Speaker 0 | 00:09.783
everyone out there listening you we’re back live um not live it is live now but it’s being recorded so it won’t be live i just felt like saying live today for some reason on dissecting popular it nerds and today we’re talking about why it people should never be in charge of people I love it. I love it.
Speaker 1 | 00:34.242
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 00:35.583
So you should be hiding in like a server closet and we should still be sliding pizzas under the door to you.
Speaker 1 | 00:42.166
Kinda, though, you know. I do have a pretty good office, so I can’t complain.
Speaker 0 | 00:49.871
Hold on. Let me open up this Rockstar so I can get high here while we’re on the show and get high on a lot of caffeine.
Speaker 1 | 00:59.424
Yeah, I’m doing that as well. Good.
Speaker 0 | 01:02.785
So.
Speaker 1 | 01:04.066
If I really shouldn’t.
Speaker 0 | 01:06.727
I don’t even know why we’re talking today. You just showed up on my schedule. I’m assuming it’s for a podcast. I’m assuming my. No, no. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 01:14.251
God, no. It’s not a podcast. We were doing, you know, that’s kind of what I figured. You know, you clickbait. Come on. Anyway, we were. We were supposed to talk about Microsoft licensing, which is a B.
Speaker 0 | 01:29.627
Yes! Okay, sweet! I hope you don’t mind that we’re recording this at the same time and might turn it into a show, because are you okay with that?
Speaker 1 | 01:37.092
Well, I’m probably going to use the R word and the N word and the F word, so you’re pretty much through.
Speaker 0 | 01:44.537
I don’t even want to ask what those are. Don’t please… All right. So this is like a live, this is like a live consulting session with Phil Howard doing, we’re going over Microsoft licensing, which sounds great to me. Never done this before. Have you even heard my clickbait? Have you heard my podcast?
Speaker 1 | 02:04.614
I have listened to it. It was like, it was a really dry one that I listened to. Probably not the best. I didn’t pick a good one, but we’ve, we’ve chatted a little bit about, you know, phone systems in the past, like kind of online.
Speaker 0 | 02:16.619
All right. Well, um, I’ve, What you got? What are we talking with? Did Microsoft, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1 | 02:24.645
you sent out the email and I responded and then your assistant reached out to me and there’s a way to get around the 15% or 20% or 35%.
Speaker 0 | 02:38.818
Oh, yeah, it was clickbait. That was some good clickbait. It was clickbait. Wow, it worked. Okay, so. Well, maybe the price increase went up March 1st. So this is not anything that like…
Speaker 1 | 02:50.734
I’ve already paid the first bill. So, and it’s, you know, it’s not wasn’t pretty.
Speaker 0 | 02:55.276
Are you a month to month or are you paying?
Speaker 1 | 02:58.477
I’m month to month. You know, I was given the option. You can pay for the full, you know, full year and only 15%, 15% or I can stay month to month. But then it’s a 35% increase.
Speaker 0 | 03:13.364
Which episode was really dry so I can delete that one?
Speaker 1 | 03:17.207
It was, you know, no, there’s like smart people out there that would actually like that episode. I can’t really say I’m that smart. I love this.
Speaker 0 | 03:27.835
This is going to be the best ever. People are going to love this. Okay, so let’s just do this. Let’s do like a, we’ll do this like speed dating, like speed Microsoft licensing. How many users do you have?
Speaker 1 | 03:40.305
A hundred and… A hundred and… 40? Let’s say 140.
Speaker 0 | 03:45.546
140 users. Are you on E3, E5, 365, whatever? What’s your flavor wave?
Speaker 1 | 03:52.833
So it’s primarily E3. There’s some E1s and one E5.
Speaker 0 | 03:59.519
All right. You know Microsoft wants you just to buy all E5s. How many E1s do you have? And why do you have them? They just need email or what is it?
Speaker 1 | 04:08.920
They’re basically, HR basically requires people, everybody who works here to have an email address.
Speaker 0 | 04:17.162
So these are like low on the totem pole people in Lebanon. Yeah. This is so much fun. How can you say that you don’t, that you’re not good with people? And you were in a, wait, you worked for an ISP call center in New Hampshire?
Speaker 1 | 04:35.627
No, actually it was in West. It was actually RCN. Ah! Yeah, I worked, you know, they used to buy out smaller ISPs, and I was bought out.
Speaker 0 | 04:48.372
Okay. What was it? RCN, you know, that’s an acronym. I’m sure you guys had plenty of names for it. Because in telecom and in the internet world, you know, we always make up lots of names for…
Speaker 1 | 04:57.996
you know the boxes of junk the boxes of junk we’d been selling called routers or yeah super rcn love locans they were like they had like this military theme going on for really long like they had this black summer they would spin out drugs you know take the shows and uh yeah yeah
Speaker 0 | 05:18.392
um super cool all right so 140 users uh the majority are e3 e5 um what Let me pull up my little Microsoft cheat sheet, which is really a spreadsheet. And what I really am going to do is take all your numbers and send them over to a very smart man named Steve Leach, who was a badged Microsoft guy for like 10 years. And we’re going to just discount everything that we can and come back with the pricing and say, this is what it’s going to be. when you sign a one-year agreement. If you want to go month to month, there’s no way around it because Microsoft just decided they wanted to make more billions.
Speaker 1 | 06:08.561
I do too. I want to make more billions.
