Even before the news cycle was dominated by terms like “stay at home order”, “social distancing”, and “flattening the curve”, the business world was opening up to the idea of remote work. A survey conducted by LinkedIn in late 2019 noted that the prospect of work from home is enticing for employers and employees, with benefits such as better work-life balance, increased productivity, and lower cost for buildings and infrastructure for the business itself.

And while the trend was rising up, it has exploded due to the current environment. Remote services like Zoom, WebEx, and Twitch have seen incredible growth due to the world-wide shutdown. What does this mean for the capability of a remote workforce? Let’s examine some of the trends and insights from around the industry and see if it is the right time to explore the prospect of a large scale distributed workforce in the very near future.

Related Blog: Has the Workplace Been Forever Changed by COVID-19?  Broadsoft’s Founder Shares His Perspective

The Agility of Cloud-based Services

In the business world, and particularly within the sphere of information technology, the word “agile” has a variety of meanings. In this context, we will be using a more athletic definition. Agile running backs can pivot and juke, making their opponents miss and pickin up a few more valuable yards. An agile outfielder can snag the flyball that might have gone over the fence. For our purposes, agility is the ability to change course quickly without losing momentum.

Related Blog: How The Cloud Changed Everything

The cloud means agility. It is part and parcel to what cloud-based services are intended to do. Deploy from scratch in days, scale up and down in minutes, and operate from anywhere there is an Internet connection – which in the USA as of the end of 2019 has almost 90% penetration. Kevin Thomsen says it this way, “Everyone has Internet, whether it’s LTE right off of your cell phone or your traditional Internet at your house, Starbucks, even know you should be social distancing, you still can immediately stand up a remote workforce.”

It is this agility that has enabled UCaaS services to be transformative in the wake of global economic unrest.

Advantages of a Distributed Workforce

When your workforce is no longer confined to a specific geographic location, or even a time zone, you can begin to reap the benefits of a remote workforce. Some of the best advantages are found in improved productivity, access to a larger talent pool, lower operating expenses for the business, and an increase in job satisfaction, resulting in reduction in employee churn.

 “If someone told me that my entire globe will be trying to work remotely, in 2020, I would say no freaking way.” – Kevin Thomsen

Improved Productivity

The right employees work better from home, and holding a hard line that nobody should be afforded that opportunity sells short the talent you have. While this does not apply universally, there is a general trend toward productivity with remote workers, as studies have shown that equipped with the right tools and support of leadership, remote workers can be more productive.

This can manifest in a variety of ways, like the ability to escalate conversations from chat to call to screen share. Another great advantage is a more flexible work schedule for employees, which results in fewer days missed but simultaneously allows those same employees to work a little longer.

Access a Larger Talent Pool

In a traditional office setting, the talent pool for companies is limited by a number of variables including talent within a specific geography, commute times, transportation and parking expenses, family obligations, and competition from other companies nearby.  When the geographic restrictions are removed, the recruiting talent pool expands exponentially, allowing companies to recruit the best talent for the required position.  

Creative types, administrators, accountants, and even call center agents can be recruited from anywhere, provided you have the ability to have them work remotely. A distributed workforce, driven by the ability to work remotely, therefore removes the geographic restrictions for recruitment.

Companies such as Zuckerberg Media have realized the benefits of expanding the talent pool, and it has benefited the founder & CEO, Randi Zuckerberg personally, “I have on my team a mother who has to work from home because she has a child with special needs, and she has to be home with him.  Normally someone like that wouldn’t have the opportunity to get back into the workforce, but thanks to the incredible tools we have … she is my right-hand woman.”

Increase Job Satisfaction and Reduce Employee Churn

Outside sales representatives or customer service engineers who go to the customer’s location have probably already been working remote, or at least mobile, for years. The ones who have traditionally been confined to an office can experience greater employee satisfaction when they are given the chance to work remote. Increased employee satisfaction leads to reduced churn, and given that it costs about 33% of an employee’s salary to replace them, this can really save a lot of money in the long term. 

Lower Operating Expenses

Companies that have expanded the number of remote employees have also realized another benefit – lower operating costs to the business, as well as having more flexibility during periods of growth, during seasonality driven fluctuations, and during downturns.  The overhead associated with real estate costs, transportation expenses of employees, office expenses, and many other office related expenses are all areas where companies can realize benefits by increasing the percentage of employees working remotely. Some of the latest evaluations estimate that up to $11,000 per employee can be saved from this overhead reduction.

The ability for a business to more effectively scale during periods of growth without being hamstrung by real estate and office limitations can be another big benefit.  Conversely, companies have more flexibility on their P&L during downturns without having to carry all of the fixed expenses associated with having office spaces. Companies that see dramatic shifts in demand during specific times of year can also benefit, as rather than having to accommodate seasonal employees in offices, they can simply equip them with the tools needed to work remotely during the peak periods.

Built for the Next Generation Workforce

The next generation of workers are not millennials, contrary to popular belief. They are in their 30s and already changing the workplace for the better, and they have helped define the types of technology that forms the foundation of interfaces. 

Gen-Z is now leaving college and joining the workforce, and they are intuitively more comfortable with smartphones and social media, and prioritize products over experiences. With 61 million Gen-Z’s soon entering the workforce and bringing big changes with them, companies need to pay attention if they want to have success in both recruiting and retaining these employees.  

Jason Dorsey, the top Gen Z and Millennial speaker and researcher, recently published a blog post that provides extremely valuable insights for companies as it relates to how leaders need to effectively implement the right technology for Gen Z, “Gen Z employees want to know that you know they are present and contributing.  What is particularly interesting from a leadership standpoint is that you don’t have to deliver this message to Gen Z in-person. You can do so by IM, text, video or a tool such as Slack or Teams. This new generation brings tremendous talent to the workforce, and adapting to engage and retain them better is definitely worth the effort!”

A workplace that not only values, but actively promotes, the kind of attributes that make a distributed workforce more productive, more satisfied, and more cost effective will be appealing to this pool of new talent.   With even primary education moving to a distance learning environment, we are actively teaching how to use video conferencing systems to people who will not even be in the workforce for 8 to 10 years or more.

Related Blog: How Education is Continuing By Using Video Conferencing and Collaboration to Enable Distance Learning

What will the future bring?

While the events of March and April 2020 will eventually recede, when things go back they will almost certainly not be back to the way things were.  We find ourselves in the midst of a massive work-from-home experiment, and the ways that distributed workforces will enable businesses to emerge more productive are being implemented now.

How does the COVID-19 pandemic reshape the workplace?  Kevin Thomsen, Channel Sales Leader with Zoom believes it will be dramatic.  To learn more click below to see his interview  with The UC Buyer’s Mike Cromwell about Zoom’s role in enabling remote work and the work from home.  Follow us more by subscribing to The UC Buyer TV on YouTube.

The post Redefining the Future of Work and the Work From Home Employee appeared first on The UC Buyer.

During its 20 year history, Broadsoft was at the forefront of innovation of cloud communications and collaboration software, developing much of the technology that the world is now reliant upon to execute business continuity plans for businesses, to enable remote employees, and to keep people connected during the COVID-19 pandemic.  By the time Cisco acquired Broadsoft two years ago, they had become the market leader globally with nearly 50% of the world’s Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market share.  

When Broadsoft’s Founder and former CEO, Michael Tessler, left Cisco in February, little could Tessler have envisioned that within a mere 30 days, virtually the entire globe would be using the technology that his team developed as a critical means of safety, business survivability, and keeping people connected.  With his plans to begin traveling the world delayed by the COVID-19 virus, he took some time to reflect on the nearly two decades he invested in transforming the communications industry from wires and telephone poles to voice over the internet and wireless. 

We caught up with Michael In a candid conversation covering a range of subjects both personal and business. What made this interview special was the opportunity to exchange memories around the development of a new technology that not only disrupted traditional telecom, but paved the way to the innovation that is enabling today’s employees working from home.  We approached our conversation from three perspectives – from Tessler’s perspective as innovator of the technology, from our perspectives leading UCaaS businesses who on the Broadsoft platform, and from the perspective of today’s CIO facing the challenge of quickly implementing UC technology.

Given our history together, combined with our passion for the technology, and our passion for serving customers and helping them drive adoption of UCaaS, it was a great opportunity for us to take a stroll down memory lane, while discussing the challenges that businesses around the globe are now facing with being forced to quickly adopt the technology as a means to survive.

Designed for Business Continuity

Throughout the history of technology, specifically the innovation of emerging technology, we often find that technology is developed to solve problems, many of which are identified during times of crisis.  The development of Unified Communications & Collaboration technology was no different.  

Since its inception, Broadsoft’s mission revolved around enabling companies to have redundancy and enable sustainability.  Soon after Broadsoft was founded, it was another major crisis that became the catalyst for innovations enabling remote work.  “What we realized leading up to and going through 9/11 was that the underlying IP infrastructure enabled us to build truly geographic redundancy. There was no single point of failure,” according to Michael Tessler.  “The mission of BroadSoft for many years was to move the PBX from the LAN to the WAN, and one of the main reasons was workforce flexibility.”

