24. Microsoft Doesn’t Care About Providing You Layers Of Failure

Speaker 0 | 00:09.566

We were talking the other day about the team’s integration. It just got me going because right after that, I got on a call with RingCentral, and then they were talking about Glyph, and I was like, well, why should any I’ve never really gotten too bought in on the Glyph thing, although I guess I should. But, you know, because I just thought it was kind of always like, well, yeah, it’s like a nice little add on. But I don’t think when I think RingCentral, I don’t think I’m going to Glip, right? But when I think CallTower, I automatically think 365, I think Teams. So I guess the first question is unique to, I guess, why are you guys very unique? And why are you unique to Teams and everyone else on this versus everyone else on this planet? Right? Like, why, how and why is it your size, your money, your organization? Like, Like why call tower over any of the other Microsoft white glove shops?

Speaker 1 | 00:59.136

So we have a little bit of a unique play compared to some of the other UCAS providers out there, but also MSPs, right? There’s MSPs that sell Microsoft services. And then there’s other UCAS providers out there. Like you mentioned RingCentral, right? So RingCentral, 8×8, all the other players out there, quote unquote, have plugins to a Microsoft environment. What kind of makes call tower different in that sense is that everything we do from a Microsoft perspective is native. to the application. So in a Skype for Business world, we’re actually hosting Skype for Business servers. That’s our platform behind the scenes field. There’s no other, well, we do have other platforms, but when we’re talking about a Microsoft world, our Microsoft platform is a Microsoft-based platform that we’re actually hosting within our data centers. So that’s really where our differentiator is because everything that we do from a Skype for Business side is native to the application. So what that means in… simple terms is you don’t have to download another application. There’s no plugin. There’s no headaches for the IT director or IT manager trying to configure this solution because you already get the Skype for Business application with Office 365. Same thing in a Teams world, right? And I know this is kind of jumping, but Teams is going to replace Skype for Business down the road, right? So in a Teams world, there is a couple of different options you have, just like there’s a couple of different options in Skype for Business. You can go to Microsoft directly and voice-enable Teams or Skype, or you can do a direct routing solution yourself for where you basically buy SBCs, Microsoft-certified SBCs, and you purchase SIP trunks from a certain provider and voice-enable the Teams client yourself. That takes a lot of expertise behind the Microsoft scene.

Speaker 0 | 02:38.779

Now, just to clarify there, you would do that in order to save money?

Speaker 1 | 02:42.542

Yeah, you could, exactly, because the other option you have… That’s definitely very cost effective. The downside of that is for redundancy purposes, if your SBC goes down, then your services go down, right?

Speaker 0 | 02:54.213

Right. So that’s kind of like a hybrid old school PBX versus Microsoft, kind of like you’re in the neither world, but you’re smart enough, you know enough about telecom that you’re going to try and do it yourself, which you end up basically probably overloading yourself with a bunch of extra work that you don’t need to do in the mid-market IT space.

Speaker 1 | 03:12.203

Right, not to mention, you know, you have a couple different layers there for possibilities of failure, right? One is an SBC, right? If your infrastructure goes down, you’re not in good shape. If your SIP trunk provider has issues, you’re not in good shape. If Microsoft has issues, you’re not in good shape, right? So that’s three different areas in which you could fail.

Speaker 0 | 03:29.156

I’m very clear on that, on that scenario. Now, what about scenario number one, going to Microsoft? You just want to do that as a customer service or what? I mean, like,

Speaker 1 | 03:36.822

well, it’s, it’s costing customer service. Microsoft does not necessarily want to consume voice licensing. They have that as an option, but why do you think they created the direct routing environment? Because they don’t want to be the voice provider. They created the ability to add voice plans onto their licensing very easily. The reason they did that is because they knew people would take advantage of it. Right. Right. People are like, Oh yeah, 12 bucks a seat. Sure. Let’s do it.

Speaker 0 | 04:00.798

So let me ask you this.

Speaker 1 | 04:01.419

The better option is. Yeah. And this is where I was getting at, Phil. The better option is to go to a direct routing partner, whether it’s call tower or whether it’s, you know, there’s like 10, 15 decent size providers out there like call tower who do direct routing. We’re probably one of the best options domestically. I would say there’s other international partners that could do better things overseas than call tower again. But from a domestic standpoint, we’re probably the top option you have. And when you’re looking at why you’d go to a direct routing partner, well, it’s as simple as there’s more features to be added. with our other platforms in the background, but you’re also looking at more flexible licensing plans.

