Yankee Group On VoIP and Goliaths

Yankee Group has issued an announcement today about their views on who will survive in VoIP.

In an era where Darwinism still has a say, they point to major players as being the winners. I agree to a point.

Last week I wrote about reintermediation, where traditional players reengineer themselves, ala AT&T, to be ready for the next generation of technology usage, while maintaining and leveraging their brand value or promise. MCI with their embarassing financial woes, Sprint with their customer service issues and more failed launches of what could be great technology, ION, LMDS-MMDS, etc. are not there. Only AT&T of the big three is moving the right way, step by step, and that is why Dave Dorman is running the company, not his last two predecessors.

The small guys out there are either using the USA as a staging ground for global (i.e. IDT’s Net2Phone, VoicePulse, BroadVoice, etc.) or like Vonage and Packet8, live on the hopes of being the other player in the game. Face it. Being number two in VoIP will be a huge market for someone, and likely number three.

The cable operators are all outsourcing some part of their VoIP plays, so in many cases, one of the smaller upstarts could be their best partner, which explains why AT&T took the cable market relationships seriously. One more reason why Dorman and his team get it right.

Absent from all this is Level3 and Covad. The former is selling a white label product to many. The latter is selling their own product and as a CLEC, would seem to fall into the category of “alternative carriers.”

Time will tell who wins and who is right.