Speaker 0 | 06:10.602
Good for them. Good for them. Okay. Congratulations. And this, so anyways, do you know what you’re paying or what you were paying last year per E3 license before?
Speaker 1 | 06:25.040
um the i want to make more billions i can hold on a sec let’s see how fast uh i can pull up find an invoice uh let’s see so i forward i get the invoices and i have to approve them and yada yada let’s see they allow you to do that i would much rather be talking about phone systems than Microsoft. Okay, fine.
Speaker 0 | 06:58.773
Let’s talk about phone systems. I have no problem with that. You send me the printout of your licensing, all of it, right? Whatever it is, like go into whatever you IT guys do, Active Directory or whatever, print out your licensing report, send it over, and I will send you pricing back.
Speaker 1 | 07:19.158
How’s that? Okay. Well, either way, I just found it. I just found the invoice. Anyway, E3, I’m paying $24 per user.
Speaker 0 | 07:31.206
List price. So you’re paying list price. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 07:34.529
Pretty much.
Speaker 0 | 07:35.250
You’re paying $28.80 for, I mean, what are you paying? Let’s see here. No, no, no, no. E5, you’re paying $57 then if you’re paying list price, I’m assuming?
Speaker 1 | 07:45.378
Yes, probably.
Speaker 0 | 07:46.899
And your E1s are $9.60 or $10, somewhere in there? so here’s what we’ll do e5 i’m paying 35 for that one all right i guess it’s not it’s not the full one or i guess there’s different tiers oh maybe it’s the yeah it’s like the the office e5 not the microsoft f3 upgraded
Speaker 1 | 08:13.459
to e5 gotcha okay eight dollars for uh the e1 and actually i can give you the numbers uh if you want how many of each i have yeah send me the bill
Speaker 0 | 08:25.552
Um, we will, um, I mean the price increase already happened, so we’ll do our best to try and backlog it into the old pricing. If you sign up for like, if you want to sign it for a year, otherwise we’ll still get you a discount based on their 15% to 20% price increase and we’ll get you a discount. And then the, the beautiful thing about app smart is you get free enterprise level support. So you don’t have to pay for that. So you don’t have to, I mean, I don’t know if you like calling 1-800. I call it calling 1-800-go-pound-sand, but.
Speaker 1 | 09:04.002
Oh yeah, no, I have, I’m calling 1-800-something-fed-x this afternoon and I’m not excited about it.
Speaker 0 | 09:12.908
Do you, what do you do for email backups?
Speaker 1 | 09:16.071
I’m using Backupify.
Speaker 0 | 09:18.072
Okay. It might be worth just doing what we call like a value discovery call with my. my Microsoft guys and application guys, because they might just, they might see a lot of different ways to do something that would be better and more cost-effective for you and maybe eliminate a silo or something like that, that you love to manage.
Speaker 1 | 09:35.339
Yeah. No, I’m probably not getting phone systems.
Speaker 0 | 09:40.521
My favorite is phone systems. I love phone systems. Let’s talk phones, phones, phones.
Speaker 1 | 09:43.542
Which is another B.
Speaker 0 | 09:45.842
What do you got? Mitel, Avaya. What do you got over there? NEC?
Speaker 1 | 09:49.103
I got something. Better. I have a hosted phone system. And I know what it is. It’s MetaSwitch. Oh, wait,
Speaker 0 | 09:57.981
don’t say anything. You got Broadsoft then. You got, I mean, Broadview. Was it Broadview?
Speaker 1 | 10:02.461
It’s not Broadview, no. It’s Metaview. Metaview. Yeah, so which I believe MetaTwitch, Microsoft bought MetaTwitch. So I have seen it, but it is a cloud-based one, and all the phones are Polycom, VVX phones.
Speaker 0 | 10:19.610
The 400 series, or how old are they?
Speaker 1 | 10:22.992
Yeah, I think 411,
Speaker 0 | 10:26.033
yes. 411s. Have you had them for more than three years?
Speaker 1 | 10:29.615
Yes, and I signed a five-year contract. So I have to, like, one and a half year left, I believe.
Speaker 0 | 10:38.318
How’d they get you to sign that?
Speaker 1 | 10:42.980
Actually, that was, you can talk about buyer’s remorse.
Speaker 0 | 10:50.282
Oh, my God. This is like the most true podcast I’ve ever done in my life. You know,
Speaker 1 | 10:54.323
like, you know, when they promise you the world, and then, you know, two girls come to install the…
Speaker 0 | 11:01.181
Oh, yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. I guarantee you they don’t work there anymore. I guarantee you they don’t work there anymore.
Speaker 1 | 11:08.166
Actually, I know. I don’t think they do. But, like, yeah, 70 phones. Yeah, we’ll get them installed and everything up and running in an afternoon. And it’s painful, you know. But anyway, the sales guy, I guess the sales guy was pretty decent. He promised the world, and he didn’t deliver it. But, you know, he won.
Speaker 0 | 11:29.953
promised that’s going to be the quote he promised the world and did not deliver it wow that is beautiful but at this point the phone system has actually you know i have very difficult users there they’re uh
Speaker 1 | 11:45.286
they’re just used to this is this is how it worked on the old system they had an old key system and uh when i got the new phone system it doesn’t work the same way as the old thing and
Speaker 0 | 11:57.657
Yeah, like, no, like, they want to be able to say, they want to put someone on hold and say, pick up line two. Yep.