“Cloud Communications…it’s no longer a nice to have.” – Michael Tessler

Throughout Broadsoft’s 20 year history, there was overwhelming evidence of how much of an impact having the right technology deployed made to customers of Broadsoft’s service providers, albeit, many of those were short lived, such as natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.  As Tessler acknowledges, it’s different this time, “We saw the results of businesses having their communications capabilities in the cloud, leading to the fact that these companies could continue to operate. It became a business continuity imperative. We’re now faced with a global situation where people are going to have to face up to the fact that it’s no longer a nice to have.  You have to have the flexibility of your communications capabilities in the cloud.”

Adoption Starts with Leadership

One thing we both agreed on was that VoIP suffered from a lack of awareness and slow adoption rates for many years.  For businesses that have yet to transition to UCaaS or even drive adoption throughout their organization, it starts with leadership.  As we discussed with Tessler, even some of Broadsoft’s service provider customers weren’t ‘eating their own dogfood’ – a critical component to driving adoption, both within their own organizations as well as into the market.  How can you sell something you don’t have confidence in enough to use yourselves?

For service providers and business customers alike, user adoption of the technology starts with the leaders of the businesses using their own technology.  In our case, we share the passion for the technology, and we all used the technology within our respective companies dating back to the time that Broadsoft introduced it to the market.  In the case of ANPI, the internal utilization of the technology drove the highest percentage of sales of the full UC stack amongst providers globally and it was large in part due to everyone throughout the organization using it day to day, and having it ingrained into their daily routines.

“As a leader you’ve got to demand it.” – Michael Tessler

At Broadsoft, they were a living example of how the leader can drive adoption, with Tessler using it himself and driving into his own organization, “We had employees in 23 countries. We had to use a ton of video to work together in a different way than getting together face-to-face all the time. When I looked at Broadsoft and the number of video minutes we would do on a daily basis, it was significant – I never made a call in the last few years that wasn’t video.  As a leader you’ve got to demand it.”

A Catalyst to Force User Adoption

COVID-19 will certainly change that.  As evidenced by a number of recent headlines, for companies that have been unable to quickly pivot due to technology limitations, it has created serious liability issues, public relations problems, and worse yet, a harmful and unsafe environment for the employees.  

“It’s not a responsible situation, and it’s a lack of leadership in terms of companies that have not taken to that imperative to move to the cloud.  I’m hoping, sadly enough, that this will create the clear need.” Tessler continued, “If you are a responsible business owner, you want to have business continuity, and you want to be able to operate through these kinds of situations – you’re able to have the flexibility that comes from operating these capabilities from the cloud and having a more agile workforce that’s able to work remotely.”

“Necessity will create adoption way above what we ever thought in the normal sales cycles.” – Michael Tessler

Tessler’s advice for business owners, CEOs and CIOs?  “I encourage everyone to get quickly on board. Then, how do you really get your teams to collaborate more effectively?  The future of work is really what we’re all trying to figure out. How to make that easier for people to work together in a more flexible way.”

The Workplace Forever Changed? The Genie Is Out of the Bottle

As the countries around the globe continue to mandate increasingly more restrictive social distancing measures to ‘flatten the curve’, it’s going to force businesses around the world to adopt to a new normal, and with it force people to use the technology as a means to keep business moving, and to keep people connected during these challenging times.  The impact that will have on adoption and redefining how we work?  

Tessler believes it will be profound, “I don’t think the genie goes back in the bottle.  People are experiencing it. It’s a way of life. It will be interesting to see what happens when we get through this to see how much business gets done on video.  One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting companies to do their intra company work on video. How much has that now forever been changed? How much will adoption change?  Can you even operate a business without a full UC suite going forward, or does that model just not work anymore?”

We all were in agreement that for a high percentage of businesses that have yet to make the conversion to a full UCaaS stack of solutions, that COVID-19 is likely to accelerate adoption well beyond what many of the analyst reports had ever contemplated.  During his last two years with Cisco, Tessler interacted with a number of Fortune 100 CIOs, most of whom were in the midst of making plans to conduct a transformation tied to large projects that ranged from 24 to 48 months with various phased approaches.  

What will recent events do to those plans?  Tessler believes it will shift priorities dramatically, “This tilts the priority up for that transformation and likely makes that overall period happen quicker.  Companies will throw some of that caution and care to the wind as they’ve got to get there – they can’t take up to 48 months. It will speed the transformation faster than anyone originally planned.”

Rapid Acceleration of Adoption For Enterprises

We all agreed that recent events likely pull adoption forward by as much as two to three years faster than anyone ever contemplated.  According to Tessler, he believes that within two years, that most of those Fortune 100 CIOs he’s spoken with will likely have completed the full transition.  This will lead to a new approach mandated out of necessity to adapt to the global crisis, and force a new approach that is driven by speed.

How will that shape the approach for enterprise CIOs?  It likely means a three phased approach, which we’ll dive into more on a forthcoming blog post.  The current phase being the one we’re in now – get the tools in place as soon as possible, leveraging many of the ‘freemium’ versions of applications, and the free promotions most companies are now offering.  The second phase will likely be driving adoption of the tools, integrating them into the way of doing business with the ‘new normal’. Once we get on the other side of the global crisis, the third phase will likely see widespread adoption in a compressed period of time.

Tessler’s advice to CIOs?  “If I was any one of those CIOs with 50,000 employees, this would be my tomorrow imperative.”

To learn more, check out the video below for the full interview.  Subscribe to The UC Buyer for more blog posts, and subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch more episodes of The UC Buyer TV.

The post Has the Workplace Been Forever Changed by COVID-19? Broadsoft’s Founder Shares His Perspective appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Teams of employees have moved from cubicles to collaboration spaces, and now they are moving to a remote environment where many of them work separately from others. This could be the result of offshoring, building teams where you find the best talent even if they are not local, or because the pandemic du jour is driving the principle of social distancing.

While software from Zoom and others can make it possible to hold virtual events with very little specialized equipment, there are manufacturers like Poly that will offer upgraded devices to make your meetings and events really striking. All this gear won’t make you a better manager and it can’t make your employees focus.

Below are four tips that can help you utilize your management skills with a remote workforce.

Interactive Meetings

It can be challenging for leaders who are accustomed to face to face feedback to try to use their same trick on a remote group. Of course, you can’t, but there are things you can do to make these meetings more engaging. In his LinkedIn article, William Balvanz of Voyant drives home the point that interaction is crucial by saying “feedback is important to be sure your meeting was of value.”

You can obtain feedback by actually asking direct questions to your attendees. If you can, distribute the topics across all of the team members on the meeting and have each one present for a few minutes each. And change it up by asking random people their thoughts on a given subject. You cannot run an interactive meeting as if you are delivering a sermon.

 “At various points in your presentation, you should stop speaking… This simple solution alone can help break up the sermon.” – William Balvanz

Consistent One on Ones

Even if you don’t actually meet face to face, you should not stop holding your one on ones on your normal intervals (if not more frequently). Cover what you have to, but be particularly focused on what is working for them, and what is not. Control the things you can (if they need to purchase a better headset, for instance) and empathize about the things you can’t. A sudden move to remote work can be very stressful and any uncertainty makes this worse. You should use point to point video whenever possible so you have what amounts to face to face contact.

Your one on ones may have been a very predictable practice before, make sure it remains consistent. Anything you can do to smooth the bumps in the road will be appreciated.

Contests

At the time of this writing the NCAA Tournament has been canceled and we are a long way away from fantasy football time. So what can you do during the months and weeks ahead. Contests are a good way to drive performance of one kind or another and offer a reward for most improved, best salesperson, etc. These are pretty standard and you probably already do something similar. 

Try to look at other things to evaluate, like social media presence. With most of the world’s workforce online, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram are more important than before. You can set up contests to increase social media engagement, which can help your staff become more recognizable. 

You can also do a weight-loss or wellness program. The Harvard Business Review looked closely at the ROI on Weight Loss at Work, like reduced health care risks and fewer sick days of absence.

And yet another great approach is one that was deployed recently by a client of Prodoscore, who has developed an employee productivity software that enables businesses to measure utilization of software such as Unified Communications, Collaboration, and CRM. During a recent video blog interview with The UC Buyer, Crisantos Hajibrahim, Chief Evangelist with Prodoscore, shared some insights from a recent study completed by Jon Arnold, Principal at J Arnold & Associates, as well as sharing how many of their clients are implementing a scoring system.  In other words applying gamification to the use of productivity software.

“We have to make sure that people are using it, and that’s where the scoring comes in.  We’ve seen a huge correlation – we realized a 100% increase in adoption from one particular customer,” according to Crisantos. “When Prodoscore was deployed, they weren’t using the tools. Now that the employees get points for using the software, everyone is using it.  If they don’t use it, they don’t get credit.” 

