenue. The Rochester paper gives a slanted, home grown view here. SGA expenses (cost of sales) were 32% of revenue. It's a billion dollar CLEC now. I wonder if like Intermedia and Paetec that marks its decline.

For those of you in Rural markets, who tell me that there isn'tt enough business to survive on, I point you to this report on Windstream. (And to the fact that if your area has a Chamber of Commerce then there is plenty of business to live off of IF you go get it.)

Cbeyond is betting the farm on Cloud. Apparently, the missed the boat on getting acquired.

XO re-launched Concentric as its hosting and cloud services brand. XO was a merger of Concentric and Nextlink. It acquired Allegiance Communications later.

Data center company ViaWest is entering the Managed IT space - with this campaign to Cure IT Headaches.

Stratosphere Networks announced it has received the CompTIA MSP Partners Trustmark for its use of industry-accepted best practices for service delivery and customer interaction.

I did not know that Hughes - the satellite folks - offer Hughes Enterprise VoIP, a fully-managed voice solution designed for the distributed enterprise market. It rides over broadband circuits like Vonage (OTT), but it has "patent-pending Hughes ActiveQoS(TM) technology, which integrates network capacity monitoring, dynamic rate limiting and prioritization to reduce packet loss and jitter."

VoxOx, a division of Telcentris, streamlined its white-label VoIP program with new pricing models.

I am tired of VoIP companies just talking about Low Price - that's the banner slogan at Phone.com.

In a unique service offering: Cloud hosting provider NaviSite partnered with Courion to deliver CourionLive identity and access management services as SAAS via TWC's Navisite division.

Cloud Sherpas - I mentioned those guys to you at the Disney CEO Round Table - rolled out encryption services. There are so many ways to make money as a service.

If you wanted to start offering SAAS now, without any CAPEX, you have choices: VAR Dynamics, OS33, Intermedia.Net, Parallels, Intronis, XO/Concentric, and so much more. What are you waiting for? Do it before your competition does!