I was privileged to join Verizon’s Partner Solutions as a guest speaker this year in Phoenix. The partners included almost everyone you would think was a competitor, but the reality is that cooperation is real in telecom. It was a very nice location, with very nice meetings and I had the chance to listen to Eric Cevis, President of Verizon Partner Solutions.
Cevis ran through the new marketing campaign called “Better Matters”, which is focused on Better Network, Better Relationships, Better Experience, and Better Offerings. It’s nice marketing, which is easy to say, easy to relate to, and it’s certainly going to be reflected in future presentations.
However, the real part that caught my ear was the pain-point of the partners he was addressing. Verizon’s partners are managing the migration of POTS. A giant piece of the puzzle is the entrance facility for business customers who have been laggards.
They are not ready to give up the landline, and for them the use of FiOS, Ethernet or Wireless is hardly a lift.
So the push is to sub-10 MB Ethernet and ATM (masked as NxDS1’s); all of this while Verizon Wireless is delivering 50 MB solutions to fixed locations. Clearly we have a mature base that is slow to migrate.
Yet we know they all have cell phones and probably have Wi-Fi at home. So the real question is, do we push them to migrate or accept the fact that they are not going to update anytime soon?
In the conversations here I have seen lots of old friends, talking about switch companies that don’t exist anymore.
The carriers are moving to the new while the customer base still wants the old stuff.
While technologically it’s worse than the move from Operators and Cord boards to Direct Dial and Stepper Switches, the customer transition should be easier; we are not introducing dial pads; in fact we’re reducing them.
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