Any way you put it, a little bit of healthy competition keeps your team members feeling more like a team.

Remote Team Building Events

Finally, team building events have been a mainstay of groups for decades, but all the traditional activities seem impossible when you are not in the same place.

Time Doctor has a great article about virtual team building activities that offers a lot of advice. One idea I thought was especially unique was the idea of a Live Remote Office, where you have a video chat get together. For a non-video alternative, set up a Skype, Slack, or Discord open chat to keep up the familiar office banter.

Companies like Zoom are making it easier for users to adopt video conferencing by creating an easy to use and intuitive interface combined with the features that create a more immersive experience for users. Just last week, they announced the addition of a virtual background feature to their platform, which enables Zoom customers to change the backgrounds to spice up remote calls.  According to Kevin Thomsen, Leader of Master Agent Channel Partners, in an interview this week with The UC Buyer “It just works and it is so simple. You have to look at trends, and ease of use.  It’s built for the millennial, which is where the entire workforce is going.”

If you have any doubt about how users are quickly adopting the new feature, just check out Zoom’s recent posts on their Twitter account, @Zoom_us, where you’ll see Zoom customers tweeting about their virtual experiences in the new reality of virtual events.

Conclusion

The workplace is changing, and the time tested skills you have honed through the years will necessarily need to be updated. You can still engage with your remote workers in ways that can keep you in charge of a productive team.

The post How to Drive Participation and Engagement with a Remote Workforce appeared first on The UC Buyer.

With a hosted PBX, the calls that are recorded are not housed on a server in a closet in your office, instead they are kept in the cloud.  Depending on the particulars of your service, there are some parameters that can dictate which calls are recorded, who can access these recordings, and the level of interaction and coaching details that will be preserved.

Effectively Managing and Accessing Cloud Audio Recordings

Your service will have an interface, most often a website, where you can go to access the recordings.  The recordings will be saved in an audio file form, usually a WAV file, but it could also be as a compressed MP3 format.  They can be accessed through the web interface to play directly in your browser, or can be downloaded to your local hard drive or emailed for a personal archive.

Typically, only the user who has the feature assigned to them may access the recordings, but by setting up Supervised Recording – designating an admin or other user to supervise the agent.

Depending on the interface, you might be able to provide some manner of rating, either a number score or a stars rating.  Also, your interface may allow notes to be made, which can be used to assist in coaching the agents who have been recorded.  

Your hosted service will provide a method to store your recordings, but the storage space maynot be unlimited.  At some point you will need to download them or delete them to free up space and avoid storage overage charges.

Recording Modes

Your service may offer multiple methods for recording.  The most common is to record all calls, which should capture all voice activity for the user, both inbound and outbound and internal as well as external.  Obviously, this is very comprehensive, but will fill up the allocated memory the fastest and give the most data points to review.

Another option may allow the user to choose whether each call will be recorded ad hoc.  Depending on the system, you may have to enter a code or press a button on the phone to enable the recording.  This option is good in that it will be easier to review fewer recordings, but the manual nature means that some calls might be missed.

Consent to Record

Depending on your state laws and the laws of the caller’s state, you may be required to inform the caller that they are being recorded.  This is always a good idea to advise a caller as quickly as possible that being recorded is a possibility. Oftentimes, this is built into the auto attendant greeting or entrance message of a call center.  Your call recording service may offer other options, as well, to automatically vocalize this for you, if you wish.

Using Recorded Calls

Once you have the calls recorded, there are a lot of things that can be done with them.  Firstly, they can be used for agent development, by reviewing customer interactions and providing coaching on this basis, a customer-centric model of care can be not only devised, but implemented and verified.

Another use is to analyze customer interactions to look to improve processes or elsewise make the caller experience better.  If the same question is continually asked, for example, you may think about putting that as an option on your main auto attendant.  This is more time consuming, but similar quality-control principles apply as they would for employee engagement.

Finally, recorded calls can be used to protect your business and agents.  Once a caller realizes that the interaction is being recorded, they may be less abusive.  These recorded calls can also be called upon in the case of lawsuits, which can save your business and show the judge your side of the story.

Hosted Call Recording is often a low cost add-on feature that can enhance your ability to manage customer facing employees, as well as the processes that your customers have to follow.  It can even give you a measure of protection in the event of a disagreement between customer and representative. Best of all, you are using cloud storage for all of the records you do not need to archive, saving your own server space for company needs.

The post What Managers Need to Know About Cloud Based Call Recording appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Related Blog: Managers Create Their Own Private Internet with SD-WAN

At the Comptia Show in Las Vegas, I had a chance to talk with Aaron Kaffen, the VP of Marketing for Bigleaf Networks. They have differentiated themselves when it comes to SD-WAN deployments with their specially designed platform, which, according to Aaron, “is designed specifically for the needs of customers like [the ones] MSPs run into: smaller businesses or distributed businesses.”

“We help companies that are using cloud based technologies like VoIP or Office 365 to create a more performant and reliable connection to those cloud technologies.” – Aaron Kaffen

When it comes to failover, though, they really shine. Aaron says, “Failover is a big deal, as everyone who relies on the Internet knows. Internet performance and reliability is always an issue.” Bigleaf takes this burden head-on by establishing themselves as a single IP provider – granting the customer their own IP address block in order to move their traffic seamlessly and automatically between IP address that are known to be clear.

This leads to faster, cleaner, and more reliable Internet performance. And in technologies like VoIP, which is IP dependant, this critical differentiation can really make a profound and noticeable difference.

You can see more of my conversation with Aaron here:

The post Bigleaf Network’s Unique Approach to SD-WAN appeared first on The UC Buyer.

The answer to that question depends on a number of issues according to Jason Cummins, SVP of Voice Networks at Magna5.  “MPLS is a proven technology and it is not going away anytime soon, especially among larger companies with multiple locations.  These businesses are looking for the direct, guaranteed point-to-point connections and additional capabilities around packet prioritization that MPLS can deliver.  This prioritization is important because your data is going over the same MPLS path and using the same bandwidth and that is a finite resource.  Voice and real time traffic must be prioritized.”  He went on to explain that for the majority of businesses out there, especially if they have a single location, MPLS is not necessary to ensure a high QoS.

VoIP Packets, Delivery and Prioritization and MPLS

When it comes to voice, or really any real-time communications, there are three key metrics that every business cares about:

1. Did all the packets get delivered
2. Did they arrive on-time
3. Did the arrive in the proper order

MPLS extends this for multi-location companies by allowing for priority tags to be attached to the packets to ensure each packet arrives with the right priority as they travel along the protected paths from source to destination.  This control is an important addition for some businesses, but that ability to prioritize packets really only becomes an issue in a network where there is congestion – an issue that many small and medium businesses can effectively address.  No congestion, no need to prioritize packets with MPLS.

Dig Deeper:  Check out the Broadsoft Whitepaper – Premise-based vs. Hosted UC: A Cost of Ownership Comparison 

For businesses considering a UCaaS solution and using an over-the-top approach to real-time communications, there are two key aspects to take into account in order to address the congestion concern.  First, getting the packets to your network edge efficiently and in a prioritied fashion, and second, ensuring you have the necessary bandwidth to get the packets where they need to go without delay.

Optimize Network Hardware Configuration to Prioritize Voice Packet Delivery

According to Cummins, for the majority of businesses considering UCaaS most of the quality issues come from their own LAN and that is the place to start.  “Most off the rack business routers in the market today have some kind of mechanism that allows the voice traffic in the customer’s network to be prioritized.  Companies often use more network resources and bandwidth sharing large data files internally than they do bringing voice out to the internet, and that is where conficts and congestion can arise.”  Taking basic steps to configure the equipment in the LAN to prioritize communication packets can pay major dividends in Quality of Service.   Cummins says he has spoken with many companies that are tightly focused on MPLS, when the quality issues can be found in the network itself.

We went into a bit more detail in a recent post when we discussed a common method for assuring priority of voice and communication packets:

The most common method of taking advantage of this capability is called the dual drop scenario.  In this instance the data network has its own port on the switch and the phones have their own port.  According to Mann, “by separating it out this way, you can easily prioritize the voice and conferencing packets and you are in a better position to deliver a quality experience to your team.” Another way to think about the importance of packet prioritization is, would you rather wait a few extra seconds for your email to show up or experience jitter on twenty percent of your phone calls?  Having the right hardware to prioritize communications packets is critical.

Making Sure You Have Enough Bandwidth for Over-the-Top UCaaS

Once you have your voice packets prioritized and delivered to the network edge and ready to go out over the internet, the next key is making sure you have enough bandwidth to avoid congestion.  But how much is enough?  Lucky you, we covered that in the same post!