Speaker 1 | 12:03.861
Yeah. Yes, which I actually kind of have working, but I pretty much had to destroy this beautiful phone system that I thought to, you know, make everybody here happy. So make it,
Speaker 0 | 12:14.508
you know, have these awesome features. I got you. I find you. Okay. So, well, first of all, what do you love about it that has to stay?
Speaker 1 | 12:28.473
Well, what I do love about it is like, I don’t, when it breaks, I don’t have to do that. That is actually, and that happened yesterday. Okay. It’s flexible. Everybody has their own DID or own phone number. I do like that. Though initially, you know, the user, you know, they actually, the management wanted me to block. I’m not sure if I can do that.
Speaker 0 | 12:55.849
that oh we don’t want people to be able to get phone calls without going through a reception and actually currently pretty much all phone calls there go through reception is that just due to like a company like like uh like we want to have everyone have a warm and fuzzy and like the old every every call has to be answered by human beings yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean they yeah that you could just maybe you know instruct your employees to answer their phone but i get it if they’re busier in a meeting it goes to voicemail i gotcha you Totally understand.
Speaker 1 | 13:27.591
But that would be, you know, not having to manage this, you know, or, you know, I maintain hardware besides the switches, which are owned by the phone company. And everybody has a DID, which works really well. It does have like a phone app feature, you know, like an Android or iPhone app.
Speaker 0 | 13:50.650
I was going to ask you, like, how did COVID treat you guys? Like, what happened when COVID hit?
Speaker 1 | 13:53.973
New Hampshire doesn’t have it having the ID actually everybody having their own phone number and I work well. So they basically everybody could be basically forward or their phone to their cell phone or home phone when they were working.
Speaker 0 | 14:10.440
So they were just forwarding it. They weren’t using the app or anything like that.
Speaker 1 | 14:14.202
No. And I don’t you know, I don’t think I would have liked that. You know, that’s super tough to support.
Speaker 0 | 14:21.201
Well, I mean, for example, you’ve got the Ring Centrals of the world. You’ve got Nextiva. You’ve got 8×8. You’ve got all these people that probably call you a thousand times a day trying to sell you something.
Speaker 1 | 14:33.991
You talk about Ring Central. They’re, you know, they’re very aggressive.
Speaker 0 | 14:39.276
Yeah, yeah. Of course. Don’t talk. And by the way, don’t talk with any of them. Don’t. No. Never do that. And the reason why I say that is just so you know a little bit about the back-end program that… dissecting popular IT nerds has. I’m a managing partner at a company called AppSmart. I worked in telecom for decades, two decades. Got sick of working for one company selling one product and have to go and do the frost and Sullivan Gartner magic quadrant thing Right. I really wanted to be able to provide a solution That’s the best possible product at the best possible price. That’s the best fit for your Particular group of end users that are different in every company and you have a bunch of different end users even inside your company alone But the point is is a partnership um remaining carrier agnostic i don’t care who you end up with as long as it’s the right player and then the other or the right sorry the right partner the right solution and then on top of that because we have the number one telecom lawyer in all of telecom um on retainer i tell you all the gotchas in your contract i make sure that you get a chronic outage addendum in a chronic outage i mean an extended sla because we all know the slas are really a joke if you worked at rcn you already know 99.99 five nines is a joke you know that they’ll give me they’ll give me a week to 50 five nines is a joke in your town um yeah you know so you know that um the other things are a we can help you never sign a five-year agreement again i’m fine with it actually i did
Speaker 1 | 16:26.608
You know, I’m actually, you know, not, you know, hating it. It’s like,
Speaker 0 | 16:31.049
you know,
Speaker 1 | 16:31.449
I got going on. Yeah. But actually, you know, you know, going forward, you know, knowing that, you know, Microsoft Teams is, you know, has the capability. I probably would like to go that route next.
Speaker 0 | 16:44.032
Well, let me explain how that works. One thing you don’t ever want to do with Microsoft Teams. Again, I love you, Microsoft, is. pay the Licensing the the the what’s wrong with me there their Brain not working today Well anyways, let’s say you’re to keep your e3 licenses You’d have to pay the $8 phone system SKU and then you have to pay $12 for the calling plan That’s what it’s called calling plan. So calling the $12 calling plan gives you basically calling in the in the United States, right? Unlimited but if you need to make international calling Do you guys make international calling?
Speaker 1 | 17:27.600
Oh, a lot. That’s all. Really? Mostly what we do. Well, we’re a pretty big internet.
Speaker 0 | 17:33.963
Okay. So then you got to pay Microsoft another $12 to add international calling on. So now you’re at $8 for the phone system license.
Speaker 1 | 17:43.026
Is that per user?