Speaker 0 | 04:36.874

Give me an example of the features first. Let’s slow this down because I know you got a lot, but just give me an example of some of the features that you would get through a direct routing partner that you wouldn’t get from, say, going direct or the SBC SIP trunking yourself route.

Speaker 1 | 04:52.162

Yeah. So if you do the SBC SIP trunking route yourself, there’s probably a chance that you have a PBX in the background. So you can get some of those PBX features. From the Avaya systems or Cisco systems or North or whatever you’re basically doing the hybrid with. Yep. In a call tower world, right? We’re a direct routing partner. So we’re directly routing most of your users into the Teams world. So most of your users are going to use the Teams telephony, Teams functionality from our SIP trunks, from our SBCs, right? The features that we’re adding, though, are on a separate platform. And those features include like faxing, paging systems, call recording features, more advanced call flows, call routing features, because of the fact that Microsoft is never going to enable teams to be able to handle that because they don’t need to. Right. They created teams to be the best UCaaS tool out there, which it’s probably going to be when some of these bugs get worked out. And once they open up some of the APIs, which they haven’t opened up yet. Yep. Bye. From a phone system perspective, it’s lacking features behind the scenes. And that’s where a third party direct routing partner like Calltower comes into play and allows you to have a more flexible UCAS option while still using Teams as the primary application.

Speaker 0 | 06:02.589

Okay. So I got to ask you this very directly. Why you over anyone else? What makes you guys very, very unique? What makes you different? What makes you, I guess, leaders kind of like the race to the team space right now? What’s going to make everyone else roll their eyes and be like, no, that’s not really unique. But actually, I don’t want them rolling their eyes. I want them actually going, oh, crap, that really is unique. What makes you guys unique versus the rest? Because I know you guys are a leader in the space. I mean, I know some of these things, but I want to hear from your perspective what you’re seeing since you’re working with thousands of partners every day. I work with hundreds, but I’d like to hear from you what you’re seeing is kind of really the biggest unique factor.

Speaker 1 | 06:38.796

Well, the unique factor of us between any other UCaaS provider out there is the fact that we’re native, right? But if you’re talking about us between Microsoft and some of the other direct routing partners, what differentiates us between those people? Because those are the competitors that we’re really going to have to beat. The other UCaaS providers, we’re not going to have to beat necessarily because we’re native to Teams and that’s our huge value add there, right? Yep, yep. What makes us unique to the direct routing partners is the fact that we have alternative platforms. These direct routing partners… What they’ve done is they’ve created the gateway between the PSTN and Microsoft. That’s all they have running in the background, Phil. What we have is other PBX platforms. So when a user comes to you and says, hey, we want a provider to be able to do it all, but we know teams can’t provide our contact center solution. We know teams can’t integrate with these old analog phones that we have within our data center without purchasing gateway equipment for those, right? Which they would have to do if they go to another direct routing partner. purchase gateway equipment. They’d have to purchase all this stuff to integrate with those, you know, old analog devices or paging systems, whatever it might be. Uniqueness of call towers that we’re providing a full end-to-end solution under a majority of the users will be using Teams. But then there’s always the fact that Teams is limited in certain circumstances. And that’s where we’re providing that extra feature. And that’s what really differentiates us. Okay. Is that kind of what you were looking for?

Speaker 0 | 08:03.086

Yeah. I mean, you just got me thinking when you said analog devices and stuff, I was thinking, you know, I started thinking healthcare, like, you know, I started thinking, you know, emergency or I started thinking elevator lines and stuff like that. So are you telling me that you’re actually going to integrate with like elevator lines and some of those other analog features and kind of marry the two together?

Speaker 1 | 08:19.511

I would tell you, we can, I would tell you, we don’t do it all the time, right? We don’t do elevators necessarily all the time. But what I do do is you said nursing homes or you said healthcare, right? I thought right off the bat nursing home, right? We have a couple nursing homes that have like VG two to four gateways, which are a Cisco analog gateway. It’s basically a router that converts digital traffic to analog traffic. Right. Right. So some of these nursing homes have huge buttons on their phones. Yep. Right. And these nursing home, these nursing home clients or whatever you want to call them residents. Right. I should call them residents.

