Homer says it all!

This just made my day because any opportunity I have ever passed up pales in comparison to this.  Even Yahoo! passing up to buy Google in 2002 is not as bad as this.. 

Hindsight 50/50 is always clearer, BUT WHAT WAS GEORGE BELL THINKING?

Passing up buying Google for $750,000 is 1999 is.. well..  NUVT – nuts.

Google now has a market cap of $160 billion.  Yes Dr. Evil,  B—I—L—-L—I—O—N!

Channel Insider has a great article about lots of merger activity in the tech industry.. 

From HP buying 3Com and Palm, to Oracle buying Sun Microsystems to SAP buying Sybase, cash rich technology companies are on a shopping spree to expand into new markets as they prepare for economic recovery. Even Novell has put itself up for sale. And Brocade reportedly investigated the market for its own sale last year. Here’s what’s behind the trend.

Check out the full article here: Tech Giants in Acquisition Frenzy

Datacenter Dynamics reported this morning that Coresite is filing for a $230m IPO.

Big news in the colo sector..  Think this is further vaslidation that the colo market is continuing to heat up.

Read full article here: Coresite Files for $230m IPO

Our friends from Telecom Ramblings wrote about their thoughts on the likelihood of a merger between Level 3 Communications and Global Crossing.   

See full post here: M&A Journal: Thoughts on the Likelihood of a LVLT/GLBC merger

There is also on article on The Fly on The Wall about it too..

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the the coming year. 

Level 3 Global Crossing?  As a telecom sales guy, this sounds like a mess but as a client, it sounds pretty enticing.  Massive network, diversity, etc. 

What do you think?

As service providers consider their place in the value chain, they want to become trusted intermediaries for both enterprise and consumer services. To maintain and build their ties to the customer experience, they have to be capable of micro-segmentation of services that are packaged in such a way that it is their brands that deliver a good experience.

Without standardization and automation, achieving that goal will be a very time-consuming and costly experience. For that reason, Qwest – a candidate to win a TM Forum Excellence Award for “Business Innovation” at Management World next week — has sponsored the “Service Model Catalyst,” a demonstration of how communications and cloud-based services can be cataloged using standardized communications frameworks for faster delivery, fulfillment, assurance and charging. The demo lays out all elements of service delivery, starting at the ground level with service suppliers, up to the service catalogs, through to service federation and the product catalog.

“We wanted to show how a service provider — as an aggregator of the product and service catalog, as well as of the service delivery fabric — can become more than just ‘plumbing,’” said Eric Bozich, vice president of product management for Qwest, adding that the notion of “just selling networks, voice and equipment, and hosting discreet products will become somewhat of a legacy. We are demonstrating how we can be a service-oriented enterprise that delivers the actual customer experience, no matter who the behind-the-scenes partners might be.”

Though the discreet capabilities of the Catalyst might not be new, certainly the way they are all brought together is, as Qwest is integrating what it natively does with other partners to create a real ecosystem in which rich capabilities can be packaged to enhance services offered to enterprise and residential customers. “Our customers need communications capabilities around voice, but also public and private Internet, IT services for applications across different networks and integration of those services with voice communications … so the networks, the hosting, the cloud, voice and back office all have to come together for innovative services, and that’s the role we will play,” Bozich said.

At the heart of this Catalyst’s ecosystem is the TM Forum’s Product and Service Assembly (PSA) — the communications framework to and from all the vendors in the Catalyst. PSA was led by Axioss (now merged into Comptel) and has yielded three well-known deliverables carried forward to bring new services to market through an ecosystem of suppliers and early adopters.

In this Catalyst, the suppliers are Tribold, Progress and Comptel, all of which have worked together to on-board new voice and cloud services from Qwest and providers in two other Catalysts: BT’s Inter-cloud Service Management Catalyst, demonstrating platform- and infrastructure as a service, and Cisco’s Service Broker Catalyst, centered on cloud-based voice (hosted IP telephony). The services from all three Catalysts will be aggregated through Verecloud’s Nimbus service fulfillment solution and federated by Comptel’s Active Catalog, which acts as a single point feeding fulfillment, assurance and charging capabilities.

“Service lifecycle management today has to go beyond traditional voice, or Internet, PTT or wireline services; it has to consider cloud-based services like VoIP or Microsoft Exchange or SaaS and IaaS,” said John McCawley, CEO of Verecloud. “All services have to be treated the same and move through the service lifecycle in an efficient and cost effective way that enables micro-segmentation and packaging of services that best service customers needs — whether enterprise or consumer.”

By working within the ecosystem created by Vercloud and its other partners, Qwest has what it feels are “unlimited” capabilities to piece together solutions provided by the company itself or other companies. “We can piece together solutions from within or outside our organization, while maintaining the ever-important customer relationship; we want to make sure the customers interface with us, and so this work helps us bring together what we need to behind the scenes,” Bozich said.

Telco outlines plans for operations in London, Singapore, New York and San Francisco Bay area

“The financial returns of the global data center industry are very attractive,” said Cassidy. “Demand is very broad and is driven by many factors.”

