Monday, May 11, 2015

Birch Buys Again (and other news)

In it's 24th acquisition, Birch is buying the assets of OrbitCom. Orbitcom with its HQ in Sioux Falls, SD, "is a regional provider of voice, data and IT (colocation and hosting) solutions to small and medium businesses in several markets across 14 states." Just 5,000 customers across 14 states!


There was a bunch of M&A that I noted last week like Cisco-Tropos, SilverSky-BAE, QTS-Carpathia Hosting, SingTel-Trustwave.


RingCentral closed another OEM deal. This time with InContact, a cloud contact center provider that is a big partner of Siemens Enterprise (now called Unify). RC has OEM deals with AT&T, Rogers in Canada and BT in the UK.


Even if you don't sell VoIP or UC, integration and mobility will have an impact on your business. Desktop and laptop sales declines have an effect on break/fix revenue, right? Integration of software is what every business owner dreams of. 8x8 and RC and even VZ are integrating hosted phone systems with Google for Work, CRM (like Zoho, Salesforce, Dynamics), help desk (like Zendesk), and more. Think about a way to package cloud apps that work together to your customer base.


Saw this webinar invite:


CLIO is law practice management software that integrates with Broadsoft and I think QuickBooks. Add in a credit card processing app with managed IT and some bandwidth and you should be good to grow!


Now that Lync is Skype for Business, a day doesn't go by that someone isn't integrating with S4B. CallTower, Intelepeer, Arkadin and others are all announcing packages around S4B. I guess the adoption of Office365 is big.


"Arkadin Total Connect is a UC ecosystem based on Microsoft Skype for Business technology and integrated with Arkadin’s audio conferencing." [source CV]


Here is an interesting bundle: "Sonus Networks has announced the Better Together Alliance, a partnership with Plantronics, Nectar and Numonix to ensure full inter-operability of each companies’ Microsoft Skype for Business supported network devices, The goal is to reduce inter-operability risk and provide channel partners and customers with pre-tested solutions." [source: CV]

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