Speaker 0 | 08:51.060

It’s kind of like a quasi, it’s not home healthcare, but it’s a nursing home. I gotcha. But yeah,

Speaker 1 | 08:55.561

exactly. Like assisted living almost. And these people that live at these assisting living homes have a very standard analog phone on their, in their rooms.

Speaker 0 | 09:03.583

Right.

Speaker 1 | 09:04.204

Big buttons so they can see them, right? They don’t need Teams features on those phones.

Speaker 0 | 09:07.807

No, they need to hear it loud. Exactly.

Speaker 1 | 09:11.710

And they need to make a phone call. Exactly. So if they type in 1, 2, 3, 4 to hit a nurse, right, an extension, that nurse can be walking around all over the place on a mobile device and pick that up on her Teams client, right?

Speaker 0 | 09:22.819

Oh, wow. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 09:23.760

that’s cool. That transition, that is basically going from call towers platform to Teams, but we make that handoff so easy because we’re hosting both platforms. within our infrastructure. So that’s why.

Speaker 0 | 09:35.929

So talk to me about that. So that’s kind of like a team slash your soft phone on their mobile device type of marrying together.

Speaker 1 | 09:42.314

No, it’s all under teams. So we don’t, we don’t marry any soft phones into teams. We use teams as the soft phone.

Speaker 0 | 09:48.999

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 | 09:49.780

What that is I’m talking about is technically that would just be an analog. Technically we’re doing like a third party SIP handoff from that analog phone to an extension, but In the background, that extension is actually a Teams line. Yep. That Teams line is still under call towers environment. So that handoff is directly, it’s an inner office call. So they’re not hitting the PSTN at all. That’s just an extension dial. And then that nurse is picking that up on her Teams phone. Yep. Where he or she, I should say he or she, is picking that up on their Teams client on their mobile phone. Or they can pick it up on their mobile phone, right? They have a bunch of different options.

Speaker 0 | 10:24.650

Now, here’s the key piece though there. The key piece here is… A, it’s transparent to the users themselves. But the big key piece is that an IT director looking to do all of that integration on their own would have a very long project on their hands.

Speaker 1 | 10:43.579

Yeah, exactly. They’d have more equipment to manage. Yep. They would have to have a PBX in the background to integrate, to marry.

Speaker 0 | 10:52.382

They’d most likely have to have an MSP. They’d most likely have to have their phone guy or an MSP phone guy. Right. hosting a local server in their data center. And probably that would drive costs up, not to mention probably disaster avoidance. Other questions around, is it really truly geo-redundant? Numerous other factors.

Speaker 1 | 11:12.050

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 11:13.151

Okay, awesome. So let me ask you this, and this is the key one. If you have to think of the top five, what are the top five problems around implementing Teams, managing it, etc.? What are the top five problems? that you guys see people running into, the biggest kind of juggernaut issues that either IT directors or people are running into that you guys help make go away? Probably has something to do with implementing, managing it. Maybe we start with, can you take over their E3 licensing and kind of help bring everything home into one spot? Or where do you want to start with that?

Speaker 1 | 11:49.642

Yeah, the top five problem, well, top five, there’s not necessarily top five problems, which is all right, because there’s… In every implementation, there’s different problems, but I would say I could give you top three. Top three, one would be porting the numbers to Microsoft services, right? That’s a self-managed porting process. And as you know, porting can be a bear sometimes. So being a carrier and also being our own rest board, Call Tower can port those numbers over and it will actually handle that process for the client, right? And that’s included in that cost, which is huge for someone who doesn’t want to do the porting process themselves, right? Yep. That’s probably the main caveat we see in a Microsoft world. Another one.

Speaker 0 | 12:29.664

Interesting too, because in the telecom world, you don’t think of porting as like a big, you don’t think of as porting as a big deal all the time. You think of it as like, Hey, we’ve got to be ready for this. You’ve got to get all the things right. You got to fill out the LOA perfectly. You’ve got to dot your I’s cross your T’s. You got to make sure you have your bill copy. You got to make sure you, you know, do all this annoying stuff, very detailed. And then hopefully everything will port correctly, but you don’t normally think of that as like the number one thing.