…businesses should use the 1 to 6 rule as a starting point.  “The rule of thumb is that businesses need to plan for one active phone call for every six users.  So if you have 60 employees, there will be 10 ongoing calls at any given time…more if you have  a contact center.”  

Toll quality calls require 80Kb per second, per call, so if a business needs to support 10 calls at a time the upload / download speed for voice calls alone is 800K per second.  “Of course that is the baseline.  Companies needs to leave extra room for overhead, extra usage and data,” says Mann, “They also need to take into consideration richer forms of communication like video conferencing, web conferencing and collaboration.”

So is MPLS right for your company?  It’s likely if you’re a medium or larger organization with multiple locations.  If not, look first at ensuring you can prioritize voice traffic on your LAN and that you have enough bandwidth (and then some) to support your UC deployment or your connection to your UCaaS provider.   Actually, you should do that even if you are going with MPLS)  Let us know how you think about this challenge in the comments section below.

The post Addressing MPLS vs Over-the-Top and other UC & UCaaS Quality of Service Questions appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Bill Balvanz is a guest author for the UCBuyer. This article originally appeared on Linkedin.

It happens every year, in every sales industry: the off-season. Sometimes this is in the early part of the year in the case of car dealerships, sometimes it’s in the summer for local attractions (if you aren’t in a tourist area, anyway). Whenever it occurs, there are important things that marketers and sales professionals can do to help boost sales results.

You can look at this as laying “the groundwork for future success once business picks up again”, or as a chance to “keep the cash coming in all year ‘round.”

Below are some pieces of advice that can help keep the sales engine churning, even when the calendar doesn’t seem to cooperate. The key is to think creatively, strategically learn more about your customers and their needs, and to broaden your horizons.

Creative Thinking

One way to think outside the box is to explore ways to create off-season excitement. During the slow periods, use your predicted idle staff as an advantage. You have more hands available; maybe offer a shortened expectation for installation — even a day or two makes a difference. If you value it enough, even absorbing the cost of expedited shipping may be a way to fast-track a client during the off season.

Another thing that can be done is to take this time to re-evaluate your marketing process. “The slow season is a good time to take a look at the big picture of your marketing and sales process and try to make corrections and improvements,” according to Gregg Schwartz from Modern Marketing. Maybe there are marketing strategies that are not yielding results and can be abandoned. Perhaps there are other marketing avenues, such as social media, that can be mined for new prospects. With a low expectation of performance, you can take a step back to see what works and what does not.

Learn More About Your Customers

The off-season is a great time to look back at those unfinished projects and business leads that asked you to call them back later. Whether the sale is on the verge of closing or is somewhere earlier in the pipeline, this period affords you extra time to give attention to these clients.

This is also a good time to circle back to check on your customers and solicit referrals. The happy customer no doubt knows other similar businesses that may benefit from your products and services. This is a great time to build leads and prospect them without the nagging concerns of ever looming deployment deadlines.

Broaden Your Horizons

This is a great time to expand your product selection by adding new services. Add Unified Communications as a Service to your already solid managed services portfolio, long distance or Internet offerings? Find new verticals to approach by learning more about products you may have (such as Hosted Fax or Call Center), but do not truly understand. Take this time to explore other products.

The truly great sales professionals do not let an off-season define their success. Engage your leadership, marketing team, and even your partners and customers when you have a chance and make sales, fill your pipeline, and have as great a year as possible.

The post Keep Your Sales Engine Churning Through the Summer Months appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Crisantos is a guest author for The UC Buyer.  This article was originally published on LinkedIn

I had the opportunity to attend Google Cloud Next 2019, Google’s annual cloud conference held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on April 9-11. As you might expect, there were many attendees, announcements, and activities for the Google cloud community. By the end of the event, three critical themes emerged that were quite significant, that you might have missed – either because you couldn’t attend, or you were overwhelmed with the volume of announcements that were being made.

Let me know your feedback and whether you agree with these three key takeaways!

The Kurian Effect

On the first day’s keynote address, we got to see Thomas Kurian, the new Google Cloud CEO. After having spent the last 22 years at Oracle, he started 2019 in his new role as CEO of Google’s Cloud business.

According to Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, “Kurian is a great fit for that job, having led 35k+ developers at Oracle, ending the trench warfare between product teams and other divisions within the company, that had plagued Oracle a decade ago” (source).

I suspect there might be a bit of a cultural shift Kurian is going to have to navigate at Google cloud, at least based on what I understand and already know about the different cultures. More importantly, Kurian will bring a much-needed discipline and maturity with a keen focus on the large, enterprise market.

TechCrunch interviewed Kurian at the event. He explained that his first task was to set up hundreds of meetings with prospective and current customers to best understand what they were looking for in a partner. This was a smart move. The overall feedback was consistent – customers love Google’s technology, but they want more support to help with adoption and implementation.

Kurian was quick to respond that Google will go on a hiring spree to provide the needed support. He added that his team is rolling out new contracts and plans to simplify pricing and that the quest to court the enterprise customer will continue to be a focus in the pursuit of growth.

If you want to see the “Kurian effect” in action, you might want to take the time to watch this video of the opening keynote where these concepts were mentioned repeatedly:

https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/sf

From my perspective, Kurian’s comments tell me that Google’s Cloud business is poised for significant growth. As the third largest cloud service provider behind AWS and Microsoft, I wouldn’t count them out yet as a future market share leader in this space.

My next observation that reaffirmed this focus is the importance Google places on their Cloud business, which began when Sundar Pichai kicked off the keynote. As Google’s CEO, he had three points to convey – the importance of growing a scalable business, the need for an infrastructure that can accelerate innovation to market, and do so through an open ecosystem.

According to Pichai, most enterprise computing occurs on-premise. The key to growth is facilitating a transition strategy to overcome the inherent complexity, incompatibility, and flexibility requirements to make this change happen easier.

Google thinks they have the answer in a new product announced at the event – Anthos – the new name for the Cloud Services Platform. Google introduced this product for hybrid cloud management last year. Anthos will launch with support from 30 major tech and developer services and will be supported by infrastructure service providers like Cisco, MongoDB, HPE, and VMware.

As Pichai explained, “Anthos gives you the flexibility to move on-prem apps to the cloud when you’re ready.” More importantly, Anthos will make it easier for companies to add Google Cloud to their existing cloud strategy without concern over incompatibility or future integration challenges.

This new product will be essential for Google to achieve enough momentum to fuel their growth objectives by overcoming how to simplify provisioning and support complexity.

Significant Investment in G Suite and Other Products

A dominant theme of Google Cloud Next 2019 was the high volume of new product introductions announced at the event. I counted at least 10 – there were probably more.

Here is a two-minute video Google’s product team prepared, which gives you a good overview of all the new products that were announced at this event

All the announcements from Google Cloud Next 2019

I already spoke about Anthos being a key component of Google’s growth strategy. Here, I want to talk about G Suite updates, which might not have received as much press attention, but do hold exceptional promise to help businesses improve their productivity.

As Kurian explained, he sees a future where G Suite “enables collaboration for everyone in the world.” Smartphones will play a key role in making this vision a reality – leveraging built-in voice and camera capabilities without having to type anything. Voice to text is a crucial technology I would expect Google to continue to invest in.

Google Assistant can now access G Suite Calendar under a new update (in beta) that lets users ask when and where their next meeting is. Cloud search will be extended to new 3rd party data sources including SAP, Salesforce, and SharePoint, in addition to G Suite, significantly expanding where you can search to retrieve information from each of your digital assets.

And, the announcement I am most excited about, Google Voice for Business (GVB) is now available. GVB gives every one of your employees a phone number that can work from anywhere, on any device. Also, it looks like it will be easy to provision, deploy and manage, based on my personal experience with GVB. Add Google’s text-to-speech technology, and you can see that it will be easy to set up a welcoming, interactive menu to greet customers and prospects seeking to engage with your company.

A Final Comment

In closing, an observation I repeatedly observed at the event was that of participants being overwhelmed. There was so much information being shared, it felt like we were all drinking out of a fire hose. I saw many an expression of utter confusion.

When did it become an industry standard for these types of events to overwhelm the attendees with so much information? Given we will all likely only remember 20-30% of what was presented, how else can we achieve knowledge transfer with greater effectiveness?

I suppose this is a sign of the times. Technology advances continue to accelerate and an ever-increasing rate. The bar keeps getting higher as each successive vendor tries to outdo each other with all their new product announcements. The increasing use of AI, machine learning and automation isn’t helping. Despite each of these technologies, it is still a human that must process all the information to make a smart choice on where to invest scarce resources.

I hope you found this summary to be helpful. It was my way of trying to slow down the velocity of company and product updates to help you make a more educated decision on what new technology solutions you make as you make your way through the year.

The post My 3 Key Takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2019 and “The Kurian Effect” appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Increased Productivity

You can now edit Excel spreadsheets, compose Word documents, read PDF files, and send and receive email with rudimentary applications for your device.  Many of these applications have been around since the days of Blackberry, but where they used to be simple readers, there are now full applications for the most common business programs.