Speaker 0 | 17:45.167
Correct. Wow. So now you’re at $8 plus $12 plus $12. So that’s $24. I stayed back in first grade. So I got to do this math on a calculator. So $12 plus $12 is 24 plus $8. I didn’t do it on a calculator. It’s $32. But why would you pay $32 per user? And Microsoft would probably, I don’t think they really care because they’re not in business to be a telecom company. So what they did was they went to a company for all their enterprise users and said, hey, look. We need you to do all of our call path routing and we need you to build a software that makes migrating all of these users to Microsoft Teams easy without all of the PowerShell nightmare stuff. Okay. That company, I will, is a direct routing partner. And what that means is their telecom provider that provides access to the PSTN. and allows you to use a SIP trunking model to voice enable teams. It is by far the best way to do it. And what that allows you to do is take 140 users and not pay $32 times 140. Instead, you can pay, I think it’s 25 cents or 50 cents a DID. So everyone still has their DID. We poured all the numbers, all that stuff. Try paying 25 cents times 140. It’s a ridiculous savings. So that’s not all. I mean, you’re going to pay more, obviously. We’re going to make you pay. But 140 times 0.25 is a whole whopping $35 for DIDs. And then you can buy the trunks. So let’s say we then buy the trunks at $20 each. How many people, what do you have running? How many people are on the phone at your busiest, craziest time there of the 140?
Speaker 1 | 19:44.882
You know, probably, let’s say, five or ten.
Speaker 0 | 19:48.706
Are you kidding me? Yeah, the average is a third. Worst, you know, worst case scenario. So let’s just say you do like a traditional PRI type thing. Let’s just give you, actually, we’ll do two more. We’ll do 25 trunks. times 20 bucks is $500. And then you got to pay E911 and other kinds of like ridiculous fees for each user. So 140 times two bucks, you got 280. And then you’ve got 280 plus 500 plus the $35. The beginning is a whopping $815, free taxes, surcharges, FCC fees, you know, I went and we got the E911 in there, you know, all the other. junk and let’s just say we did 25 of that for taxes so times 1.25 that would be 1018 a month and i can almost guarantee you that that is much less than what you’re paying right now i’m paying about five five a month everyone listening to dissecting popular it nerds we just saved someone 80 it’s ridiculous dude you And the only issue, okay, so actually there is an issue. When you migrate to Teams, it’s a change. The best way to use Teams is in a soft phone environment. Are people chatting on Teams? Are they doing Teams meetings?
Speaker 1 | 21:20.807
They’re actually taken to it. That’s kind of why.
Speaker 0 | 21:24.049
Ah. So what you do is there’s two ways to do this. You can either be ruthless. take everyone’s phone away and throw a headset on the desk and say, here we are. We’re in teams now have fun, or you can use teams enables phones, but you wouldn’t, you’d have to buy some physical devices, like some Polycom devices and stuff like that. The receptionist, I don’t know. Does she have like a really big heads up display, like a HUD right now with like a big, like a separate computer screen, drag and drop and all that stuff.
Speaker 1 | 21:53.087
He’s like really old. No, no.
Speaker 0 | 21:58.232
Gosh. Yeah. HR. HR.
Speaker 1 | 22:02.554
No, he’s not, because he does not do well with technology.
Speaker 0 | 22:06.896
And this is our end users. So we’re just being, you know, this is just realistic. We’re just speaking realistically here. We have every, all of our end users are different. There’s a learning curve a bit. So, I mean, you could give her a Teams-enabled Polycom phone, but one thing that, if you want to go Teams, you’re going to have to sell. executive management on there’s no more receptionist. There is a receptionist kind of, but you need to sell executive management on the receptionist can answer the phone if they call the main number and you can have after hours and you can have like, you know, your, all your routing, like a typical phone system. Right. But she’s not going to have the, like, you know, hold, please transfer, you know, she can hold and transfer. Yes. But. We’re not talking like a crazy heads-up display. I mean, you would be able to look in Teams and see, you know, you’re going to be able to chat with people in Teams and that type of stuff. And it’s going to get a lot more robust. The other option would be to use a direct routing partner like a RingCentral or a Nextiva where you have a phone provider that basically either does Teams over the top. They either come on top of teams like over the top of teams and your dialers in there or they still do direct routing But they’re giving you additional features and benefits that you have to have like overhead paging something like that What you can still do with the the direct routing partners, but do you have anything like weird features overhead paging? door strikes, okay
Speaker 1 | 23:40.797
We’re a manufacturing company
Speaker 0 | 23:44.299
Yeah, you can do that with a You can do that with an algo unit and mapping an extension, that type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 23:49.918
Kind of what we’re doing already.
Speaker 0 | 23:52.540
Yeah. Perfect. Do you do call recording or do you have any kind of one-off odd features, any type of omni-channel, website chat? Nope.
Speaker 1 | 24:03.468
Not that.
Speaker 0 | 24:06.690
No mini call center, no people in any hunt groups or stuff like that? Okay.
Speaker 1 | 24:11.013
There are a couple of hunt groups. for uh like the the income there’s few few people that pick up the the incoming call sort of from the main line so the the other thing too right with a team’s environment is you get a you know obviously you have the teams the microsoft teams application
Speaker 0 | 24:34.436
on android or iphone or whatever so you can just make and receive calls that way So if from like a, from like a COVID or a work from home or a, I’m somewhere else in the world, or I’m at a Starbucks in Texas or whatever, I’m just still able to make and receive calls and do extension dialing and receive voicemail and all that type of stuff. Does that make sense? Yep. That’s pretty easy. There’s no, like, we don’t have to do call forwarding to a home phone or something like that. Like, no, just, just turn your computer on. And put the headset on. It doesn’t really matter where you’re at, right? Yeah. Okay. So from that standpoint, it’s easy. What are you going to do with all the money I save you?
Speaker 1 | 25:17.599
I’m going to go surfing somewhere in the ocean, the cold ocean.