Speaker 1 | 12:53.693

Right.

Speaker 0 | 12:53.893

According to Microsoft is a big deal, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 12:56.153

It is. Yeah. Well, it is a big deal because you have no help from a telco team. Right. And that actually becomes a big deal, especially if you’re not used to porting numbers or you’ve never done it before. So that’s that’s one issue, Phil. Right. Yeah. Another issue is exactly what you mentioned. Expertise behind the Microsoft platform in a Microsoft world. Most of the time, the call flows were going to help the client build out. within Office 365. So they get all that consolidated functionality under the Teams client. The other stuff that we enhance, right, we can build out in our platform. That’s a different story. So the other problem is people don’t understand how to build out these call flows. They don’t know how to build out their user voicemail boxes properly and basically enable unified messaging to be, you know, the standard communication environment for their organization in Office 365.

Speaker 0 | 13:46.039

IE, voicemail to email for anyone.

Speaker 1 | 13:48.341

IE voicemail to email, IE setting up day and night call flows, IE anything related to exchange. And now it’s going to be pushed to, well, it’s pushed to Azure now, right? But anyways, that is where people get confused because they don’t have Microsoft expertise.

Speaker 0 | 14:01.393

Now, let me just take that a step further. What about the more old school of the users that have to have a phone sitting on their desk all the time? And like, if you take my physical phone away, I’ll probably shoot somebody and I need to have a blinky light on my phone telling me this. I need to be able to. hold down the one or press the envelope button to check my voicemail or dial in old school. How about making sure we keep those functions intact for the people that have to have them?

Speaker 1 | 14:25.333

So that is a big deal. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge problem because once you enable Teams, it’s basically Teams firmware on either a VVX or a Yalink phone, right? A Polygon VVX series or a Yalink T-series phone. Pretty straightforward with the features pulling over that phone. You have a provisioning server at call tower where we have multiple, right? That does a little bit easier. The firmware is, you know, automatically registered. That phone automatically registers when we provision the phones, right?

Speaker 0 | 14:54.936

In other words, it blasts out to all the phones. So someone doesn’t have to touch each individual phone. I guess my question is what an it director have to touch each individual phone if they’re doing this on their own, or would they be smart enough to talk with someone and get one of those provisioning like softwares?

Speaker 1 | 15:07.900

Well, you could purchase a provisioning server, right? Or you could. Well, it depends who you’re buying the phones from, right? Some companies that you buy the phones from have a provisioning server. So if you buy them on Amazon, right, you have to touch each individual phone because they’re not a phone.

Speaker 0 | 15:22.760

Dude, it’s a crazy research project. If you’re going to do this on your own, it’s insane. I mean, I don’t see how, I mean, to me, it’s at least eight months of work on top of your normal job, on top of your normal, you know, managing a help desk. doing everything else that you do, taking care of your users on a daily basis. And there’s too many things that can go wrong. And there’s too many areas of people that can complain and really make your life miserable. At least from what I see.

Speaker 1 | 15:46.518

And another thing, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 15:47.759

Why pay for it? And you don’t have to pay for it.

Speaker 1 | 15:49.946

Exactly. Here’s the other thing too. It’s like, why wouldn’t you want handholding? And then the third is we’ve optimized our network for PSTN functionality, right? So meaning we have 40 different carriers we’re working with. We understand the PSTN. Microsoft makes updates to their, you know, application to their platforms all the time. If you’re making updates without telling people when these updates are scheduled, then those phones are going to reboot and that’s going to interrupt your services, right? What we’re doing is we’re… Yes, you can push through these updates, right? But our telephony environment’s not being affected by that. So Microsoft’s uptime, right, their SLAs are 99.9. The reason they have 99.9 is because of the fact that they’re constantly making updates to their different infrastructures, right? And their uptime’s actually not as good as you would think it is because people don’t notice blips and blurps in exchange, right? Your email might say, oh no, it’s got a reboot. It doesn’t matter.

Speaker 0 | 16:46.305

When you’re on a quarterly earnings call.

