The next installment of Dial a Phony that-would-be-a-Telephony, but since it rhymes with Melanie, I have to use the former as a title. Today’s focus is a company called “bvoip”. Gotta make sure the case is right for “stylistic” purposes…

This company’s web presence doesn’t really describe what they really offer of the “bloggy” site. (In comparison which this site and The Museum of Telephony  has 20x more static pages than what this company has called my site a “blog” for…)

 

bvoip back during the Avaya bankruptcy period in 2017 libeled the company and stabbed them in their heart with the following narrative (excuse the capitals, since apparently they post in plain text:)

From that blog post, the “CEO” George Bardissi claims with the Avaya bankrutpcy and the leverage buyout (LBO) of Mitel from private equity, better known as the damned P.E. firms, he recklessly posts inaccurate information in a fratboy language structure. I explain it all after.

 Avaya was TOO LATE to the recurring revenue game (AKA Cloud / Hosted VoIP & PBX) and this lead to their demise. Avaya has been around for A LONG TIME yet once again the on-prem proprietary boxes and phones didn’t keep the lights on in the end. Some feel Avaya will come out of bankruptcy and once again be the big player that they once were.

 Boldface Mr. Bardissi, we are no longer in the era of VT320 terminals anymore to author Web pages like that… Engineers and their boring expressive style can kiss my a–! And can we lay off the “AKA”. It’s not appropriate for business. It’s that goddamned peer/bro like language. With the #MeToo and #TimesUp Movement, you better do that before it’s TOO LATE before your company goes bankrupt for libel, harassment mixed with improper Business Language! 

But sadly, idiots like George Bardissi, a guy who apparently doesn’t understand enterprise technology, since he uses “AKA” in a business writing clearly is a result if you don’t understand business, and if you don’t understand enterprise, you will then make improper judgements. Such as neglecting the fact that many Avaya customers themselves may not had a choice to use alternative technologies. I allowed my Montana friend to explain this on The Museum of Telephony where in reality Avaya was pushing for SIP trunking over traditional T1/ISDN for their customers.

But let’s lie to get a sale, right?

Worse was a real reckless statement of declaring the death of “on prem PBX systems” and again from the same post, he writes about the Mitel buyout approximately a year and a half ago.

(I am sorry for the readers who write in Effective U.S. English, who has to read such brother/peer like language. Not only that I am also quoting his spelling errors.  A female should be really offended by the improper use of Capitals in Places Where a Boldface character should be placed…I could just be a Grammar Nazi right now…)

This was long rumored and kept circling around for the last three years. The reality is both of these companies were struggling to figure out how to move forward. Innovation on either product line has not really shown progress. Mitel has been on an acquisition spree recently purchasing Aastra and also trying to acquire Polycom. Polycom backed away from the deal and [Mitel] was picked up by a Private Equity Firm. Mitel’s biggest issue was lack of reccuring revenue and Shoretel who had pushed forward to Shoretel Sky has simply not seen the success that they once saw with their on-prem boxes. Truth be told the combined company will have something like 34% in recurring revenues and either company alone was not seeing a positive outlook had they remained stand alone entities as the majority of their revenue was tied to on-prem proprietary boxes and phones which is clearly no longer what the market is buying.

No one is buying them because these aren’t mass produced equipment! These are purchased once in a decade. The market understands that, except for the Midtown Manhattan pundits who think they can interject their opinions and manipulate the company indirectly.

(I have to be fair and call out Shoretel for what it is: the company once known for targeted ads the moment you came across their side of the web, billed themselves as “Pure IP” solutions, but ironically it was all proprietary. They never made a SIP set or SIP functionality. Not to mention that Mitel and Avaya were the only two companies that had super proprietary systems that “phoned home” to their base where the serial numbers had to match the site location. In order to gain access to unlocking the features you had to have a “maintenance contract”. They could’ve actually had retained customers if they allowed customers to purchase contracts “off the shelf” from say a VAR or Business Partner’s virtual catalog on the B2B sites like CDW or Connection. They didn’t and with the legal protection of these systems made them even more of a “proprietary box”. But the other systems that wasn’t as proprietary like Nortel’s Meridian 1, well we know how that fate of giving everything away lead them to insolvency. )

On Twitter, I called them out for their reckless lies in July 2018 of which they replied:

https://twitter.com/bvoipllc/status/1016768237034524672

And why should you trust a company who can’t even have a nice, Capital Letter in the beginning of a name? We are really becoming European for sure! And why is the “CEO” writing blogs – WITHOUT a filter? Without any Standards and Compliance?

https://twitter.com/gbardissi/status/1015306885464018944

And exactly, look at what’s going on with Elon Musk and Tesla? Mr. Bardissi may not even have a board to report to, because a CEO by legal standards must have a board and elective system! Only a man like Steve Jobs could get a title like that and do nothing. And he got away with that.

Now I had a probable cause that this company just resells dial tone over IP. And I am not even sure if they are a telephone carrier or just an application provider! (Those Kari’s Law fanboys would obsess on that for sure!)

https://twitter.com/bvoipllc/status/1015306515450925056

Sure thanks for calling my work a “blog”! It’s not my LiveJournal like your company’s writing style is on your CMS! And I do not appreciate the suggestion in going to another industry (read below!) Deflective at best, and the following Tweet too

https://twitter.com/bvoipllc/status/1016768104469327873

But men in general don’t care about details (again “blog” – kiss my a–!), they just like to be arrogant, argue like 13 year old boys and get away with it.

As a result for their attack against “on prem PBX” systems, what really is your solution?

The Bottom Line

This man is your typical “bro”, somewhere in the Millenial generation who believes technology is magic and doesn’t require much heavy lifting. Also running a company without a proper board.  Given their vague background, it’s highly unfair to attack dying companies due to greedy P.E. firms, and claim you’re the better one especially when your sales doesn’t stand out.

This is the example of what Mike Sandman out of 312 area code has been saying for years. Now to be fair, some of his views are very antiquated. VOIP is here to stay, I don’t think SIP was the best standard, since SIP only gives basic Tip and Ring over IP. H323 was a better standard, but that becomes a religious war. If anything we should be calling  SIP cloud services as IP Centrex or something that resembles advanced PBX over POTS lines to hundreds to thousands of numbers.  Calling them “cloud PBX” systems is a) an oxymoron and b) just technically inaccurate.

The concerns of enterprise VOIP (over 2,000 stations) a decade ago was valid (security, reliability, survivability), in small businesses it’s security, reliability and survivability is ether non existent, or is cost prohibitive. With the rise of VOIP on small sites being deployed more rapidly than the enterprise years back, it’s more concerning.

The problem is when things go down, the “consumer” class will expect better quality… however

If providers just focus on applications, and avoiding holistic approach such as

• Networking, and the IP stack
• Telephony, attempting to replicate all the traditional voice applications

Then you have

• High levels of instability
• No real expectations of reliability
• No levels of accountability (look at the Zoho outage of September where the domain was registered to a small domain registrar mostly to host WordPress-dot-org sites)
• The culture of providing a service for “friends” and not taking it seriously as a business.

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