Screen sizes are getting larger, too, and with devices like Smart Pens you can get really precise on devices that fit in your pocket, not to mention lightweight tablets and pads.

This potential to fix one little problem or finish one more document is a powerful draw, but just like anything else can be managed properly.

Enhanced Work-Life Balance

The concern with using a personal cell phone was that one would never be able to escape the office and work-life balance would surely suffer.  If one can be reached at all times, it was assumed, one would be. The initial response to this was Find-Me Follow-Me, a protocol to route calls made to the office number out to a personal number.  That way, your clients didn’t have your personal info. The problem resurfaced when you called back, and the ubiquitousness of caller ID came into play.

But, with modern mobile applications, you can take your work number with you.  It can ring an application on your smartphone or computer, and you can answer as if you are at the office.  Furthermore, you can place outbound calls as if they originated from the office, with the appropriate caller ID in place.  Extension dialing, voicemail access, and any other feature of your office line can be utilized with a variety of applications.

How Top Performers Make it Work

For employees, the key to keeping your time even when you are shackled electronically is to pick and choose when you want to be “on call”.  The appeal of getting a few extra things done when you are up late at night, or to use the quiet of an early morning to respond to some emails is strong.  You have to keep in mind that you are eroding into your own time with every email sent and every spreadsheet cell filled.

While a 40 point zero hour workweek doesn’t work for many positions, personal time is important for balance.  You work for your freedom, for your family, and unnecessarily cheating yourself is an archaic mindset to adopt.

Instead, set aside time if you must – an hour before breakfast, or right before the game starts on Sunday – makes a huge difference.  

For managers and directors, if you expect your employees to be available at all times, you will burn them out quickly.  Have reasonable expectations for off-hours availability and time, and respect these expectations. You can also set the same expectation for yourself.  Your time is important as well, after all.

Conclusion

Just because you can be as productive out of the office as in it does not mean your time has become any less valuable.  Use the tools you have to their fullest, including protecting your personal phone number, and enjoy the added freedom. But always remember that there has to be a balance between work and free time for yourself and your employees.

The post How Effective Leaders Reclaim Time with Technology appeared first on The UC Buyer.

In a recent article discussing Virtual SBC and SBCaaS options, we promised that we would take a closer look how media processing (transcoding and interworking of various communication codecs and protocols), which has traditionally been one of the liabilities of cloud-based SBCs, is being enhanced.  To start, it is important to note that the software that handles the signaling in a Unified Communications environment, things like setting up sessions, session management and GUI presentation, is different than the software handling the media processing.  The signaling component of UC (basically what you see as your UC software) can easily be virtualized and is well suited to run on Central Processing Units (CPUs) in COTS (commercial off the shelf) servers.  This is not always the case with the media processing, as we discussed in this article from late last year.  Interworking and transcoding of many realtime voice or video sessions requires a lot of heavy lifting and a lot of processing power.

Session Border Controllers (SBCs) usually handle media processing beautifully, but traditionally have done so with hardware-based appliances sitting in an enterprise or service provider’s data center.  They utilize custom designed DSP (digital signal processors) chips that are optimized to perform certain repetitive tasks extremely well and very quickly.  Unfortunately for companies looking to virtualize network functions, DSPs are not something you can buy off the shelf and plug into a COTS server.

Heavy Transcoding Loads Can Overload COTS Capacity

For most small and medium businesses (and even some larger ones, depending on their requirements), optimized virtual SBCs are perfectly capable of handling all their media processing requirements in the cloud and are a solid option.  But what about larger enterprises and service providers with more complex needs?  Where does the virtual model start to break down?  According to Daniel Teichman, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at SBC vendor Sonus Networks, Intel general purpose processors are not yet designed for high scale media interworking. “Transcoding involves many small repetitive tasks done over and over again and general purpose CPUs are not fast enough to allow large scale,” explained Teichman. “For example, we will get about 200 G711 – G729 concurrent transcodes – the easiest one to do – in a single core of a very powerful CPU.”  That problem is exacerbated when using more complex codecs like EVRC, AMR-WB/NB, etc., which are the codecs that mobile service providers use.  “In this case the average can drop down to 100 or less per core.”

When you consider that Sonus has appliance-based SBCs that can handle thousands of concurrent transcoded media sessions, you can see the challenges that larger organizations need to address.  “Throwing lots of blade servers with dozens of core processors at the problem quickly starts to negate the cost effective nature of moving to an all software-based solution,” says Teichman.

Leveraging GPUs to Scale Media Processing in the Cloud

One very promising approach to solving this challenge is to leverage Graphical Processing Units, or GPU chips.  For you gamers out there, you recognize GPUs as the chips that take the processor intensive, repetitive,  graphics processing requirements away from your computer’s primary chip and handle them so they don’t negatively impact overall machine performance.  The better your GPU card, the better the game play, even at the highest resolution…I’m not saying that I’ve spent a lot of money buying the best GPUs for my new PC’s over the years to ensure performance, but…..I have.  Don’t tell my wife.

According to Teichman, Sonus has been seeing terrific results in their virtual SBCs when leveraging GPUs in a COTS environment.  “GPUs are designed to perform the same tasks over and over again, very quickly and efficiently, so in that way they are very close to DSPs.  Our testing has shown that GPUs drive down costs, power consumption and rack space requirements, while improving performance.”  Sonus has been busy optimizing their software to take advantage of GPUs for media transcoding and it is showing great promise in allowing the virtual SBC architecture to scale.  “GPUs are low cost, easy to buy and COTS servers recognize them and know what to do with them,” says Teichman.  

So, GPUs are the answer to processing media in the cloud.  I’m not surprised.  Us gamers have always been on the cutting edge.

The post Are GPUs the Answer to Scaling Media Processing in the Cloud appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Open Source UC is consistently one of the most searched for terms on The UC Buyer.  We dig in deeper in this information packed interview with Jerry Stabile, CEO and Founder of Commercial Open Source UC vendor, eZuce.

We discuss the benefits and challenges of Open Source UC, the types of companies that it is right for, and virutalization, cloud and UCaaS implications.  We also look at how the SipXCom open source project community is working to keep up with the breakneck speed of change in the communications industry.  

If your business is considering UC and looking at Open Source as an option, this podcast is definitely worth your time on the way to or from work.  Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS.

The post What You Need to Know About Open Source Unified Communications. Podcast with eZuce appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Over and over at The UC Buyer we have heard that one of the biggest risks to Cloud-based UC is a corporate network that is not up for the job.  In this detailed podcast with Stephen Farkouh, the Executive Vice President of Information Systems at UCaaS solution provider Broadview Networks, we discuss the network challenges that businesses face when deploying UCaaS and what they can do to prevent them.

We talk about  jitter and latency and their causes including router configurations, firewall setup and bandwidth.  We also dive into their new solution allows their channel partners to perform an in-depth, long-term pre-test of a company’s network that identifies any issues up front so they can be addressed before pulling the trigger on UCaaS deployment.  If you’re considering cloud-UC, you definitely should take a listen.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS (they’re great for the drive to or from work!)  and stick with The UC Buyer for best practices around moving your communications to the cloud.

The post Testing the Readiness of Your Network Prior to UCaaS Deployment appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Companies are moving towards Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in a big way.  NFV is an initiative undertaken by companies and communications service providers (CSPs) to virtualize the network services that are now being carried out by proprietary, dedicated hardware.  As businesses successfully adopt NFV they will decrease the amount of proprietary hardware that’s needed to launch and operate network services.  Businesses are looking to NFV to deliver a number of benefits, including operational savings, lower CapEx costs, increased agility and flexibility to scale.  

When it comes to the communications stack there are a number of capabilities that are moving towards NFV and the cloud at breakneck speed, from telephony and PBX’s, to UC to video conferencing.  One concept that has been gathering a lot of attention on the NFV-front is virtualizing session border controllers.  SBCs have traditionally been deployed on purpose-built hardware with custom DSP’s that are designed to excel at the sophisticated security and interoperability functions that SBCs provide, so they are an obvious NFV target, yet they also present certain challenges.  

According to Walter Kenrich, the Director of Product Marketing at Sonus Networks, simply porting an application to a virtual machine, especially one as sophisticated as a SBC, doesn’t mean it will work in the cloud.  “There is a lot of “myth vs reality” out there when it comes to Virtual SBC options,” says Kenrich.  “Companies are obviously concerned about security in cloud communications, as well as insuring interworking and scalability – especially when an SBC is being deployed on a COTS (Common Off The Shelf) server.”   The thought being that as the optimized hardware disappears, the standard hardware could have difficulty keeping up with heavy interworking and media processing requirements.  However, according to Kenrich, “As the technology has been tested and improved, these areas have been addressed and effectively overcome, especially when businesses and services providers deploy orchestration software, like OpenStack, to manage their virtual communications services.”  (NOTE: In a previous article we discussed some of these media processing challenges…keep your eyes open for a post updating how this is being addressed) .

