Speaker 0 | 00:02.192

All right, welcome everyone to Telecom Radio 1. This is your host, Phil Howard, the most bearded man in telecom. Today we’re talking about a very controversial subject, Enterprise VoIP. And when we talk enterprise, we have to bring some big guns to the show. So we’re bringing Pete Caparonis and Chris Muggleston, aka Muggs. Muggs, am I getting this right? You got it.

Speaker 1 | 00:28.400

You got it. Appreciate it. Muggs is here.

Speaker 0 | 00:31.002

Good afternoon. Awesome. These gentlemen are from Masergy. So Masergy is very well known in the industry for providing the best customer service. Now, you know, Ira from Nextiva may have a problem with that, but I actually do believe you guys provide the best customer service in the industry. But today we’re talking specifically about Enterprise VoIP and you wouldn’t… Most people, when they think Masergy, they think MPLS, but we all know MPLS is dead. I don’t care what you say. MPLS is dead. Okay. It’s dead, Pete. Get that in your head. Most people don’t think of a voice or a voice over IP and Masergy in the same sentence. They think MPLS, they think international MPLS, they think networking. So I’m going to let you go from here. I’ll let you start off, Pete. Okay. Enterprise VoIP. There’s a lot of skepticism around it. you know, why should someone even be thinking about Enterprise VoIP to begin with, as opposed to going to, you know, the old route where we call up Avaya, we call up Shortel, or now Mitel, because they bought them. You know, why would anyone think Enterprise VoIP with you guys?

Speaker 2 | 01:39.215

Sure. So, and thanks for having us, Phil. Yeah, you know, I think there’s a number of reasons why, you know, just about everybody is looking at the cloud. So that, obviously, we’ve seen adoption in the SMBs and in the mid-market. And I think we’re starting to scratch the surface here on the enterprise in terms of VoIP. You know, the reasons are the same. There’s much more scalability, there’s much more disaster recovery ability and business continuity in the cloud. You have the ability to scale very easily. You can start off with a portion of your enterprise and migrate to the totality or even keep it as kind of a hybrid solution. And the last thing I would say is MPLS is not dead.

Speaker 0 | 02:26.561

We’ll talk about that another time. Hey, Muggs, now for every sales rep, we must have a sales engineer or someone that actually knows what they’re talking about on the line. That’s you. So give me a, give me a, you know, what are your thoughts on this enterprise VoIP? A lot, there’s not many companies out there that do it. They kind of steer away from it. I would say they stay, stick in the small business to, to. you know, medium sized business. But when I think enterprise VoIP, I’m thinking well north of 5000 seats. What are your thoughts on that with Masergy? How are you know, what are the, I guess, what are some of the some of the benefits? Like, why would they do that? Because I would say from a person like myself that does play in the enterprise space, you know, pricing is an issue, you’re now paying kind of like a user license versus the old school, you know, get a get a Cisco call manager, throw it up and, you know, throw it in a data center and buy some SIP trunking. And in the long run, maybe the, you know, the CapEx OpEx is better. Why, you know, from your perspective, why enterprise VoIP on a hosted solution like Macergy?

Speaker 1 | 03:31.742

Sure. Well, good afternoon, Chris Muggleston, again, cloud communications manager for Macergy. And I think really a couple of things there. So the first would be, in my opinion, is, you know, we’re not all things to all people, right? We focus on network. we focus on security, we focus on enterprise voice. Okay, so we own and maintain our own platform that is fully redundant in the East Coast and the West Coast. So our story around our pillars or our products is we are laser focused on enterprise space when it comes to those three areas of focus. So from the voice perspective, again, you know, I think when you talk about enterprises that have For example, CPE deployed. You gave an example of Cisco. The reality is, look what Cisco just did. Cisco just acquired the best of breed technology person in the market, which was Broadsoft Broadworks. And that is what Mastry is running in our East and West Coast POPs, again, fully redundant to each other. So I think what we like to talk about a lot is, and there’s a couple of things, but our net promoter score, we just… What we do, we do very well and our customers are the ones that say that about us. As far as the platform, it’s best of breed. It is the, Broadsoft is the leader in the technology space and we think Cisco will solidify that by making that purchase.