Speaker 1 | 16:49.098

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 16:50.018

With, I don’t know, a couple thousand people or I don’t know, however we can doubt, well, would that even affect that? Would you even do that through a conference call? Let’s just say you’re on a very important call with, you know, 20, 30 people and Microsoft doesn’t update. Are you telling me it’s going to drop that call?

Speaker 1 | 17:03.125

I would think so. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t been in that.

Speaker 0 | 17:05.827

It could happen.

Speaker 1 | 17:06.667

But it could definitely happen. And I have a client, this is actually a funny story, right? I have a client that’s using our CT Cloud Voice platform, which is, it’s basically a meta switch, right? They’re using us as a backup to Microsoft Teams directly with Microsoft. Why are they doing that? Because they’ve had an interruption in their conferencing with these, this is a law firm called New York City. Okay. I can have you call David if you want, you can talk to him, but you know, keep that between us. You don’t need to put that in the article. Right. And they’re using the, they’re using our CT Cloud voice platform as a backup. And they might even use it as their primary phone system now, because of the fact that they’re concerned that Microsoft. will start pushing out updates and have some downtime in their voice services because they don’t really care about that, Phil. As long as they’re hitting on 99.9% of their SLAs, which with Microsoft’s huge, vast infrastructure is actually a decent amount of downtime per year. So not saying that call tower is necessarily so much better with uptime, even though I would say we are based on how we have our infrastructure and SBC set up. But that’s another reason why Microsoft’s positioning direct routing partners. Because of the fact that they don’t care about the telephony and they’re not providing necessarily any support except to those enterprise, you know, 5,000 seats or greater companies.

Speaker 0 | 18:22.761

Yeah. So I’m sure there’s going to be some people that are thinking, okay, this is all great, but obviously I’m going to have to pay a hefty price for this. So is there a difference in price?

Speaker 1 | 18:34.186

Between us and Microsoft, we’re usually less expensive.

Speaker 0 | 18:37.788

Now, why would that be? So why would, to me, this is like a no brainer, right? But people are going to be skeptical. They’ll be like, no, this is too good to be true. I don’t get it. You know, I mean, why?

Speaker 1 | 18:48.913

I honestly, I can’t answer that other than this, Phil. I think it’s because Microsoft doesn’t necessarily care about the voice licensing. They discount for nonprofits because they can write it off, right? It’s as simple as that. When they give out government licensing and nonprofit licensing, they can discount the voice because they can, right?

Speaker 0 | 19:06.043

Yeah, I know a little, you go to the website, you got to get three times out here. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 | 19:11.366

For any commercial client that’s looking for UCAS solutions, you’re paying $12 for domestic and then another $12 for international. What that means to you is that’s $24 per user just to add voice, okay? Or $12 per user if they’re only a US.

Speaker 0 | 19:26.792

Through Microsoft, let’s be clear.

Speaker 1 | 19:28.153

That’s through Microsoft.

Speaker 0 | 19:29.473

You’ve got to add an additional $24 per license to add voice for something that you’ve got to manage for something that’s a little bit clunky because you don’t get everything that you need. And then you’ve got to deal with their support and you’ve got, or you’ve got to at least bring in a third party to help you take care of all of it.

Speaker 1 | 19:46.823

Exactly. And that third party is going to even cost you more money for the support aspect.

Speaker 0 | 19:51.106

Okay. Now through you guys, what’s, what, what does that picture look like?

Speaker 1 | 19:54.950

So to us, you can either purchase the office 365 licensing on your own, right?

Speaker 0 | 19:59.033

We already have it. What if you already have it?

Speaker 1 | 20:01.055

You already have it, then that’s fine. You already purchased it. So then call tower, we’ll add an unlimited seat. And I don’t know if you should publish this in the. in the article, Phil, because then, because this is like information that competitors could take a look at. And I know we’re cost effective.

Speaker 0 | 20:17.825

Don’t say it because I might use portions of this recording as well. So don’t even say it. So,

Speaker 1 | 20:24.428

so that’s unlimited calling.

Speaker 0 | 20:26.289

Is this published? Is this public?

Speaker 1 | 20:29.910

I mean, we don’t, we don’t publish it publicly, but I’m sure other direct routing partners are probably pretty similar. And the reason we’re Five is one, to be competitive. But two, we’re giving you everything Microsoft’s giving, plus a support and implementation team.