Three Models for Deploying Virtual or Cloud Based Session Border Controllers

As Session Border Controller vendors like Sonus have been working to optimize their virtual SBC offerings, businesses and service providers have been busy deploying vSBCs in a variety of ways.  Here are three that, according to Kenrich, have been gaining the most traction to date:

On-Premise (CPE) Virtual Session Border Controller for Enterprises

Pretty straight forward.  An enterprise owns and manages their own virtual SBC in their own public, private or hybrid cloud environment.  SIP trunks come in and the customer has their own orchestration built in.  Using COTS servers, the enterprise deploys a virtual SBC and enables it to be managed as an application module by their orchestration software.  Simple, right?  I mean, if you consider setting up that kind of thing ‘pretty straightforward’.  

According to Kenrich, businesses taking advantage of a solution like this are looking to retain control of their environment while lowering costs.  “Having a virtual SBC in place allows enterprises that are already comfortable managing session border controllers to spin up or down additional resources as necessary to support peak loads or busy times of the year,” says Kenrich.

Virtual SBC is On-Premise, But is Managed By Service Provider

This situation is ideal for businesses that are looking to maintain control of their own cloud environment but may not have the internal expertise to manage the details of a session border controller environment.  The service provider delivers all services around the SBC and can even handle the scaling up and down of capacity because they would have access to their client’s orchestration layer.

Kenrich indicated that this model is gaining traction with larger Tier One service providers.  “These firms are looking to provide as much network management (via NFV) as possible for their clients,” says Kenrich.  “In addition to real time communications applications like SBCs, policy routing engines (PSX) and element management systems (EMS), these service providers are even looking to handle applications like firewalls and other traditionally networking-focused capabilities”

SBCaaS – Solution Resides on Service Provider’s Cloud

In this instance, the service provider handles all aspects of delivering SBC capabilities as a service from their own cloud.  Customers eliminate all hardware requirements and rely on the CSP for setup and management, software upgrades and network configuration and security for their SBC instance.  “In this scenario, service providers have their own orchestration software which allows them to adapt to identified traffic spikes,” says Kenrich.  “They can utilize load balancing across instances to elastically react and can even take advantage of analytics to do so dynamically and proactively.”  Just like every other area of computing, expect to see more businesses providing as-a-service offerings for SBCs.  

And stay tuned for a post digging into the details about how the challenge of scaling interworking and media processing on vSBCs is being addressed.

The post Virtual SBC and SBCaaS Options: The Market is Coming Into Focus appeared first on The UC Buyer.

In this insightful discussion with Derek Yoo, CTO of Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) we get into the details on the trends impacting the enterprise communications space and what is driving the movement towards Unified Communications in the cloud and UCaaS in particular.  We discuss the impact of consumerization of IT, the various freemium collaboration solutions in the market and how UC and UCaaS vendors are adapting to continue delivering a high level of value and service to their enterprise customers.

>>Dig Deeper: Download this Whitepaper for UC&C Deployment Best Practices

If you’re considering UCaaS or are interested in where the market is headed, this is a must listen.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS (they’re great for the drive to or from work!)  and stick with The UC Buyer for insights into how the way business people communicate is evolving. 

The post The Evolving Enterprise UCaaS Market – Podcast Interview with Fuze appeared first on The UC Buyer.

1996

I had bought my first cell phone in 1995 and you could make calls on it in many places (even back then Verizon had the best coverage).  Laptops were rare.  The English company I was working for had a handful of German “laptops” that looked like suitcases and weighed 15 pounds, which were doled out to salespeople when they hit the road and were certainly not something you were expected to have with you on vacation.

My company had recently launched this newfangled thing called a website and we were not provided with email addresses.  My boss and I (early adopters that we were) had our own email addresses, and they weren’t AOL addresses.  We were hardcore and had direct to the “Internet” access and didn’t have to go through a gated community like AOL or Compuserv.  I didn’t check my email while I was on vacation…I couldn’t.  I may have called into the office once or twice.  I did however, get a great tan and read a lot of books.

2004

Blackberry anyone?  Things moved quick and I had email on my phone!  My laptop weighed 6 pounds, Windows XP was out and solid, but my laptop still didn’t make it on vacation because the place we rented didn’t have Wifi…really most people didn’t if you can believe it.  I turned on my “out of office” response, but still checked my work emails all the time (it was still somewhat novel at the time….you couldn’t do it on flip phones).  Email had quickly become a dominant form of business communications and cell coverage was better.  Web conferencing was available, but still rare.  Texting was starting to explode, but not easy (who wanted to click the number 2 three times to write ‘C’).

You were always available for calls, but on the upside you could play Breakout, Tetris and Solitaire on your phone.  I still read a lot of books.  Made out of paper.

2010

The devices made the trip.  My wife and I both had iPhones and I brought my first generation iPad and my laptop.  The first thing we did was connect everything to Wifi.  Unpacking could wait.

Vacation sort of started seeming like ‘work lite’.  Still checked email all the time (on multiple devices) and responded to important ones.  Key team members would text me in an emergency.  Important sales calls or customer meetings were easy to pull off with mutliple web conferencing systems (WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc.) that required downloads, but  worked well.  You still had to call into them though…VoIP calling was often a jitter-fest on web conferencing platforms.  

Video was nowhere to be found, except maybe Facetime, but that wasn’t a business thing (and still isn’t).  I still read books, but did it on the iPad. Unfortunately, that kept me one click away from being connected to work.

2016

The family packed 4 iPhones, 2 ipads, 2 Chromebooks and a couple of Kindles (so we can read books in the sun without being distracted by work).  Unified Communications and web conferencing is ubiquitous.  Collaboration solutions still mostly require a download, but WebRTC is sniffing at the door and the friction associated with collaboration is disappearing.  Presence, IM, Texting, email, VoIP connectivity, a myriad of apps for every situation are available on every device (like my meditation app to help me stay centered in a world of non-stop communications).  Cloud has changed everything.  There is no difference between working at the office and working on the road.  I didn’t even turn my ‘out of office’ reply on my email.  Why bother?

Video is right on the edge of being a part of most meetings, but in my experience participants hesitate because of inconsistent performance, bandwidth issues, not wanting to, etc..  I’m confident the next entry in this timeline will say that video is part of every meeting we want it to be part of.

You have to make an effort to compartamentalize work.  I try to arrange all meetings before noon, so I can carve aside time for fun.  I still brought a paper book with me.  A biography on Einstein.  When I have a chance to sit with it for an hour or two, it makes me feel like I’m on vacation.  

What about you.  What are the memories you have around communications tech and vacations.  Let me know in the comments section.

The post Summer Vacation in the Age of Unifying Communications appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Here’s a crazy stat for you: 76% of the 5.3 million small and medium businesses in the U.S. say they are moving their telephony to the cloud (or 86% if you believe this recent report) within the next few years. The majority of these businesses are still a year away from pulling the trigger and are currently in fact finding mode, but if you believe what people are saying, the tidal wave is cresting.

As we’ve covered here in the past, one approach that holds a lot of appeal for SMBs is going all in on Skype for Business and Microsoft’s new Cloud PBX offering. And you can understand why. There are a huge number of companies that have already deployed Lync / S4B for IM, Presence and web conferencing, and all the hassles that many of these businesses experienced from deploying the telephony layer are gone when you deploy the entire Microsoft stack along with Cloud PBX, right? According to Rich DeFabritus, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft’s strategic partner Sonus, that is true to a certain extent and Cloud PBX can be a great option for businesses ready and able to deploy entirely on the cloud, but when it comes to companies that want or need to maintain their existing local systems (at least at some locations) or have contracts in place for PSTN calling, the story can be a bit more complex.

How Cloud Connector and Cloud PBX help Streamline Skype for Business Hybrid-Cloud Deployments

Back at Enterprise Connect in March, Microsoft made a bunch of big announcements, including new features in Office 365 Cloud PBX, Cloud PBX conferencing availability in 32 countries and Project Rigel. In many ways their biggest announcement, Cloud Connector Edition, flew under the radar because it is middleware, and middleware just isn’t that sexy. As Microsoft explains it:

All versions of Skype for Business Server allow customers worldwide to use Office 365 Cloud PBX with the carrier calling services of their choice, and the new Cloud Connector Edition allows customers to quickly connect existing phone lines and phone numbers to Office 365 by delivering these proven hybrid capabilities as optimized, pre-configured virtual machine images.

Doesn’t sound that sexy, right? Well according to DeFabritus, it depends on who you ask. “If you’re talking to a business with 5 locations that each have a separate PBX system and different carriers with whom they have a contract, they have difficulty moving to Cloud PBX all at once. This solution means that they can move to a centralized UC solution that includes telephony immediately without having to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” In other words, they can deploy Cloud Connector Edition along with Cloud PBX via their Microsoft Office 365 licensing and continue to use their existing on-premise hardware, PSTN access and PBX. “If you initiate a call through Skype, it will connect (via cloud connector) to the local on-premise PBX and route through your carrier, but will be logged and interact with your Skype for Business as if you made the call through Cloud PBX,” says DeFabritus.

