Greenville loves Google!

Happy Easter! We’ve spent the day watching my uncle teach my nieces to golf. In one afternoon they are already better at it than I am at even one minute of put-put. Better even than I am at Wii golf. I understand that it’s all in the wrists, and I have wrists, but my wrists are permanently at odds with golf clubs.

While reinstalling Diablo II on my computer (don’t ask me why) Will discovered that WYFF has a video up alerting us to this Time Magazine article about Google Fiber. If you have an interest in either the Greenville community or the Google Fiber project, it’s worth viewing both. The Time article features Greenville’s effort almost exclusively. No matter what happens, I’m exceedingly proud of our town for pulling this together. From everything I’ve read, Aaron von Frank is to thank for leading this endeavor. Will and I both work in the tech industry downtown and have never met him, but I hope one day we can thank him personally for doing such an amazing job. The concept was simple, perfectly relevant to the challenge, and superbly executed.

Our hats are off to everyone who helped with the planning and all those who twirled a glow stick. Greenville is in your debt.

Google On Main!

Why haven’t we posted about this before?!

It’s old news to many now (mostly because it was announced a month ago) that Google is going to provide ultra-highspeed Internet access in one or more trial communities. Their marketing documents claim the access will be available in 1 Gbps speeds and beyond which sounds too good to be true!

Greenville, G-Vegas, Beloved Home is vying to be Google’s fiber test-ground. If we’re chosen the benefits for the city are virtually limitless. To get Google’s attention, the city is organizing a demonstration tomorrow evening. Thousands of Greenvillians are assembling armed with LED glow sticks in different colors behind the Peace Center and marching down to Falls Park on the Reedy River to form the word “Google.” Helicopters will film all this from above, and I anticipate a virtual downtown block party when they finish. I don’t have many other details, but I’ve heard there will be much more to it. Will and I will try to be on-site with a camera to document the event. I’d love to take part but with my recent MS attack I don’t think I’m reliable enough to make the walk. As I joked last night, from a helicopter I would look like a lost packet hobbling around trying to find a bench. I really want one of these reusable glow sticks though.

Greenville Online has reported on this a little and the official site for the event is WeAreFeelingLucky.com, a reference to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search feature.

Greenville was also one of the highlighted cities in this article. According to this, our competition is :

• Columbia, Missouri who held up signs during a basketball game. We watched this game and I missed this completely.
• Grand Rapids, Michigan who is organizing a flash mob fiber ring of people holding hands.
• Peoria, Illinois who sang a song and taped themselves doing it.
• Topeka, Kansas who renamed their city to Google for the month of March.
• Sarasota, Florida who renamed City Island to Google Island.
• Duluth, Minnesota who organized a Googlefest and dunked their mayor into Lake Superior.

Sure, we’re biased because we live here, but we love Greenville, SC and I can’t think of a better place for a Google Fiber Trial. We have tons of cool businesses already in the area (Michelin, BMW, iCar, Windstream) not to mention some big businesses coming in that will bring a lot of new jobs. Greenville, SC was also rated the #1 Micro City in the United States in the 2009/2010 North American Cities of the Future. Check out the links and come support Greenville!

UPDATE : We missed the event entirely (my fault), but here’s a great photo gallery showing some of what went down. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

Greenville loves Google!

Great job on the logo!

Bye bye happy NuVox/NewSouth circle thing!

Today it is official: Windstream has acquired NuVox. Right now we’ve been told this means business as usual. As I said in my last post, Sara and I are both looking forward to the coming changes and being part of a larger company. One thing is for sure, the NuVox brand will be going away and the new company will officially be Windstream. NuVox came into life with a million other CLECS as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and continued to grow through a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. I think the management team and the people we worked with to build this company are second to none and some of the best in the industry.

We’ve accomplished a lot here in the last eight and a half years, and I expect there will be a period of rapid growth and expansion in the not too distant future. The new company has a much larger footprint and is a financial powerhouse, both of which will position Windstream as a leader in the new markets. With the pending acquisition of Iowa Telecom in the pipe, the company seems poised to compete with the likes of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, and Qwest.

Looking back on our time at NuVox and toward the future at Windstream, it doesn’t feel like the last chapter in the NuVox story but the first chapter of a new book. Here are some things about the acquisition I find really exciting:

• Windstream’s annual revenue is now estimated to be approximately $3.7 billion dollars. That number is just mindblowing to me. When I started at NuVox we weren’t even EBIDA positive. 8 years later we are free cash flow positive and netting $565 million in revenue a year with $115 million in operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA). Now our total revenue is just 15% of what they expect the combined company to produce.
• Windstream is investing $20 million into building out their fiber network. This is great, I hope the trend continues as it could make the new company incredibly competitive in the wholesale access market with the huge increase in demand for bandwidth for all applications, mobile in particular.
• Windstream is very excited to be able to sell our products and services. I cannot wait to build out our network to provide them to the entire footprint.
• Working for a company that has traditionally been an ILEC as opposed to NuVox (we were a CLEC) should provide a unique perspective into the other side of the business

I probably won’t post too much specific information (NDAs, etc.) but I will try to keep posting the big news as it comes out over the next few months. Thanks to everyone who has sent us their well wishes over the last few months, Sara and I are very excited to find out what opportunities the next year will bring.