Speaker 0 | 05:01.312

it’s a good point and now which is interesting is cisco cisco purchased broadsoft yet most of the phones most of the phones that people use are polycom phones and so i just i’m just wondering what polycom’s thinking about that because cisco manufactures phones i’m just wondering what polycom’s gonna do now I don’t know if it’s like a secret at all, but Polycom is actually a Masergy customer, right?

Speaker 1 | 05:33.575

Correct. Correct. Yeah. So, you know, I think a lot of that stuff is going to fake out. You know, I think you’ve got the best of breed technology partners in the market. For example, Polycom and Panasonic, there’s some things going on there. You know, you alluded to Mitel and Shortel. You’ve got Cisco and Broadsoft going on. You know, I don’t know. I don’t have the crystal ball, but I can tell you that the partners that that Maestri has synchronized with over the years is proving to be a good decision. You know, Polycom, yeah, to your point, you know, Polycom is a Maestri customer for their voice. So if you think about that for a second, in the medium to enterprise space, you know, more enterprise, Polycom, they could have selected anyone to handle their voice traffic, but they selected us. They’ve been a customer of ours for, I think, over three years now. We have some of their network as well. But You know, Polycom is, again, one of the best breed partners in the space, and we service them from a voice perspective.

Speaker 2 | 06:34.788

You know, a lot of the speculation around Polycom is that, you know, what’s going to happen with all these changes with Cisco, right? You know, on the surface, it looks like Polycom and Cisco are competitive. What I would also say is, you know, a lot of service providers, including Maestri, are now deploying Cisco Endpoints. So. In my mind and from what I hear, this is probably going to be more of a benefit to Cisco injecting their hosted phones back into the marketplace. But based on the amount of endpoints that are out there already, the proven performance ability of Polycom out in the market, that’s not going to go anywhere for quite some time. And I think Cisco has made it clear that they’re in. intention is not to supplant all of the different Polycom endpoints that are out there. They’re really just looking to bolster their own strategic initiatives and branch out into the cloud.

Speaker 0 | 07:38.177

No, it was a genius play. It was a genius play. I actually wonder how many Polycom phones are actually out there in the environment. It’s got to be, I mean, the numbers have just got to be astronomical. And the fact that-Absolutely. they are your customer is even cooler. Let’s talk, just give me a couple of success stories. Let’s go through a couple of scenarios. And I say this because I honestly think a large organization like, I don’t know, multi-location, multi-state hospital network, for example, or massive manufacturer and, you know, shipping and receiving logistics company, right? Some of these, you know, with international locations. Okay. All over the world. I don’t think they think or would even know to go Masergy. I just don’t think they would do that. So how do you even go about making them aware of that? Because I, I honestly think, and I wrote an article about this, you know, your, your PBX is dying and you’re thinking of buying another elephant in a pink tutu. And, and what I mean by elephant is, I mean, you’re going to go make this another huge, massive purchase. That’s going to be a complete circus act to install and to roll out all over the world. And at the end, you’re going to have an elephant. That’s what you’re going to have in the end. You’re going to have this elephant that’s just dying. It’s going to die. So how do you even, and I think people, when they go to look at a new purchase or their PBX equipment or their voice services are coming end of life, I think people are still stuck in the mentality of. We’ve got to call this third party, massive PBX vendor integrator. I think the first thought they think is Avaya or hopefully now Cisco, which is going to point them in the right direction. But how do you guys, give me some scenarios. Give me some enterprise scenarios of customers that went with you guys. How did they even find you or even know to begin with? How did you go? Take me through the whole process, kind of like A to Z. Sure.