This approach provides multiple benefits to businesses that need to migrate to a straight cloud communications layer at a more measured pace. For example, deploying Cloud PBX a single location at a time. Or putting all new employees on Cloud PBX from day one so that the footprint of the existing platform doesn’t grow. Or move all home-based workers to Cloud PBX in one go so they have full UC functionality no matter where they are. Microsoft claims that each version of Cloud Connector Edition will support 500 concurrent calls, so based on the 6 to 1 rule, you’d have to have more than 3,000 employees on a PBX before you’d have to get creative in how you would roll it out. “Essentially, CCE allows business headed towards Cloud PBX to migrate methodically and allows them to retire the rest of their equipment at their own pace,” says DeFabritus.

Sexy

Deploying and Securing Cloud Connector Edition and Cloud PBX

Two things come to mind when thinking about what comes next: How much of a hassle is it to deploy and, do you need an SBC for security and interworking on Cloud PBX?

Cloud Connector Edition Deployment

Even though the license for CCE is free, it can be somewhat costly and time consuming to deploy. This potentially includes a server, windows server licenses, yperV licenses and firewall modifications. A recent TechNet article laid out the deployment details like this:

With Cloud Connector Edition, you deploy a set of packaged VMs that contain a minimal Skype for Business Server topology — consisting of an Edge component, Mediation component, and a Central Management Store (CMS) role. You will also install a domain controller, which is required for the internal functioning of Cloud Connector. These services are configured for hybrid with your Office 365 tenant that includes Skype for Business Online services.

According to DeFabritus, it is not a simple process and you should expect installation to take a full day. Not too bad, but still pretty stiff. And what about security?

Session Border Controllers and Securing Microsoft Cloud PBX

Microsoft strongly recommends having an Session Border Controller with any CloudPBX deployment. According to DeFabritus, having an SBC in place makes a lot of sense for any company deploying a hybrid S4B architecture, and doubly so if they are taking advantage of Cloud Connector. “CCE quickly becomes mission critical technology and needs to be protected while working seamlessly.  Telephony remains the lifeblood of many companies.”

Sonus is offering a new solution to address both of these issues that includes an optimized and pre-configured version of the CCE embedded on – and integrated with – their SBC, effectively killing two birds with one stone. Execs should like that because they not only get the security assurance and improved performance, interworking, media processing, etc., that you get from an SBC, but you also save money by only having to deploy and manage a single device.

According to DeFabritus the real winners here are the IT guys. “This approach with the optimized CCE and the tightly integrated SBC cut installation time down to about one hour.” Nice…anyone for kicking off early and grabbing a beer?

The post Secure Deployments of Cloud Connector Broadens Market for Microsoft Cloud PBX appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Was taking a few planned days off when I realized that everywhere I looked there was video conferencing news.  Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for group video systems just came out, there was a big acquistion in the business meeting / video conferencing space and leading business publications were pushing stories about how to make video work for your business.  Let’s dig in. 

2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Group Video Systems

The group video market is changing quickly (no surprise) and according to Gartner is in a slow decline phase (contracting by 1.3% annually through 2020).  Software video infrastructure, innovative form factors  and video as a service and are reshaping video collaboration. In an updated Magic Quadrant report Gartner reviews eight vendors with the necessary reach, scale and interoperability for the global enterprise market.  

The report evaluates vendors based on dedicated and huddle room systems, personal video endpoints and video infrastructure.  The ‘Leaders’  in this go-round are Cisco, Polycom and Vidyo, with Lifesize tagged in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant.  Take a read through the entire report here, courtesy of Vidyo (thanks guys).

LogMeIn Acquires Video / Web Confereing Provider GoToMeeting from Citrix

I used LogMeIn for the first time in 2002 for their server management solution when carving out a $100M business from a larger company and always appreciated the simplicity, security and stability of thier system. Their business conferencing solution had many of the same attributues but I was never a big user.  When Citrix came out with GoToMeeting, it exploded onto the scene as a key competitor to Cisco’s WebEx and it seemed as if everyone was using it for awhile. 

In big news this week, LogMeIn has acquired GoToMeeting from Citrix in a deal valued at about $1.8 billion.  According to Fortune:

The combined conferencing business, should take in $1 billion in (pro forma) revenue in its first year, the companies said. And it will have bigger reach to help compete with Cisco’s CSCO -0.42% WebEx, Microsoft MSFT -0.63% Skype for Business, and Blue Jeans Network. Business-focused paid services are all feeling intense pressure from free or near free consumer video conferencing alternatives like Google GOOG -0.05% Hangouts and Microsoft Skype.

The deal will allow Citrix to focus more on its core business lines like XenApps and XenDesktop and in some financial wizardry mumbo jumbo:

LogMeIn and Citrix described this deal as a Reverse Morris Trust, which means it’s supposed to be a tax-free transaction for Citrix CTXS -2.80% shareholders.

Now if only I could figure out how to not pay taxes when I sell something.

Inc. Spells Out How to Choose the Best Free Video Conferencing System for Your Business

Free is a word that a lot of companies like, but when it comes to video conferencing systems it is a word that can come with some tradeoffs.  As this Inc. article goes into some of those can be things like, ‘immediate, easy-to-use and reliable’.  

The article digs into the pros and cons of Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom and does a nice job of looking at the kinds of things businesses should consider when making this decision.  Since this is Inc., it is obviously focused on smaller businesses.  So which one wins the prize?  Zoom…who would have thought.

The only ding against Zoom is that your clients, investors, or customers might not already use it or know about. Skype is more popular. It means it could take a bit more time to install the app and get things working, but in my experience, it’s seamless.

Otherwise, Zoom is my top pick for the low cost, ease-of-use, and features.

My First Time Using Yorktel’s Univago Video Conferencing

The other day I was invited to a Univago video conferencing meeting leveraging Yorktel’s enterprise-grade collaboratin platform.  As I cover in this podcast with Wainhouse Research, Univago is powered by the Pexip platform which brings a lot of benefits along with it, and the experience was pretty seamless.

I clicked on a link in my meeting invite and the conference opened up directly in my web browser.  I entered my name and was brought to a full-screen video image of the meeting host (who was the only one in the meeting to start).  The video quality was seamless and far beyond what I am used to with Skype, or even most Skype for Business meetings I’ve been in.  As more people entered, the video quality didn’t degrade and it was easy to keep track of who was speaking.  Honestly, it was as good of a desktop video experience as I have had.

As Ira Weinstein from Wainhouse put it, Yorktel was very smart to start with the Pexip platform which is field proven and stable and takes care of the plumbing. Yortel then extended this solution and put a wrapper around it to make it an easier to use, enterprise platform with improved workflows and management capabilities that allows businesses to take advantage of on-demand virtual meeting rooms and bring in a myriad of devices across various existing video conferencing solutions.  It also allows them to do so completely in the cloud.  

This is what Gartner meant when they were saying that software video infrastructure, innovative form factors  and video as a service were revolutionizing in-room solutions, video endpoints and video infrastructure.  With video conferencing solutions as capable and easy to use as Univago, don’t be surprised when you are having more and more video conferences as part of your daily work life (just make sure you’re not part of the 11% that admit to not wearing pants during video conferences!).  

The post Big News on the Video Front This Week appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Was taking a few planned days off when I realized that everywhere I looked there was video conferencing news.  Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for group video systems just came out, there was a big acquistion in the business meeting / video conferencing space and leading business publications were pushing stories about how to make video work for your business.  Let’s dig in. 

2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Group Video Systems

The group video market is changing quickly (no surprise) and according to Gartner is in a slow decline phase (contracting by 1.3% annually through 2020).  Software video infrastructure, innovative form factors  and video as a service and are reshaping video collaboration. In an updated Magic Quadrant report Gartner reviews eight vendors with the necessary reach, scale and interoperability for the global enterprise market.  

The report evaluates vendors based on dedicated and huddle room systems, personal video endpoints and video infrastructure.  The ‘Leaders’  in this go-round are Cisco, Polycom and Vidyo, with Lifesize tagged in the ‘Visionaries’ quadrant.  Take a read through the entire report here, courtesy of Vidyo (thanks guys).

LogMeIn Acquires Video / Web Confereing Provider GoToMeeting from Citrix

I used LogMeIn for the first time in 2002 for their server management solution when carving out a $100M business from a larger company and always appreciated the simplicity, security and stability of thier system. Their business conferencing solution had many of the same attributues but I was never a big user.  When Citrix came out with GoToMeeting, it exploded onto the scene as a key competitor to Cisco’s WebEx and it seemed as if everyone was using it for awhile. 