I think there are some missing cats in here somewhere...

Well it’s that time of year again, namely the new year. Each year Sara and I go through our stuff and find things that fit into either the Goodwill or eBay pile depending on what it is. If we think we can make some money on it then it goes in the eBay pile otherwise it ends up in a box bound for Goodwill. So far this year we’ve already made about $500 dollars in donations to Goodwill according to their pricing sheet and I’ve got about 30 auctions going on eBay with many more to come.

My favorite part of all of this is not a tax write off or the pay off from getting rid of stuff we didn’t even know we have (we made over $1,000 dollars on eBay auctions last year) but eliminating the clutter from our lives. It’s very cathartic to eliminate 15 – 20 boxes of clutter from our house and all of the sudden be no longer owned by our belongings. Last year Sara and I did some late spring / early summer cleaning and found 25 plastic bins like you see in the pictures there in our attic and closets and decided it was time to make some changes. Last April / May our office was full to the ceiling with these plastic bins and our spare bedroom was full of huge cardboard boxes of stuff of all manner that we had accumulated over the years. It was maddening because we couldn’t for the life of us figure out where all of this clutter had come from and it was driving us insane.

We both grew up in homes where clutter was pretty much the norm. Sara’s parents managed to keep it out of the house and had several storage buildings of years of accumulated stuff including such great finds as 175 lamps her Dad bought at the Pickens Flea Market one day. My parents had no such luck so our entire house was full of books and toys. When we moved out on our own we both lived pretty sparse existences in our respective apartments. Sara had a bed, dresser, desk, chair, computer, clothes, and some books. I had my Futon bed / couch, dresser, desk, chair, computer, records, stereo, and books. All of my stuff fit into my first tiny 10 x 10 bedroom and moved comfortably into a 12 x 15 bedroom when my roommate Jeff and I moved to lake Keowee. When we got married and moved in together it was an entirely different story…

Once you’re married your parents want you to get everything that is “yours” out of their houses post haste. Sara and I took a lot of things from our parents’ homes not to mention our wedding gifts which quickly filled our new apartment. I’ll have to admit that even then we hadn’t taken all of our stuff from our parents and I think my mom is still holding out hope that I might come and pick up my old comics, cards, and toys any day now. (I promise; one day Mom!) Before long we were buying books, DVDs, records, musical equipment, toys, and knick knacks that even further filled our home.

At some point over our numerous moves and finally buying a house we ended up with a deluge of clutter of our own. At first I didn’t care. We just bought more storage bins and threw stuff in the attic. We put so much up there it got to be difficult for the builders to get up there to fix a leak and we still kept piling in the junk. At the end of 2008 we had an epiphany. My nephew was born in October and we went in late December to meet him for the first time and see my brother and sister-in-law’s new home in Roanoke, VA. When we got there we were immediately struck by their spartan living. When I say spartan I don’t mean without any kind of luxury but they had seemingly mastered a simple style of living that would prevent their belongings from ever owning them. Some tasteful furniture and modest decoration seemed to be all they needed and it opened my eyes to how Sara and I had been living for the last eight years.

When we got back we were briefly sidetracked on my mission to simplify our living by Sara’s Multiple Sclerosis attack and diagnosis and Vlad’s bout with Lymphoma and hospitalization but by April we were feeling up to tackling our first Spring Cleaning. We ripped the house apart in the course of two weeks and pulled everything out of our closets, attic, bookshelves, dressers, car, and every nook and cranny we could find in the house. The picture afterward was vastly different from the  picture above and I really wish I had taken it for comparison. The office was so full of stuff there was only a small path from the door to our office chairs and in the spare bedroom there was only enough room to walk in the door and toss stuff into boxes. The hall upstairs only had enough room for me to setup a small area to photograph things for eBay.

The first step was to split things into two categories; Goodwill or eBay. After we had everything separated our parents came by and picked the Goodwill pile over. When they finished we still gave away nearly $1000 dollars worth of stuff to the Goodwill and Salvation Army. With our spare bedroom reclaimed we were on to tackle the eBay pile. Over the course of a month I listed auctions daily and Sara helped me pack up, manage payments, ship, and track all of the items. By the end of may we had auctioned at least 100 items and made over $1000 dollars. Through some delusions of my own I undercharged for a fair few items and charged way less on shipping than I should have but we still netted close to $750 dollars that we didn’t have before and with a cat battling cancer and a wife needing another MRI every penny helped.