Speaker 0 | 20:45.406

Now, we talked about a price the other day that was even more aggressive than that. Now,

Speaker 1 | 20:49.509

my- That’s like a cent a minute. So a metered rate at a cent a minute.

Speaker 0 | 20:54.747

That’s so ridiculous. A penny a minute. And the reason why that’s so crazy is because if you look at the, I don’t know if it’s national average or even global average of how many minutes a month an employee talks on a phone across an organization. Across an organization, the average is about 200 minutes. per user per month. That might sound a little bit low, right? It sounds like, no, I need the cricket plan.

Speaker 1 | 21:23.801

I would even say that sounds high.

Speaker 0 | 21:25.703

Yeah. So, the average user, let’s say you have 100 users in your organization, the average user is using 200 minutes a month. So, someone might use a thousand, but there’s like 20 other people that don’t even ever pick up their phone. It just sits there and collects dust on their desk. So, you know, a user at a penny a minute, let’s just say you have 100 users that… talk that 200 minutes. Let’s just use the average. That’s 20,000 minutes a month times 0.01 is 200 bucks. So, so, so you could pay per user and then just $200 in usage. Right. That to me, that’s, I don’t see how anyone’s going to compete with that. And I mean, that’s just crazy. So you don’t, let me just ask you, you don’t want me publishing that?

Speaker 1 | 22:15.580

I probably not Phil, because Okay. We want to make sure that we’re,

Speaker 0 | 22:21.172

how do we want to say this then where, where it doesn’t sound hypey because no one likes sales hype. And I don’t like, and I’ve been accused before of, you know, people just not believing me or calling me the spin doctor just for telling the truth. So I’m not, and you know what I mean? It’s like, so what do we want to say? I mean, do we want to just say, Hey, look, I mean, I don’t even know. I mean, I would say like, I would even be with me. personally, I’d be willing to put money on the line. I’d be willing to say, look, if we can’t come in and beat your original pricing, if you have a hundred users or more, and you let us quote your services and we don’t absolutely blow the competition out of the water, I would be willing to send that IT director a hundred dollar bill in the mail.

Speaker 1 | 23:06.975

Yeah. I mean, you could do that, but what I’m thinking too, Phil, as you think about it like this, Microsoft is going to be X amount of dollars, or you can do it yourself. And do it yourself. You purchase the infrastructure, purchase the SIP trunk provider, whatever it might be. With our solution, we’re going to give you what Microsoft’s giving you for less of a cost, and that’s guaranteed. And then we’re also going to be able to do the whole hand-holding implementation support throughout the life of the contract for the same, if not less cost than what you’re going to be paying directly to Microsoft. So it makes zero sense. to go to Microsoft in that sense. Yep. Because you’re getting the exact same services for less or the same cost.

Speaker 0 | 23:51.254

But then we have to differentiate ourselves from the other players in the industry. And that’s the direct, like your direct hosting.

Speaker 1 | 23:57.259

Yep.

Speaker 0 | 23:57.780

Your native hosting.

Speaker 1 | 23:58.900

Well, we’re more flexible and versatile. That’s really it. We have other direct routing partners that have infrastructure built out to fill, right? So between us and them, it’s really reputation and references at that point. Right.

Speaker 0 | 24:11.354

But what about, what about the number of partners you peer with? What about your, what about geo redundancy? What about, um, you know, MPLS backbone or anything like that? Does any of that come into play?

Speaker 1 | 24:21.257

Yeah. And also what also comes into play is yes. Redundancy is huge. Every partner is going to be pushing that, right? Every direct routing partner is going to be pushing redundancy. If you don’t have it, then you’re not an ideal player. Okay. Yep. If you don’t have, you know, the support and implementation, you’re not an ideal player.

Speaker 0 | 24:37.350

What about just general, what about 365 support? What about like…

Speaker 1 | 24:40.713

Exactly. I was just going to mention that. So coming to the picture is we’re a gold partner. We’re a gold CSP. So when you’re talking about, when you bring up questions during the implementation, how do I set up my unified messaging? How do I set up my call flows in Office 365? That’s something our implementation team can walk you through. Other companies can’t say that.

