Middleman company being squeezed out of the marketplace - SASE Syniverse Employee Review

At a macro level, the company is being squeezed out of the marketplace by pricing pressures. The bread and butter services like messaging and roaming that are provided to wireless carriers are continuing to have their pricing hit hard by Syniverse's customers since they no longer pass on charges to subscribers for these services. When's the last time you had a cellular plan where you paid for SMS messages? Syniverse's owner, Carlyle Group, has been keeping the costs down for years to make the financials work for the huge loans they took out to take Syniverse private, which also means there hasn't been much money for innovation. There's barely enough to keep the lights on. Acquisitions have only focused on trying to prop up the core business numbers rather than finding an innovative product looking for the right company to mentor it into the market, because that would take investment and hurt the numbers for the lenders. Executive leadership is a club where the most senior folks are cronies of the latest C level executive. Now it's all former Centurylink people, Cox in the past, Convergys, etc... There's a lack of cohesiveness between regions, especially since some were a result of acquisitions. The recent review about the "aged crew" is from the European group where that team was acquired from a company called Mach. There's been very little investment there either now or previously under Mach, and therefore is quite stagnant, like it is paused in time. The company has gone through so many layoffs that employees only do what they can to avoid standing out to be cut by the yearly axing. There's a lot of finger pointing, employee ranking, back stabbing and politicking. The cuts are deep into the bones of Syniverse now in many areas like operations. Still a lot of fat on the legacy product side though. Prime cushy retirement positions for some lifer employees in those groups. Cons specifically for the employees, - The US benefits are getting worse going into 2019 as Syniverse is digging the bottom of the barrel looking for the lowest cost insurance company for US employees. They're ratcheting up the "employee engagement" and cheerleader culture to distract employees from what's really going on, but management forgets that most of the employees are very competent engineers who can put two and two together.