Speaker 2 | 09:48.668

Yeah, and it’s a great question because I think the way that people have perceived of these services. It remains true, right? You know, in the telephone business, it started off as you don’t have a choice, right? You have one company, Bell, that you’re going to buy from, and that’s it. And, you know, as the deregulation happened, you know, over the last 30 years or so, you started to see more competition. But it was still, at an enterprise level, you know, you were really kind of incentivized to go with the big, well-known providers, right? So the Avaya’s, the Cisco’s, and then on the telephony side, the Bell’s and eventually Verizon and AT&T and all that kind of stuff. So those companies have the biggest brand awareness. But I think as you know, the resurgence of telephony and the change that’s happening in the marketplace is not happening from these big carriers that really kind of function closer to public utilities. than a true service provider, right? We’re seeing a lot of upward mobility from the smaller carriers, the ones that can really focus on something like hosted PBX or SIP fronting. And so, you know, from the buying side of the table, you’re exactly right. These buyers don’t know of these companies that are really more laser focused on, you know, on these types of services. They just know, okay, well, you know, this company is… has you know billions of dollars in revenue so they must be able to do this well when the reality is the opposite the fact that they’re bureaucratic and they’re very steeped in their traditional product means they aren’t as reactive they don’t have as much focus on deploying these solutions well so I think one of the reasons why it may should be has been successful in that area is that we’re kind of at the size where they’re big enough to have the resources you know global network operation centers, security operation centers, really advanced analytics, lots of back office personnel and support and escalation tiers that allow us to design and install and manage the services very well. But we’re also not too big where we don’t care, where we have to run into interdepartmental issues. So I think that’s one of the ways that May 3rd be in particular has been successful and I think that other Polyphony companies are looking to tip away at you know, some of these, you know more traditional Providers of enterprise voice over IP.

Speaker 0 | 12:38.123

Let me give you an example 30,000 user company that it’s good to know the phone still ring over there. We got 30,000 user company and their issue right now is They have to have a third-party call center just to manage MAC requests for various different departments. That third-party call center can handle the typical MAC request, but a lot of times they can’t handle more complicated issues where they actually have to go to the manufacturer or say like a tier three or a higher level support just to make a change. Sometimes it takes a week to take care of a simple MAC request. So now this enterprise company has to pay for internal telecommunications departments. They pay for a third-party call center group of people, which are basically glorified ticket takers. And then they’re also paying another level of yearly ridiculous maintenance costs and one-offs on MAC requests. So the numbers are actually astronomical. Let’s just take that scenario and throw it over the fence to Masergy. You’ve got, I don’t know, enterprise company that has 50 Mac requests a week. I don’t think it’s that much. I don’t even think it’s close to that. But I do know that they’re paying an astronomical amount to just take care of those tickets. How does Masergy handle the Mac attack?

Speaker 1 | 14:18.830

Mac attack. Hey, this is Chris here. I can tackle that. So, a couple things. So, you know, first of all, from our support perspective, you know, we do a lot of things that are very unique. In a hosted user environment, users can simply dial 611 from any phone and get access to our tier one knock on a first call resolution at about 90% rate. You know, and a specific example of that would be. You know, we just closed a very large deal recently where that scenario was exactly what got us in the door. with Verizon and their hosted platform. And basically, the challenges that they ran into was exactly what you outlined, is they have thousands of users and in this case it was about 7,000 users. And how do you handle the MAC request? They’ve literally had resources deployed in a full-time manner just to handle the moves, adds, changes. So what we did is the maestricity came in. And basically, you know, by proving our self-worth and what we do in the industry and do it well, and, you know, we’re big enough to handle this type of, this size of customer, but small enough to take care of them well, things like the 611 and the first call resolution. So a lot of things that we can do from a support perspective, again, and we always tie this back to our net promoters. It’s the highest in the industry as 74, 75, where the industry average is about a 25. And that. specifically speak to support. So for those of you out there that may want to brush off, you know, as a SNP promoter, I don’t know what it is and you don’t take it serious. You should, because that is a third party company that is querying our customers and saying, hey, how did they do on a scale of one to 10? How did they do? How well do they support you in this enterprise environment? And really everything’s thrown out except the nine and a 10. And we scored a 74%, which is phenomenal.

Speaker 0 | 16:30.455

That’s actually a really, really big deal. And I’m only saying that’s a big deal because 38% of America, that means more than one third of America, says that telecom provides the worst customer service of all industries. So that means more than one third of America basically says, you guys are really, really terrible, telecom in general. And you guys… are not that. If your customers are giving you nines and tens, then that really is, it’s a minor miracle.