Speaker 0 | 24:59.989

What about like, I don’t know, 12 months down the line, a year and a half down the line and Holy, I mean, geez, we got, you know, we’re growing really fast. We’ve got 50 more users and 25 people quit. And I’m just, you know, I’m flooded right now and I need your help managing these users and making all these changes. Like, you know, how can you help?

Speaker 1 | 25:20.604

Yeah. And that’s something our support team helps out with. Any move ad changes, you’re going to be able to reach out to our support team. Usually it’s a 24 hour turnaround for move ad changes. If you call in, it’s quicker than that. It’s within an hour, they’d be able to make those changes.

Speaker 0 | 25:33.530

And are these people that have access to, I mean, like, is there any, you know, one thing we didn’t talk about is security. Kind of like, are there any security holes or any differences there from a security standpoint that an IT director would be concerned about?

Speaker 1 | 25:47.780

No, because our compliance and security, say protocols, right, or even just compliance in general falls under the same as Microsoft because our call paths are encrypted to Microsoft’s environment. And every data piece stored in Teams, every call made is encrypted at, you know, transit and rest. So everything from a Microsoft standpoint, from a compliance standpoint, actually stays within that infrastructure. So we fall under the same compliance. as Microsoft. We don’t even have compliance certificates at call power because we don’t need to. Okay. Okay. Um, not an issue. The only issue would be is if we’re recording calls, then we have to figure out where we want to, where we want to store those, right? We can store them in our data centers, which are compliant under like PCI, SOC, HIPAA, that sort of thing. Yep. Yep. Which is great, right? People like that. But at the end of the day, some people, especially European based clients want things stored in European data centers. So we push it out to like an FTP site, purge the data, then push it to their sites.

Speaker 0 | 26:43.976

That’s more of a custom kind of like, how do we want to, I mean, that’s going to come up with, that’s more in solution design and no one’s going to escape that. No one’s going to escape that issue. If you need to record calls and you need to have, you know, credit card compliance or whatever it is, HIPAA compliance, all that, PCI compliance, all that different stuff, that’s always going to be in case by case basis, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 27:05.269

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 27:05.869

And most people don’t, I mean, not many, I would say. I mean, I wouldn’t even say 90% of the people out there need call recording or even turn it on anyways.

Speaker 1 | 27:14.795

Right.

Speaker 0 | 27:15.436

So any other problems around implementing, managing anything else around this? How about just in general teams versus how about you guys just versus the rest of the world? What about someone that just says, you know, fine, you know, forget 365, let’s go Google docs and, you know, glip with ring central or. you know, Slack or something else, you know, like what, what about just kind of like the, in general conversation there?

Speaker 1 | 27:40.503

Yeah. So that’s where we position another platform, Phil. We wouldn’t even go to Teams direction in that realm. If they’re not an Office 365 shop, which a majority of businesses out there are Microsoft shop, but if they’re not right, then we’re not positioning Teams or Skype to business, right?

Speaker 0 | 27:54.552

You’re telling me you do have another option as well, even.

Speaker 1 | 27:57.154

Yeah, exactly. And that’s our CT Cloud voice platform. You can basically think of it as very similar to RingCentral, eight by eight. We actually use if we’re talking about a full UCAS suite, we actually use Zoom technology in the background.

Speaker 0 | 28:09.542

So you guys are plugged in with Zoom. That’s awesome.

Speaker 1 | 28:12.625

Yeah, exactly. I can show you like a demo of that too, because it looks and feels almost the same as this meeting right here. And what’s cool about us versus like the RingCentral Zoom integration, because that’s what RingCentral is using as well, is Metaswitch purchased infrastructure and resources from Zoom to be able to create that integration. So our application, which is a session, session meeting. console. It’s all integrated within the tool itself. So it’s not separate applications. It’s not like you’re downloading Zoom separately to a session. No,

Speaker 0 | 28:42.406

I get it. I’m pretty familiar with their wholesale, with their wholesale rollout process because I went through Zoom with a wholesale rollout overseas with a telco overseas.