Speaker 0 | 25:21.222
I surf. I have no idea.
Speaker 1 | 25:22.723
Yeah, I know. I kind of have a vibe right now.
Speaker 0 | 25:25.966
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 25:27.167
Somewhere I saw you surfing, and it was cold. Yeah. Are you in New England?
Speaker 0 | 25:35.517
Yes. Born and bred in New England. I’m, you know, did you know where Princeton, Massachusetts is?
Speaker 1 | 25:40.380
I kind of do.
Speaker 0 | 25:42.181
Yeah. We’re not far from Lebanon. That’s where my uncle, we have a, we have a ski mountain called Mount Wachusett. You may have heard of it. Yeah. And then, uh, so I, I grew up in Mass. Then I was in Maine. Now I’m in Connecticut. There are a lot of like during COVID and when your parents get older, you do a lot of moving around. There was a point in my life.
Speaker 1 | 26:02.604
You don’t tell me I’m actually from from Iceland. So, you know when I raised in Iceland
Speaker 0 | 26:07.967
They’re surfing they’re surfing in Iceland. I was looking at the couple months ago
Speaker 1 | 26:13.310
Yeah, I was there, you know, I was there in September and I was actually it was decent But I normally when I’m there it’s in the winter and I hate it Here and I hate it actually funny thing. Let’s get a lot colder in New England than it does in Iceland.
Speaker 0 | 26:30.339
Yeah Yeah. Isn’t that why they named it Iceland to be the opposite of Greenland or something to make people think it was cold there, but it really isn’t?
Speaker 1 | 26:38.050
It’s really windy in Iceland. Okay. That’s how it gets you.
Speaker 0 | 26:43.055
Don’t you guys have like a booming economy or something? Aren’t you like some, aren’t you known for like some like really like special things?
Speaker 1 | 26:51.763
We’re known for a lot of weird things. You know what the weird things are? are, you know, DNA mapping. And, you know, it’s a little bit weird. Like after I left, I left there probably in 97, 1997. And Iceland was kind of behind at that time. But after I left, you know, there’s fiber everywhere and everybody’s got everything. So my sister is a farmer there and she’s got.
Speaker 0 | 27:24.856
you know better connection if you’ve got fiber to to her farm isn’t that annoying when you leave the united states and you think we’re the united states i don’t have good internet in lebanon but i go over here and i’m like what i’m in the middle of nowhere how’s like there’s a guy with a donkey walking down the street how does he have better internet than me yeah it’s kind of it’s kind of frustrating well i went to visit a friend in egypt and we were in like a northern a village north of cairo that was really really poor And, um, I mean, you see crazy stuff there. You just see stuff that you’ve never seen, you know, like being in America, you see cars driving down the street and a kid, you know, riding a horse, pulling a wooden, uh, a wooden trailer with another kid sitting on the back of the trailer with the, you know, towing a cow literally. And, um, you know, then there’s cars and motorcycles going by with five people on one motorcycle and, you know, and you’re like. It’s a dirt road and then yours is dust everywhere and then but great internet Okay, so your phone system sounds fairly Simple how about move add change requests when you go to make a add a user delete a user? Are you just going into a portal and doing that or you how do you prefer to do that?
Speaker 1 | 28:48.959
it’s done through a portal, but I I really haven’t had to do much of that. You know, there hasn’t been much turnover, but, you know, I just reset a phone and repurpose it.
Speaker 0 | 28:57.665
And be fine to do that through Active Directory or Microsoft?
Speaker 1 | 29:02.168
There’s like a phone company has a porthole for me to do that. Right.
Speaker 0 | 29:06.992
I’m just saying in the future, if you migrate to Teams, like you’re cool with. Yeah, I know. Okay. And then there’d be another portal to for disaster avoidance recovery. Do you ever have any outages? Have you had you know like phone outages?
Speaker 1 | 29:19.601
We had one yesterday
Speaker 0 | 29:21.383
Wow I’m angry.
Speaker 1 | 29:24.665
Yeah. No It wasn’t too bad. It was you know, and I do it did enjoy it because Nothing I can do
Speaker 0 | 29:35.594
What was
Speaker 1 | 29:37.316
Sorry can’t help you.
Speaker 0 | 29:38.577
Oh did anyone complain to you?
Speaker 1 | 29:40.939
Oh God. Yes These people are horrible.
Speaker 0 | 29:47.004
Wow. This is amazing. This is so true.
Speaker 1 | 29:51.568
Right now, I love my coworkers. They’re really spoiled. Hey, with a $5,000 phone bill and, you know, my Office 365 is even worse. You know, they’re spoiled.
Speaker 0 | 30:05.340
Um, how does an outage cost you guys? How bad is it?
Speaker 1 | 30:13.422
Well, I don’t know how.
Speaker 0 | 30:18.203
Let me, let me give you an example. I was talking with a logistics company the other day. When they have an hour, one hour outage, it costs them $40,000. I doubt it’s that bad.
Speaker 1 | 30:29.386
It’s probably not that bad, but you know, we could miss, miss phone calls, but, uh, you know.
Speaker 0 | 30:34.748
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 30:36.128
Nobody yelled at me about that.
Speaker 0 | 30:38.349
Okay. What do they yell at you about?
Speaker 1 | 30:42.231
My phone is in our camera. And then, you know, today, you know, I get, like, it’s still not fixed, you know. So, and it is fixed, but it’s like, you know, they had a phone call drop, and then that means it’s not fixed.