Speaker 1 | 17:01.073

I agree. And the other thing I’ll add just to your previous question, you know, back to the global deployment, you know, we’re global. We’re in 23 countries and growing. We have options globally. We can do DIDs, we can do gateways, you know, we’re very transparent when it comes to our global offering to make sure we are meeting the requirements laid out by the customer. So essentially, if there’s an in and outbound requirement needed in a specific country, we make sure that we can provide that telephony experience up front. One of our core culture values is we’re transparent. If we’re not a good fit, we’ll tell you we’re not a good fit. The other thing too I wanted to mention is the fact that we can do a hybrid type deployment. So you talked a little bit about companies that invest in hardware on-prem and they’re growing and moving and changing and going through acquisitions and such. Another unique attribute of Meishuji is the fact that we can integrate into any PBX platform that’s out there, whether it be a SIP trunk, emulating a PRI, and provide them with a migration strategy from CPE to hosted and all the while creating one ubiquitous dialing plan between the CPE and the new hosted. So that alone sets us apart from a lot of the providers out there that really want to come in and rip and replace. And we all know how disruptive that can be.

Speaker 0 | 18:27.913

Yeah, no, that’s huge. Especially when you have enterprise companies that have become enterprise through acquisitions or purchases and acquisitions where you have multiple various different types of PBXs and phone systems. You may have a mix of Avaya’s, Mitel’s. You may have PRI’s. You may have analog lines. and you’ve got various different outages happening and you need to have a roadmap and strategy for the future. And that roadmap and strategy shouldn’t be, let’s throw out $20 million to buy a new phone system and figure out who’s going to maintain it. It’s just not realistic. And yet people are still doing that. And I’m finding multiple companies are stuck in the middle. They’re stuck in the middle on a migration or a multimillion dollar migration. And by the time they get that migration done, the PBX is going to be completely dead anyway. So five years from now, they’re going to finish their migration. Where are they going to be? These are very tough. These are very, they’re tough business cases to be stuck in. Give me just, you know, thanks guys for your time. Give me maybe like what are, give me some examples of some of your enterprise customers that you guys serve today.

Speaker 2 | 19:39.611

Sure. Hey, and Phil, let me just also. mentioned, you know, one of the other questions you had was about, you know, how do you integrate these systems that enterprises have and have built their business plans around? So the other thing that I do want to mention is, you know, similar to the way that lot of people you take a look at their iPhone or their Android and they’ve got all these apps and they’ve got all these programs and and systems that are supposed to you know connect, you know, the large majority of them are being underutilized and what we’re seeing is the same is true for businesses, you know, just like you know your mother-in-law picks up her phone and it’s talking into the wrong end of it and you know, it’s not connected to You know, the systems that he needs to connect to, businesses are the same way. They’ve got all of these platforms that have open APIs that can be integrated, CRMs, ERP systems, Active Directory. And one of the big things they’re missing out on is having an easy way to integrate them. You know, it’s very daunting to say, OK, I’m going to go to this third party developer who’s going to build this. system that only they can maintain and will be able to marry my systems together or I’m going to have to staff full-time developers with an endless set of goals and deliverables that are going to marry these systems together. So one of the things that Maestrgy does to kind of bridge that gap is we’ve partnered with a company that allows us to do what we call ICAST. which is really an integration platform as a service. So that’s really meant to bypass the complexity of these APIs and give you a simple integration. So an example would be just down at Enterprise Connect, the center of enterprise voice minds and products and services. We were able to demonstrate a tool that allows Active Directory to incorporate into Broadsoft provisioning. So exactly what you mentioned before, a company that wants to do these MACDs can do it themselves. They don’t have to rely on a third party or they don’t have to rely on, you know, support that might not be 24 by 7. You also have the ability to tie in things like employee onboarding systems or system administration. So, you know, really, I think. You know, Muggs had mentioned our ability to do hybrid UCAS, and that’s a big thing. You know, being able to design solutions that can account for global offices, even if they’re in a country like China or India that don’t allow for number portability. But the same is true on the rest of the application side. So, you know, tying in Active Directory, tying in databases, tying in CRM applications very easily. It’s something that businesses are looking to do and they’re looking for their service provider to help them with.

Speaker 0 | 22:55.680

Well, the truth is we’ve only barely scratched the surface of what you guys can do. We haven’t even talked really about a single feature and or benefit. I think that goes without saying, like in the UCAS world, when you say UCAS in general, I’m sick of talking about specific features and benefits anyways because just about everyone has them. But the actual back… backbone and the network and the company behind it is so important. So let’s, again, you know, give me some examples. I mean, what are some of these enterprise customers that you guys have rolled out?

