Competitive service provider XO Holdings (news, filings) has announced two interesting deals this week.
Yesterday it was a contract with Dialink, a provider of VoIP services to small and medium enterprises in northern California. XO will helping with more than VoIP though, apparently Dialink’s customers are frequently requiring more than T1 services and therefore will be offered Ethernet-over-copper (EoC) and Ethernet-over-DS1. XO put a lot of capex into EoC over the past couple of years, perhaps deals such as this as well as the opportunity provided by Ethernet Exchanges will start to bring out its potential.
Today’s deal was a win with ACTIV Financial, which provides low latency solutions to the financial industry. XO will be deploying 10G waves between ACTIV’s data centers in New York and Chicago in support of those efforts. While all carriers have shifted their message somewhat with the rise of interest in low latency connections, I haven’t seen XO making that much noise in the low latency arena before this. Although their fiber footprint consists mostly of IRUs on the original Level 3 build, I didn’t think the current low latency route Level 3 sells in this sector falls entirely on those routes. Does anyone know? Ah well, there are many ways to serve the financial community’s need for speed, XO’s waves might be simply adding diversity with an attractive price/speed tradeoff.
All this of course follows last week’s news of internal layoffs at XO, which generated a huge outpouring of comments on this site over the last week. No matter, some positive news coming out of the PR department a few days later may not be coincidental, but that’s their job of course.
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Categories: Internet Backbones · Low Latency
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Interesting that XO is just announcing the deal with ACTIV Financial. That deal closed last Sept/Oct. Wonder if this is similiar to the BankofAmerica deal that XO fumbled with for months while counting the revenue.
This announcement might be a cover-up to recieve some good press after last weeks announcement of the layoffs.
That sounds about right.
What we fail to recognize with regards to XO’s recent lay-offs, is their addition of 450 employees last year. They are still running 300 employees stronger than they were Q209.
Umm.. If you are talking about all those f-in HAJI’s you hired to replace your American workers, Dan, then F-U!!!
The majority of people I know of who got laid off recently were 5+ year veterans of XO.
Doesn’t mean XO doesn’t still have some Great talent there – but let’s keep it real, mmmkay!?
No Ex-Oh, we aren’t talking about the new internal Accounts Payable department which was outsourced, we are referring to the dozens and dozens of Account Relationship Mangers, sales people, and a new retention team which was developed to reduce churn in 2009.
The NAS account team was not impacted nor has it been disbanded. I find that a lot of the comments left on TelecomRamblings, are just that, ramblings from disgruntled sales people who make every excuse in the world as to why they are not performing. And regarding your veterans with 5+ years, the majority of employees effected by this recent RIF were sales people and the relocation of one our repair teams from Tennessee to Michigan.
Q209 versus Q210, XO is operating with an additional 300 employees.
Regardless of whatever the situation is, business at XO has come to a very slow trickle compared to years before. It’s only a matter of time until almost all internal departments are outsourced or the company is sold. Face it – XO can’t complete, not to mention they baby their customer’s too much. Sales is the blame for most…starting with false expectations. What upper management doesn’t see is…the XO internal reps still with the company are fixing 99% of the outsourced errors. Of course upper management will say it business hasn’t been better…because it’s the same people doing the same work they always did PLUS fix the outsourced screw ups. Once they see ‘how well’ the outsourced teams are doing, they will cut more and then really be in the hole. I’m looking forward to that day.
I’m interested to see how this plays out. What do you guys think?
There are many advances in this industry over the last few years.