Speaker 0 | 30:58.097
Okay, dropped calls.
Speaker 1 | 30:59.918
Dropped calls, yeah. It was the same person twice, you know. Okay,
Speaker 0 | 31:04.172
it wasn’t our end were they at home or were they in the office or where were they?
Speaker 1 | 31:08.074
No, they were they were here. It was a receptionist that you know, the call came in twice from the same person and dropped both times Okay,
Speaker 0 | 31:15.579
what do you have?
Speaker 1 | 31:15.980
Only only phone call what I have do I have for internet? Yeah, I about 200 max Yeah, it’s 200 max up and down fiber. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 31:27.668
Yeah Who’s that through don’t tell me RCN.
Speaker 1 | 31:32.271
No, it’s It’s through First Light. Okay. Which is also the phone company.
Speaker 0 | 31:38.934
Yep. Okay, great. Do you have a backup internet connection?
Speaker 1 | 31:43.075
Not yet. I’m working on it.
Speaker 0 | 31:45.396
Do you want me to get you a backup internet connection? Cheap? Do you have cable there? What do you guys have? Time Warner cable? Comcast? What do you got?
Speaker 1 | 31:53.680
It’s Comcast, but I don’t know. Everything runs on the same old Android 3.
Speaker 0 | 31:59.722
Yes, but if someone’s central, if someone’s on… like, you know, network access point or there, or they, they have a network outage, then, you know, that’s, it’s on the same pole. Aerial. Is it all aerial?
Speaker 1 | 32:14.674
It’s all aerial. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:16.255
Well, you could do, you know what you can do. You can do a cheap cable backup and a 5G LTE, and then you can aggregate it through like a, I’ve thought,
Speaker 1 | 32:25.423
you know, I’m, I’ve been looking at 5G because honestly, I don’t know if it’s, if the fiber does.
Speaker 0 | 32:31.428
go down then there the phone system is gonna be down and do you think what do you have for like what’s your network like what kind of shopper you do you have do you have any kind of SD win or you have any kind of do you have only one location you only have one location only one location well we have you know we have VPN users how many VPN users probably
Speaker 1 | 32:53.454
around like 10 that are on like every day 10 15 that on every day have you ever heard of a company called big leaf networks
Speaker 0 | 33:01.632
I have not. So Bigleaf Networks is good for doing kind of like a single location SD-WAN aggregator aggregation. So they also allow you to have multiple providers and then, you know, kind of like one IP addressing scheme for all of your providers. And it can take up to four providers in the back of their little, you know, I guess you’d call it router or whatever they want to call it, access device. And then they can also speed up, you know, application performance if you’ve got, you know, I don’t know if you’ve got other applications up in Azure or Amazon or anything like that. Do you have anything in the cloud?
Speaker 1 | 33:41.363
It’s coming probably mid-month, mid-this month. So, you know.
Speaker 0 | 33:47.224
Are you migrating something or buying space?
Speaker 1 | 33:49.585
I am migrating. Well, another kind of phone company. They have a data center that they sell. thing from and i’m moving so it’s basically running on on uh vmware and uh and i’m migrating some of our servers to there and then i have a vpn tunnel from here to there and you already bought this data center space do you have a rack there or what’s going on there no i just bought you just buy like cpu ram and hard drive space and then you create the vm it’s all is it core site or something or like who are you using for that no it it is for flight as well oh cool okay all right Um, and they came out looking to be a lot steeper than doing it through Azure. I looked at Azure and, uh, I felt more comfortable, more comfortable doing it that way. Knowing, you know, I’m have a direct connection.
Speaker 0 | 34:43.506
Down the street type of thing.
Speaker 1 | 34:45.767
You know, they’re, they’re hosted out of like Portland.
Speaker 0 | 34:49.850
How’s their support?
Speaker 1 | 34:52.332
Actually, it’s great. I actually,
Speaker 0 | 34:53.833
now that they are good, they are good.
Speaker 1 | 34:56.455
They actually, I used to work. for one of the companies they were bought out so okay
Speaker 0 | 35:03.767
I’m just trying to think if there’s anything I have not asked you about your phone system. Faxing?
Speaker 1 | 35:09.972
That could be dead, but it’s not.
Speaker 0 | 35:14.837
We’ve tried to kill it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:17.119
We still use it for, you know, quite a bit, actually.
Speaker 0 | 35:21.042
How many fax machines?
Speaker 1 | 35:23.464
One, thankfully.
Speaker 0 | 35:25.106
And is it on a POTS line?
Speaker 1 | 35:28.889
It is. It goes through an AdTrend IAD.
Speaker 0 | 35:33.511
Oh, AdTrend. So it’s kind of on a bot’s line. Yeah, kind of. It’s kind of not. It’s an analog handoff.
Speaker 1 | 35:43.475
It’s a simple one.
Speaker 0 | 35:48.297
It kind of is. Is First Light providing that one for you?