Speaker 2 | 23:28.375

Yeah, I can give you a good example of one recently. We just completed an installation. So a multi-location global company that’s based in the U.S., based out of Florida, actually. They acquired a company in Ireland. And, you know, the acquisition went through. They had some demands on getting services up and running. So the ask of us was, can you integrate this phone system that we’re going to put in in Ireland with the U.S. phone system, which is an Asterisk system that we don’t manage at all? And can you do it in 45 days? And the answer was yes. That is something that we can do, absolutely. So we deployed hosted handsets in Ireland. We were able to give them local numbers that they actually reported numbers. So their existing numbers that were on all their advertising material. And we were able to support the numbers that they have in that location, support the numbers that they have in their Florida location that are associated with SipTrunk, and then create a dialing plan across. systems that allows the users to do extension dialing obviously at no charge but fully integrated between the two systems So, you know, this really allowed the company to, you know, they didn’t have to buy another Asperger’s server and put it in, you know, this new location, lots of hardware costs, lots of shipping costs, lots of coordination with multiple vendors. They were able to rely, in this case, on a single vendor to manage the entire system and have a seamless platform, you know, that goes across it. And, you know, without giving away all of the secrets. sauce you know we have the ability to you know having been you know in the business of making stuff work in the back end for you know the entire existence of our company to know all the the tricks of the trade engineering wise to make these systems play nicely together do you have any names you can give out of companies specific names i’m

Speaker 0 | 25:47.133

putting you i’m putting you on the spot here putting you on the spot come on who do you got you I want some names here. Okay, I’m into names.

Speaker 1 | 25:58.271

Yeah, listen, we’ve got a handful. So, I mean, I think we talked about Polycom, right? Polycom customizes you with our voice services. You know, Cabela’s is another big one. Amgen, large, very, very large customer of ours. Tesla, Patagonia, Weber. And we’ve got lots of enterprise-based customers. that trust us not only with the voice offering, but a lot of the names that I just mentioned there are also network as well. So, you know, and it’s interesting that, you know, more and more we’re seeing in the voice space that voice is driving a lot of these other opportunities where traditionally, you know, we’re talking network and then we uncover a voice opportunity. Well, now with all the disruptions in the marketplace, you know, forget about SDU and for a second, but look at what voice is doing. And to layer that voice infrastructure on top of maybe an existing dead NPLS network, as you would say, that’s when we can come in and say, yeah, you know what? Not every site is equal. We can do an NPLS and an SD-WAN and a hybrid-type network deployment and layer in our voice infrastructure. But, yeah, we’ve got lots of big-name clients.

Speaker 2 | 27:13.912

I think the other one is Live Nation was another one. I mean, that’s one where… you know, they really needed to have the utmost assurances for their uptime. And so, the resiliency and the engineering and also the global capabilities from a porting perspective were one of the reasons why they chose us. Another one is Tesla. So, you know, everyone pretty much knows Tesla is kind of a forward-leaning company, very much aligned with what we do here at Maester D and…

Speaker 0 | 27:46.266

Guys, so here’s what I want to do. For any potential enterprise, IT directors, CTOs, CEOs out there listening, I want to offer a completely full network evaluation for them at no cost. Are you guys willing to do that?

Speaker 2 | 28:04.759

So, I laugh, but I mean, one of the things that we do at MesaG is, we do a lot in the pre-sale process. We’re careful with how we spend our resources. you know, a lot of times there are companies that say yes or no.

Speaker 0 | 28:22.638

Pete, it’s a yes or a no, man. Are you willing to do that? Yes or no?

Speaker 2 | 28:26.740

Like the first opportunity for you. Sure.

Speaker 0 | 28:30.321

Okay. So first five, okay. Look, I mean, I don’t, you know, let’s just get to the point. Gentlemen, you know, it’s been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Thanks both of you for being on the show. And we’re just going to have to do like, you know, a small little mini. series here. We’ll have to have you back for another show just so we can talk about how MPLS is dead and your other security products and really some of the great things that you guys are doing in the marketplace. Sound good?

Speaker 2 | 28:54.678

Sounds great. Look forward to it.

Speaker 1 | 28:56.420

Thank you, Phil. All right,

Speaker 0 | 28:57.401

guys. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.