The thing that amazed me most about all of this is that most of the stuff we had gotten rid of was stuff we had completely forgotten we ever owned. We made a lot of the money off of toys I had collected and kept in their original packaging which was no surprise but we also made a killing off of old computer software and hardware peripherals which was quite shocking. At the end of the day I decided this stuff was no use to me in the attic or a closet and Sara had not only patiently tolerated me owning this stuff for years even though I couldn’t remember it but helped moved it four times so I owed it to her to get what I could for it and make some room in our house and lives.

As things have calmed down toward the end of the year I decided it was important we finish getting rid of the stuff we set out to rid ourselves of at the beginning of the year so now I’ve got a whole slew of new eBay auctions going up for toys, books, computer software and hardware, gaming consoles and systems, games, posters, records, and maybe these cats if I don’t find them in the box pile. With any luck the rest of it will be out of here by the end of January and I can finally have my office back after nearly a year of living with boxes, storage bins, and clutter.

I’d recommend to everyone to take a look at the things they surround themselves and give it some hard thought. Do you own your belongings or are you owned by them? When it comes time to move do you really want to continually move a houseful of junk you never use and don’t need? We didn’t so we did something about it.

Bye bye happy NuVox/NewSouth circle thing!

Sara and I have been extremely busy this week so I’ll have to ask you to cut us some slack for being a few days late with this news.

Wednesday November 3rd NuVox, Inc. entered into an agreement to be acquired by the Windstream Corporation (NYSE: WIN).

The purchase has been valued at over $643 million dollars. Windstream expects to issue 18.7 million fixed shares of stock valued at $183 million dollars, pay $280 million dollars, and assume a net debt of $180 million dollars as part of the proposed transaction.

You can read the official statements on press releases at BusinessWire or on the Windstream or NuVox websites. For my unofficial, not in anyway representative of my employer statement, keep reading.

I have worked for NuVox since July of 2001 and Sara was hired on in April of 2002 to prepare for the One.NET acquisition. My initial thought, being a veteran of a large number of mergers and acquisitions at NuVox was, “We’ll see what happens.” After reading some more about Windstream I have to say I am very excited about the prospects for the combined company. I assume Windstream hopes to deploy NuVox’s products across it’s footprint and vice versa although I haven’t heard anything to definitively confirm or deny this. If this is the case I am interested to see how NuVox’s product set would be deployed on Windstream’s network and vice versa not to mention the possibility for new products we could deploy on both networks. I could definitely see the benefit in developing an IPTV product that could compete with AT&T’s U-Verse and Verizon’s FIOS offerings.

In my time at NuVox (I started just after the Trivergent and Gabriel Communications merger) the company, our network, and our products and services have grown tremendously. I’ve gotten to play a part in the convergence of our network (MPLS roll out, Sonus VoIP deployment, QoS and Multicast roll out, etc.) development of some of our coolest products and services (VoxIP, VoIP product, and VoxNET, MPLS VPN product with optional QoS and Multicast) , and helped integrate multiple networks into the NuVox network as a part of our various mergers and acquisitions. (See the timeline below…) With the amount of the time and effort I’ve invested in the last eight and a half years I’ll admit that it’s been hard not to get attached. I work with a great group of people that have worked some miracles over the years to build NuVox’s network.

At any rate, here’s a time line I’ve put together to try to document all of the mergers and acquisitions over the course of NuVox’s history. I am missing some exact dates so if I got something wrong or missed something feel free to comment and I’ll update it. It was hard enough to track down dates (much less precise dates) for all of the constituent parts of NuVox so I’ll let someone else who is more inclined do the Windstream piece. I think NuVox’s M&A history is a drop in the bucket compared to their’s.

1995:

Sometime in 1995 – Carolina Online, Inc. is founded to provide internet access to the businesses and residents of South Carolina.

1996:

January 1996 – Nicky Smith starts the Internet/MCR Corporation to provide internet access to the businesses and residents of North Carolina.
February 1996 - ISAAC.net is founded to provide internet access to the businesses and residents of Wilmington, NC.

1997:

Sometime in 1997 – NewSouth Communications is founded to service business customers in the Southeast.

1998:

Sometime in 1998 – Florida Digital Network is founded to service businesses and residents in Florida.
November 1998 – Bob Brooks of Brooks Fiber and Cencom Cable Associates (Charter) fame founds Gabriel Communications to service business customers in the Midwest.

1999:

Sometime in 1999 – The Houser family founds State Communications to service businesses and residents in the Southeast.
April 1999 – State Communications acquires Carolina Online, Inc. and becomes Trivergent. Trivergent continues to provide residential and business internet and phone service to customers in the Southeast.