Speaker 1 | 35:51.279
Yeah, that’s actually leftovers from the previous phone system. They had 11 lines going through that. to the do you need to port those old dids over to the new phone system and just keep that one ad tran analog line on there or what do you want to do i don’t know it’s like you know we tried you know do it doing something funny and it didn’t work because there’s also uh alarm lines and elevator lines you know that are going through a couple of them okay
Speaker 0 | 36:21.188
yep yep um if you want me to look at that happy to look at that bill what i would say is send me all of your bills maybe fax them will you pay will you pay them if you want to send me uh send me uh basically details of your licensing details of your phone system thing if you have an extension um do you guys have like a company extension sheet like excel document type of thing that you guys use and print up for people or no
Speaker 1 | 36:54.662
We do, and that’s actually one of my pains with this phone system.
Speaker 0 | 37:00.404
No directory.
Speaker 1 | 37:02.385
Well, so there’s an attendant console.
Speaker 0 | 37:04.906
Yep.
Speaker 1 | 37:05.646
Like kind of a digital one that attaches to these Polycom phones.
Speaker 0 | 37:09.408
Yep, yep. We call that a sidecar. Yeah, sidecar.
Speaker 1 | 37:13.710
Yeah, so a sidecar. And to manage that, you know, of course they want it alphabetical. Yeah. So you, you know. Adam starts working and then William starts working and then somebody in the middle and if for me to you know Make changes to that and I have to move pretty much everybody on the attendance console and it’s really painful
Speaker 0 | 37:36.781
That’s dumb teams address book team. It’s tea. Yeah, I mean come on What I will do is quote the top. I’ll look at every way of doing this I’ll quote the top five I’ll whittle it down to three and then we can talk again on the phone and I’ll show you those three providers, the pricing from those three providers. And then in a year and a half, when you’re done with whatever you’re doing, you have an idea because any year and a half, some who knows. But in a year and a half, all this, when all the smoke clears in a year and a half, for all we know, it might be only Microsoft teams. Yep. And Because I do believe that five years from now, teams will be the majority of the ways people are doing telephone calling. And the fact that it is so much more cost effective when you do it through a direct routing partner, the way that I kind of described earlier, like separating SIP trunking and doing DID separate. That’s the smart way so that you’re not just getting killed paying $140 times $32. Because that would just. be this probably be the same as what you’re paying right now i’m assuming not that we’re always looking for a savings but you know 140 times 32 yeah four thousand four hundred dollars yeah it would be five thousand it would be exactly what you’re paying right now um so um i’m just trying to think of any other potential features or things that we need to know um if you can give me kind of like a breakdown of hey um this is an overhead paging unit like some of the extra auxiliary type of things. I’m happy to do all this work for you.
Speaker 1 | 39:26.587
Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll see if I can’t, you know, find some time to, you know, put something together and send it over to you.
Speaker 0 | 39:35.370
If you just send me, I mean, I can do it with 140 users and still just, you know, kind of do a guesstimate with 140 users. If you want.
Speaker 1 | 39:42.512
There’s a, there’s a lot more. There’s 140 users of the, the three. And then there, there are separate.
Speaker 0 | 39:50.014
like power bi licenses there are video subscriptions and there’s all kinds of weird things i can look at every single one of those and if you’ve got other stuff like do you have any other other things docusign adobe um you know any of that other stuff You know,
Speaker 1 | 40:08.436
there’ll be bill, you know, it’s not ugly, but it was like 11,000, I think with, you know, this year and you, you, you pay, pay once a year. So it just becomes a ball that rolls and gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 0 | 40:22.960
Just dump, just dump all of that, that inventory on me and I’ll have the team crunch the numbers and we’ll say, Hey, this is what you have now. This is what the Microsoft price increasing did. And then, and here’s what. we can do for you minus uh discounts and while providing um support that i that i like to believe and know is better than calling
Speaker 1 | 40:47.313
1-800-go-pound-sand well you know this became a really interesting phone call i’m like you know uh who’s sponsoring this phone phone call me i’m paying all of this i pay this bill believe it or not so my story was um
Speaker 0 | 41:04.122
when i left the bureaucratic corporate world aka rcn i did not work at rcn but i worked at many similar people uh aka windstream broadview uh i worked at a company called c beyond way back in the day i did fixed wireless before that um when i when i left the corporate world you already know why i left um you can’t keep a job No, no, I left over my partners and became a partner at a company called Converge Network Services Group. We merged with AppSmart. And I at the beginning, I used to take any and every customer. I took all the small business customers. I took medium enterprise customers. I took large retail. I had Metro PCS as a customer, a large number of Metro PCS ones. That was a nightmare. Can you imagine hundreds of locations with one phone in one? cable internet connection and people call you hey we’re opening up a new store tomorrow we need service like do you realize that like you can’t do that right you can’t just order internet overnight so um i eventually decided that i would look at all of my customers and figure out which people i liked and i would fire all the people i hated and uh the people that i yeah the people that i liked are people like you weird people from iceland it directors uh you It’s true, though. I mean, really, people that know what an IP address is, right? People that understand that when everything’s working, that’s a good thing. How many times have someone said, like, you know, well, what do we need IT for? Everything’s working.
Speaker 1 | 42:47.420
Well, yes, that’s a very good point.
Speaker 0 | 42:49.021
Right?
Speaker 1 | 42:49.241
I mean, everything works great there.