CyrusOne operates data centers in Dallas, Houston and Austin, Texas and combined with Cincinnati Bell’s existing data centers in Chicago and Cincinnati the merged operations will serve many “nameplate” enterprise customers, Cassidy noted. “If you look at the nameplates in [our centers], all of those companies are global in nature. Globalization isn’t going to stop and these [companies] will need data close to their operations. . . . We have to execute on our ability to follow those customers to the sun.”

Specifically, the company indicated it would be interested in adding data centers in London, Singapore, the San Francisco Bay area, and New York. Cassidy said the company would be unlikely to build “green field” facilities but hinted that additional acquisitions would be considered.

Previously Cincinnati Bell had total data center space measuring 446,000 square feet that was 90% utilized. The acquisition will bring that total to 609,000 square feet, which will be 87% utilized. Revenues from the combined data center operations will be five billion dollars annually.

 Cincinnati Bell was attracted by CyrusOne’s strong financials. CyrusOne currently earns 98% of its revenues in the form of recurring monthly charges, which average $25,000 a month per customer. The company has been growing at a rate of 60% a year, experiencing churn of just a tenth of one percent per month.

The new Blog (www.afsnetworks.com/fiberconnectblog) will be maintained by the AFS team to provide viewers with relevant news about company-wide initiatives, educational posts about the Telecom industry, customer success stories, and details related to the 10 major metropolitan markets they serve.  With information about network upgrades, planned downtime, road construction and real-time local topics, AFS anticipates this Blog becoming a “go to” resource center for all of its customers and partners.

Founder and CEO Dave Rusin stated, “After observing the warm reception my op-ed Blog
Telecom Straight Shooter has received over the past few years, we realized the Telecom industry is truly embracing up-to-the-minute, relevant information.  An executive level-maintained Blog that provides readers with valuable, actionable information is a natural fit with the core value of AFS to provide exceptional network service and to live by our Golden Rule business values.”

The Fiber Connect Blog reaffirms the AFS motto of putting its customers first by giving them an pportunity to candidly comment on stories, ask questions and collaborate with the executive team.  It also marks another step in AFS’s 2010 social media initiative, which also includes the launch of the company’s Twitter account (http://twitter.com/afsnetworks).

Rusin concluded, “As my colleagues, friends and peers know, I am not shy about voicing my opinions so I am always excited to launch platforms that encourage everyone to do the same.  It’s a great way to celebrate 10 successful years in business.”

Here are a few comments on some of the news in the metro fiber space today:

European metro fiber operator euNetworks reported earnings this morning.  Revenues climbed to €8M, up 14% over last year which is quite a reasonable clip considering the economic headwinds.  Gross margins of 80% reflect the company’s increasing focus on its fiber assets, as the percentage of revenue derived from network services rose from 75% last year to 98% in the latest quarter.  It has now been a year since CEO Brady Rafuse took the helm, and the company seems ready to make a bit more noise this year.

Integra Telecom apparently is going to release earnings later today to debt holders, though hopefully that will filter down to the rest of us.    The financials should be interesting, but at the bottom of that PR were numbers I have been hunting for a while:  1386 on-net buildings on 2800 metro fiber route miles, more than I thought they had.  I’ll have to update my metro fiber statistics list soon, both for Integra and for the rest of the sector.

Level 3 Communications (LVLT: chart, news) announced the next focus area for its local markets initiative, in the southwestern US.  That means a regional general manager and some new capacity investment in Phoenix, Tuscon, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City – which covers a lot of ground but of course not very much water.  The PR didn’t happen to mention this time what sort of fiber assets and on-net footprint they start with, but this a region where the assets came almost entirely from level 3’s wholesale past and therefore probably start with rather few mid-market enterprises on-net.  My own research suggests they have around 50 on-net buildings or perhaps a bit more spread across all four markets, half of which are in Phoenix.  Lots of room to grow though!

And finally, we have a new corporate blog in the neighborhood over at American Fiber Systems.  That’s Dave Rusin territory of course, and he does have his own blog over at Telecom Straight Shooter already.  However, the AFS Fiber Connect Enterprise blog will likely focus more on AFS’s initiatives and interests and less on Dave’s rather more colorful screeds.

Key acquisitions and a bit of churn in its bandwidth unit played roles in Zayo Group’s generating a modest $58.9 million in revenue for Q1 2010, about $700,000 more than Q4 09 and a 5 percent annualized increase. However, the bandwidth and network infrastructure service provider carefully pointed out that its revenue increased $20.5 million over the third quarter of 2009 and that compared to the first quarter of 2009 revenues rose 53 percent, from $38.4 million.

The Colorado-based company reported results for all three of its business units: Zayo Bandwidth, Zayo Enterprise Networks, and Zayo Colocation (zColo). Zayo Bandwidth’s purchase of FiberNet in September 2009 led to an average monthly churn rate of 1.7 percent, the company stated, due to the lower gross profit margin on the off-net transport business inherited from FiberNet.

The unit generated $45.5 million in revenue in the first quarter, with a gross profit of $32.1 million and adjusted EBITDA of $17.5 million. Zayo Enterprise Networks posted revenues for the quarter of $8.8 million, and zColo reported $6.9 million in revenue.

The company spun off its subsidiary Onvoy Voice Services to an unrestricted parent holding company in early March and on March 23 announced it will acquire dark fiber provider AGL Networks, a purchase expected to be finalized sometime this summer.

For more: – see the release