2000:

February 2000 – Trivergent acquires ISAAC.net and Teleco of Wilmington.
March 2000 – Gabriel Communications and Solutech launch WebBizApps, LLC venture to provide an array of web based business applications.
April 2000 – NewSouth Communications and UniversalCom, Inc. announce intent to merge.
June 2000 – Trivergent and Gabriel Communications announce intent to merge.
July 2000 – Trivergent acquires Internet/MCR Corporation.
NewSouth Communications and UniversalCom, Inc. merger closes. The new company will continue to operate as NewSouth Communications.
November 2000 – Trivergent and Gabriel Communications merger closes.

2001:

February 2001 – NuVox Communications is chosen for the name of the new company created through the merger of Trivergent and Gabriel Communications.
May 2001 – NuVox acquires the remaining 50% of WebBizApps, LLC from Solutech.

2002:

February 2002 – NuVox acquires One.Net from US.net.
April 2002 – LecStar purchases the resale residential phone service customers left from the State Communications days from NuVox.
NuVox acquires Edge Connections, Inc.

2003:

March 2003 – FDN acquires the Florida assets of MPower Communications.

2004:

February 2004 – NuVox and NewSouth Communications announce intent to merge.
May 2004 – NuVox and NewSouth Communications merger closes. The new company will continue to operate as NuVox.

2005:

March 2005 – FDN and HIG Capital jointly acquire Supra Telecom.

2007:

March 2007 – NuVox and FDN announce intent to merge.
June 2007 – NuVox and FDN merger closes. The new company will continue to operate as NuVox.

2009:

November 2009 – Windstream to acquire NuVox.

Wow, what is their marketing department thinking?

I’ve read several articles on Forbes.com and Network World this week about Juniper rebranding as they try to make a move deeper into enterprise space. I guess part of this change is hiring the same elementary school class who made Cisco’s crayon logo a few years ago to make over their logo.

All joking aside, Juniper has been pushing hard all year to make a big move into the enterprise space that Cisco has ruled comfortably for years. There is a fair bit of competition in the lower end enterprise space but when you start looking at medium to large sized businesses, they are more or less dominated by Cisco. Jim Metzler and Steve Taylor in this Network World article about a possible Juniper acquisition of Riverbed seem to have missed all of the clear indications that Juniper is heavily invested in making a move into enterprise space. Check out this quote from the article:

We doubt it in part because we don’t see the two companies being a good fit. Although Riverbed certainly does sell into service providers, it is primarily a fast moving enterprise-focused company. Juniper’s DNA is clearly in the service-provider market. In addition, the cost to of acquiring Riverbed would be very high – probably around $2 billion.

Now, I don’t disagree that Juniper completely failed to properly leverage their Peribit acquisition to remain market leaders in the WAN acceleration space, but Riverbed could be the jewel in Juniper’s enterprise offering. $2 billion is a hefty price to pay, but just look at a few of the things Juniper has done in the last few years to prepare for a large move into the enterprise space:

• Offered 100% discount on certification testing and introduced an entirely new line of enterprise certifications as part of a new Fast Track program
• Earlier this year there were multiple job postings on Juniper’s website for a new Transition team (including Chief Transition Officer) that would work to rapidly shift the focus of the company and work to help integrate the new focus into Juniper’s existing company culture
• In the last five years Juniper acquired NetScreen, Peribit, introduced the J-Series routers and low end EX switches for enterprises, and versions of their IDP and SRX specifically aimed at the enterprise space
• Juniper Partner program that is becoming geared specifically towards companies that will sell their enterprise equipment

The writing has been on the wall for awhile and to anyone who has been looking in the last two years it should be very obvious that this is the next step for them. The Service Provider market has been rapidly shrinking in the last 10 years as a result of all of the consolidation and consequently Juniper’s primary customer base is shrinking. The next logical step is into the enterprise space.

Cisco’s heavy focus on enterprise space (higher profit margins) allowed Juniper it’s start in the Service Provider space and also let them grab a large chunk of the core router market. The JUNOS (Juniper Router Operating System) was developed on a BSD kernel for their hardware based routers that offered better throughput and faster switching (and the same OS across all of their router platforms!) as opposed to Cisco’s IOS based routers. (The Cisco Router Internet Operating System has so many different revisions and forks you’d need a historian to keep track…) In the last few years, Cisco’s acquisition of Procket Networks led to a renewed focus on the core router market and included the roll outs of the ASR and CRS-1 series hardware based routers running a brand new IOS XR. (IOS XR is based on the QNX Neutrino microkernel which may actually mean better longterm stability, read this link for more information.) As a result they have cut further into Juniper’s main source of income.

Let’s just hope this rebranding and shift to enterprise focus doesn’t compromise the excellent service provider quality routers and software they have developed. If anything, let’s hope enterprises can now (affordably) benefit from JUNOS in their wiring closets.