Speaker 0 | 42:51.283
Yeah, so. And when you work with a lot of MSPs that serve small business owners, small business owners are always pinching pennies. They’re always looking how to save a buck. And if their IT guy is really doing his job well, they go to their IT guy and they say, hey, business is tough. We’ve got to cut you. And what do we need you for anyways? Everything’s working. And the IT guy is like. That’s what’s supposed to happen. So I used to coach these IT guys when I was at the larger beer cart. Hey, just break something. Okay, just break something so that you can look like you’re doing something and fix it. You know, people don’t understand. That was a joke. Like, you know, but so anyways, I started the podcast to highlight IT directors like yourself and other IT directors that are always struggling or have figured out how to sell to executive management. Get a seat at the executive round table. Sell IT as a business force multiplier, not a cost center that is just cost money. So that’s the point of the show. But yeah, we are looking for soon many, many good sponsors to pay for this. But right now it’s fully funded by AppSmart. And our back end program is completely free. So you have access to… All of my engineering department, all of my guys, if you need help and you are migrating something to Azure, you need extra support or help, I’m going to give you at least probably eight to nine extra resources that you don’t have to pay for that we can get on calls, do value discovery workshops, do roadmap planning, whatever it is that you need help with. It’s pretty much like… nine different areas hold on i can pull up my little nine different areas wheel here um come on computer um yeah yeah so yeah customer experience so that would be contact center omni channel which you don’t have any of um software as a service you do have that that would be your applications microsoft obviously i don’t know what you do if you have a crm or something or erp type system um
Speaker 1 | 45:08.520
That’s actually one thing. That’s actually what we’re deploying. We’re deploying a new ERP system, and we’re going with a new CRM here like mid-month.
Speaker 0 | 45:19.525
Oh, so that’s going to be fun for you.
Speaker 1 | 45:21.466
Oh, God. You know, we have not even gone through the part where I tell you, oh, yeah, I’ve had two heart attacks during this.
Speaker 0 | 45:30.290
I just put your notice in now, and let’s find you another job. By the way, there’s tons of IT jobs available. Right now, from my understanding, there’s tons of jobs in IT. Mobility. So, I don’t know. Do you guys have cell phones? We never even talked about that. Do you guys have wireless phones?
Speaker 1 | 45:47.186
A very small variety of brands.
Speaker 0 | 45:49.307
Okay. I don’t care if it’s… Unless it’s 100 phones or more, you’re fine. But it is a pain in the butt factor to manage those big time. Cloud in general, hosted infrastructure. We kind of talked about that briefly. azure data center co-location disaster recovery you know how you’re doing your backups for email if you are security posture firewalls threat detection malware that type of stuff energy believe it or not i don’t i’m not the energy expert but i have a whole energy department of people that are just hey save me kilowatt hours and put in new light bulbs that type of thing which can be big if you’re massive manufacturing or retail or hospitals. Obviously, they’re pumping out a lot of energy.
Speaker 1 | 46:38.365
UCAS. I’m in a brand new building that’s covered by solar panels.
Speaker 0 | 46:42.707
Yeah, and besides, you’re one location. So UCAS, that’s why we’re talking. Hosted voice over IP, Teams, video web conferencing. Do you have Zoom licenses, or are you guys doing everything through
Speaker 1 | 46:54.410
Teams? We’re doing everything through Teams.
Speaker 0 | 46:57.411
Good job. Good job. Hey, I’m… Standing ovation, metaphorically. Connectivity, that would be your fiber. You guys, you’re doing good there. I mean, you’ve got, you know, what do we say, fiber light? I always get those mixed up. I always get those two mixed up. Firstly, aren’t those the guys that are migrating those AS400s into the cloud? They’re one of the very few companies, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1 | 47:23.275
That wouldn’t surprise me.
Speaker 0 | 47:24.496
Yeah, they’ve got a data center. They’ve got a really good data center. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 47:31.324
They got in a little bit of trouble. They had a lot of Huawei equipment floating around.
Speaker 0 | 47:39.489
And then managed services in general, because a lot of companies will outsource a help desk or, I don’t know, whatever. Some level of managed services or professional services type of thing. So that’s what I am happy to help you with at any time, whenever, completely at no cost to you as a value-added partner. And so we’re not a reseller. We’re not a telecom expense management company. We’re not someone that white labels and takes a portion of the profit. We are literally a massive $1.5 billion master agency slash CSP on steroids that helps you find, buy and purchase stuff. And we get a very small percentage from the providers for bringing the paperwork to you. You still sign directly with the providers. And then the providers are happy because they don’t have to hire sales reps out of college that don’t know anything about technology and then pay their benefits, salary. We all know they’re going to quit in three to eight months anyways, and then it’s going to revolve indoors. So it’s better to have people that actually know what they’re doing. So we fill that gap in the telecom and data world that is so known for providing really mediocre service.
Speaker 1 | 48:56.244
So that’s pretty good.
Speaker 0 | 48:57.464
Yeah. So I will do whatever you want. Um, if I can help you out, great. If not, no big deal. Um, send me the, send me the Microsoft licensing breakdown, the video stuff, um, all of that. Um, and then we have a really good guy named Steve Leach. Uh, he was a badge Microsoft guy for years. Um, so I will probably have him or one of those type of guys looking on the Microsoft stuff. And if you send me a Doesn’t even need to be that detailed breakdown of your extension list and everything. I’ll crunch the numbers on the phone system side for you.
Speaker 1 | 49:30.634
Okay. Sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 0 | 49:32.694
Alrighty, sir. It has been… The pleasure is all mine, believe me. This has been very fun.
Speaker 1 | 49:38.676
All right. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 0 | 49:40.916
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