In big news this week, LogMeIn has acquired GoToMeeting from Citrix in a deal valued at about $1.8 billion.  According to Fortune:

The combined conferencing business, should take in $1 billion in (pro forma) revenue in its first year, the companies said. And it will have bigger reach to help compete with Cisco’s CSCO -0.42% WebEx, Microsoft MSFT -0.63% Skype for Business, and Blue Jeans Network. Business-focused paid services are all feeling intense pressure from free or near free consumer video conferencing alternatives like Google GOOG -0.05% Hangouts and Microsoft Skype.

The deal will allow Citrix to focus more on its core business lines like XenApps and XenDesktop and in some financial wizardry mumbo jumbo:

LogMeIn and Citrix described this deal as a Reverse Morris Trust, which means it’s supposed to be a tax-free transaction for Citrix CTXS -2.80% shareholders.

Now if only I could figure out how to not pay taxes when I sell something.

Inc. Spells Out How to Choose the Best Free Video Conferencing System for Your Business

Free is a word that a lot of companies like, but when it comes to video conferencing systems it is a word that can come with some tradeoffs.  As this Inc. article goes into some of those can be things like, ‘immediate, easy-to-use and reliable’.  

The article digs into the pros and cons of Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom and does a nice job of looking at the kinds of things businesses should consider when making this decision.  Since this is Inc., it is obviously focused on smaller businesses.  So which one wins the prize?  Zoom…who would have thought.

The only ding against Zoom is that your clients, investors, or customers might not already use it or know about. Skype is more popular. It means it could take a bit more time to install the app and get things working, but in my experience, it’s seamless.

Otherwise, Zoom is my top pick for the low cost, ease-of-use, and features.

My First Time Using Yorktel’s Univago Video Conferencing

The other day I was invited to a Univago video conferencing meeting leveraging Yorktel’s enterprise-grade collaboratin platform.  As I cover in this podcast with Wainhouse Research, Univago is powered by the Pexip platform which brings a lot of benefits along with it, and the experience was pretty seamless.

I clicked on a link in my meeting invite and the conference opened up directly in my web browser.  I entered my name and was brought to a full-screen video image of the meeting host (who was the only one in the meeting to start).  The video quality was seamless and far beyond what I am used to with Skype, or even most Skype for Business meetings I’ve been in.  As more people entered, the video quality didn’t degrade and it was easy to keep track of who was speaking.  Honestly, it was as good of a desktop video experience as I have had.

As Ira Weinstein from Wainhouse put it, Yorktel was very smart to start with the Pexip platform which is field proven and stable and takes care of the plumbing. Yortel then extended this solution and put a wrapper around it to make it an easier to use, enterprise platform with improved workflows and management capabilities that allows businesses to take advantage of on-demand virtual meeting rooms and bring in a myriad of devices across various existing video conferencing solutions.  It also allows them to do so completely in the cloud.  

This is what Gartner meant when they were saying that software video infrastructure, innovative form factors  and video as a service were revolutionizing in-room solutions, video endpoints and video infrastructure.  With video conferencing solutions as capable and easy to use as Univago, don’t be surprised when you are having more and more video conferences as part of your daily work life (just make sure you’re not part of the 11% that admit to not wearing pants during video conferences!).  

The post Big News on the Video Front This Week appeared first on The UC Buyer.

Most of us think of the small and medium business (SMB) market when we think of hosted UC (UCaaS).  In fact, Cisco recently came out with a report saying that 86% of SMBs were actively testing, planning on implementing or had already deployed UCaaS.  There were signs that SMB dominance was poised to change when last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS threw us a curveball and went global.  They did so to show some separation between businesses and solutions that were ready and able to execute on a global scale (i.e. those companies that could support multi-national companies) and those that weren’t there yet (or never planned on going there).  But are big businesses really ready to scrap their existing infrastructure and move the communications to the cloud?  According to Enzo Signore, the Chief Marketing Officer at UCaaS Magic Quadrant ‘leader’ 8X8 the answer is increasingly yes.  “It’s very exciting to watch how quickly UCaaS is moving from the SMB market to the enterprise,” says Signore.  “Large businesses are seeing the transformative value of UCaaS – and doing the cost calculations – and this has led to a significant acceleration in deployments in the last 12 months.  Word of mouth is kicking in and the growth is just getting started.”

4 Reasons Enterprise Communications as a Service (ECaaS) is Taking Off

According to Signore, UCaaS (or Enterprise Communications as a Service – ECaaS as 8×8 refers to it) is becoming a consistent part of the discussion for any enterprise looking to update their communications and collaboration backbone.  “This has really changed in the last year.  The value proposition of moving the entire enterprise communications stack – from telephony, to UC, to mobility to contact center – to a cloud platform is too compelling to ignore.”  We discussed four reasons large and multinational businesses are considering making the move:

High Level of Urgency to Update Collaboration Infrastructure

Many large companies are being held captive by their existing PBX infrastructure and a mishmash of collaboration tools that were put in place over time or were a result of acquisitions.  This costly, outdated infrastructure means that for most enterprises it is easy to identify opportunities for improved collaboration and cost savings and by shifting to a hosted platform they can accelerate timelines and keep costs low.

“We work with a large, old-school medical company that had outdated systems and processes and still sold with binders of printed catalogs.  They looked at UCaaS as a cornerstone to change corporate culture.  They used hosted communications to break down barriers, increase collaboration and improve the sales and customer service process ,” explained Signore.  “Being able to deploy a turnkey, highly capable system in weeks can help a company leapfrog a long, difficult and expensive project of trying to update existing systems.”

Mobility and Untethered Working is Vital

With so many remote and untethered workers, having a system that can provide a consistent, seamless, mobile experience is critical not only for corporate collaboration, but also for branding and customer care.  Being able to deploy a single system to all employees, regardless of location, means that all employees – even at home workers and salespeople on the road – can have the same experience as office workers regardless of location or the device they are using.

Eliminating the Upgrading Hassle

With large, traditional telecom solutions, likely including different PBX and phone systems at each location, just keeping existing solutions up to date is a major effort.  According to Signore, it is a challenge that is consistently raised early in discussions with customers.  “Enterprises are often a few releases behind when it comes to updating their existing solutions.  That problem is exacerbated by having to maintain multiple systems and multiple PBX’s at locations with varying levels of IT support.  With UCaaS, that challenge disappears.”

Improved Customer Experience

Only 20% of contact centers are currently offering an omni-channel experience for customers.  Having a single, integrated communications solution that ties the enterprise together across all locations not only enhances internal productivity, but can also improve the customer experience (which we have been talking a lot about recently).  “Six of our ten largest deals with enterprise customers have been for UC and Contact Center at the same time,” says Signore.  “Being able to deploy an integrated solution globally is very appealing to them and they’ve been telling us that this approach is driving significant and ongoing opportunities across the company.”

Global Capability is Key Issue for Large, Multinational Businesses Considering UCaaS

There are table stakes for any UCaaS platform if they want to be considered by a large company.  Things like a rock solid network, security, scalability, redundancy and an API library for integration with enterprise applications are must haves.  But when it comes to winning enterprise business, being able to deliver on a global basis is going to be the next battleground, according to Signore.  “It is one thing to have a capable platform, but in discussions with multi-national companies the conversation quickly turns to global concerns and the funnel of potential providers shrinks very quickly when international support and capacity comes up.”

Global issues that often arise during discussions include:

• Data Centers or POPs around the globe
• Local number portability
• Ability to provide local numbers
• Access to toll free numbers
• Streamlined global session routing (always defining best session routing regardless of user location)
• Ability to manage and support various governmental regulations
• International support (available around the clock)
• Localization of product and documentation

Currently few businesses are capable of delivering all of these services in multiple regions around the world.  This may be one of the concerns that will keep UCaaS sales in the enterprise from growing exponentially in the short-term.  Are you part of a large business that is considering UCaaS / ECaaS?  What are your requirements.  What are your challenges when it comes to planning for deployment across your locations and multinationally?  Let us know in the comments section below and we’ll pull together some experts to get you the answers.

The post Moving on Up: UCaaS Quickly Gaining Traction in the Large, Multinational Enterprise appeared first on The UC Buyer.

This year is the year of enterprise video, but so was last year, and next year will be the year of video as well.  That’s according to Ira Weinstein, video conferencing and collaboration specialist and partner at Wainhouse Research.  We dig into how the video conferencing market is evolving, the challenges keeping it from meeting its promise and how new solutions from service providers, like Yorktel’s Univago virtual meeting room platform, are starting to tear down those barriers and open up ubiquitous access to visual collaboration.

If you are an SMB or a larger enterprise looking for ways to take video to the next level in your company, this podcast is definitely worth the listen. 

Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS (they’re great for the drive to work!)  and stick with The UC Buyer for on-going insights into the way the communications and collaboration landscape is evolving. 

The post The State of Enterprise Video. Podcast with Wainhouse Research appeared first on The UC Buyer.