Speaker 1 | 28:51.534

So it’s a little different than that though, because we’re actually branding it CT Cloud meeting. So it’s not necessarily a Zoom wholesale. It’s more, we’re leveraging Zoom’s platform in the background, but we actually… own we have ownership because of our relationship with metaswitch within that platform so we’re hosting metaswitch in our data centers and then metaswitch has the zoom technology built within their session platform so it’s it’s crazy that’s actually the best and most people out there you know are not going to probably know what we’re talking about when we talk metaswitch versus the other options it’s

Speaker 0 | 29:24.798

like in my opinion that’s the best that’s the best rollout i like that infrastructure better even though 90 of the world’s going to do it differently

Speaker 1 | 29:33.496

You’re talking about you like the MetaSwitch rollout option?

Speaker 0 | 29:35.998

Yes.

Speaker 1 | 29:37.019

Yeah. And what I can tell you too about it is it’s pretty easy, right? What’s the number one pain point in UCAS technology partners out there is the fact that the rollouts go sideways sometimes, right? MetaSwitch is very easy. And because the technology is built within the platform, right? So Zoom’s built within the MetaSwitch platform. That means if Zoom goes down, right? The MetaSwitch technology is not going to go down. so it’s all consolidated you don’t have to worry about troubleshooting multiple applications zoom’s not going down though no i agree it’s got to be one of my favorite companies then that ipo the other day was great oh yeah yeah they’re probably the well they are the best collaborative tool out there i think collaboration tool out there so

Speaker 0 | 30:20.976

cool i really appreciate you taking this time is there anything else that you can think of that we have not talked about that we should have talked about no i think we hit on the high points you

Speaker 1 | 30:29.904

Phil for sure. And obviously we can go into the weeds if we have to, but just like takeaway points, you want to think about obviously nativity into Microsoft. That’s going to be huge for your clients. The ability to add layers to Teams, right? Because Teams is a vanilla offering, even though it has a ton of features from a phone system or PBX side, it doesn’t necessarily. And that’s where, you know, call tower. Being a direct partner is going to add some value there. And then also the other things like implementation, pricing, right? All that’s included in the service costs. So it just makes sense to go to a direct routing partner. And that’s why Microsoft made it so easy. Really, that’s really, they understood what they were doing. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Speaker 0 | 31:09.993

So let me ask you this though. Does this make your job easier or do you like your job over there?

Speaker 1 | 31:16.116

At Call Tower?

Speaker 0 | 31:17.217

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 31:18.098

Yeah, it makes, honestly, Skype was kind of a bear sometimes, right? So the way Microsoft, and the reason being is because Microsoft created Skype differently than they created Teams. It’s a completely different platform now, even though it’s supposedly going to replace Skype for business down the road. Not for enterprise organizations yet, but eventually it’s going to replace Skype, right? Right. I would say. Just like Skype replaced Link. But you asked if it makes my life easier over here. 100% it does. It’s an easy sell because of how easy it is to implement. And every day, you know, average Joe. IT staff is going to want to work with a third party. They do it anyway from an Office 365 standpoint. So why not add an expert behind the scenes in the telephony? Because that’s where it’s going to get even more confusing for them.

Speaker 0 | 32:03.953

So let me ask you this. Let’s just say, and this is the last question here. Hey, I spent, you know, whatever, $100,000 last in January already on licensing and it’s not up for renewal until January of next year. Can you guys still come in, take over that licensing and be kind of transparent in the background there and help them do the team’s migration or the voice migration at the same time?

Speaker 1 | 32:25.448

Yeah, it depends, right? So if they’re working with a third party CSP, they can switch over their partner of record to us. We wouldn’t bill for that licensing, right? Because they were already billed, but we can be the partner of record. And the next time it comes up for… you know, renewal, then we can renew that for them. The voice licensing in any provider you go to even Microsoft, right. Is always separate.

Speaker 0 | 32:44.586

They’re always going to charge you more. So that’s the scenario where it’s like, Hey, do you want to pay 2495 or do you want to pay, you know, half that price and get a heck of a lot more and get full management and everything like that. Gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 32:55.915

Exactly. Yep. And we, you know, and that’s exactly how you want to think of it, right. As a UCAS provider, you’re always going to have to pay more if you’re replacing your telephony and UCAS infrastructure, right. Or even just. enabling UCaaS in a team’s world. So think of us as the alternative license model to that. And then you can also run it side by side to your existing relationship you already have with Microsoft. All right.

Speaker 0 | 33:16.931

Really cool.

Speaker 1 | 33:17.772

Awesome.