Speaker 0 | 00:09.687

Today, we have a special guest that we’re going to, I don’t know, we might beat on you a little bit. You know, just because you come from a company that’s somewhat pop, I mean, somewhat kind of famous and or well known, but Jonathan Nelson. Global Solutions Engineering Leader at Vonage. And I don’t have vendors on that often, but because you’re a solutions engineer, aka sales engineer, and we have, sales engineer is like the best job in the world, I think, because you kind of, you’re responsible for making sure sales people don’t say stupid things. And, and, make up, you know, grandiose promises to the customer? Would you say that that’s a fair statement?

Speaker 1 | 01:04.291

I think that’s fair. Sometimes we’re a barometer of truth, but I think also we’re that trusted advisor in a lot of instances, right? Because, you know, even if you have the most intelligent and capable sales rep, that title of sales rep doesn’t garner as much trust as the solutions engineering label does.

Speaker 0 | 01:23.258

So I have this ongoing argument. It’s like, if we have this the sales engineer, it’s kind of like, why do we need the sales person? I guess they’re just more good at, more good, right? I mean, here I am, an English major. I guess they’re just more good at hustling and being hungry, I guess. So regardless, welcome to the show. And I wanted to have you on for a couple of reasons, because there’s a lot of times in this industry, well, or In general, kind of the mid-market enterprise space or people, when they think of a vendor, they have kind of these preconceived notions. You know, if I say AT&T, someone immediately thinks of something. When I say Windstream, someone thinks of something. When someone says Vonage, I cannot help but think when I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in low-income housing, paying only $99 a month rent. you know, newly married with a child on the way. And I got this box from Vonage in the mail that was like going to be my new phone line. And I was like, you know, I worked for like, I think like Fazoli’s. I think I worked the fast, you know, I was working like the drive-through at the time, asking people if they wanted breadsticks with that. I didn’t know, like, what do you mean you plug it in to your DSL? Like, I don’t even, what’s DSL? That was my first experience with Vonage. And it was like, you know, insane. I was like, yeah, this isn’t going to work. I don’t get this. What do you mean? It was just send it back. Like, you know, honey, send it back. Little did I know that later on in my life, a, you know, Cisco startup, like recruiter guy would call me and say, hey, do you know what voice over IP is? And I’m like, I have no idea. I was like, I know Cisco delivers my paper products and food to like. you know, the restaurant music. No, no, no, no, no, no Cisco with the C. Okay. I’m really revealing myself here. Okay. This is really revealing my past here. But anyways, that was my very first experience with Vonage ever. And there’s other people out there that have some, you know, Vonage is the, in my opinion, quintessential example of a, of the ebb and flow of, of the telecom industry and why the, if you ask one out of three Americans who has the worst customer support in the, in, in any industry, they say telecom, like telecom. And that includes, you know, internet providers, you know, telecom, all of the telecom in general has the worst customer support because typically people are calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND. And if you look up reviews on various different telecom companies. We did it the other day. We might do that during the show. It’s a good laugh. You have this constant ebb and flow in Vonage. And usually, you’re either a telecom company getting bought, you’re either selling or you’re going bankrupt. And Vonage is on the upper echelons side where you guys are just buying companies for years, all kinds of different companies. So when someone thinks of Vonage, they could be any number of companies that you guys bought up over the last couple of years that either had a good network or a bad network or got caught in between merging networks. And you’ve been there for quite a while. So I’ll let you, I’ll put you in the hot seat here. You know, you’ve been at Vonage for eight years. How many companies have you guys bought over the last eight years?

Speaker 1 | 05:05.957

I think we’ve done, um, eight companies over the last six years, if I remember right. And there may be, I may be off by one or two. But I think that was it, right? There is this B2C mentality initially, you know, kind of, I always joke around that we were kind of the godfathers of VoIP. And we had those annoying commercials to go with it, right?

Speaker 0 | 05:27.521

Like godfather’s pizza.

Speaker 1 | 05:31.183

I mean, it was just so, so commonplace. And people still know us even when we talk to businesses. There’s always somebody in the room from the CIO to the director of IT. They’re like, I still have you guys for my residential phone. It’s always funny. But really, it was this pivot towards the business and this vision of building a complete technology stack that led us down this road of acquisition. I think initially, some of those acquisitions were of… different carriers or technology stacks. You can think like Broadsoft and stuff like that, and we still hold those and we manage and curate those. But we’ve really gone all in on our own proprietary technology. And that’s where a lot of our acquisitions have gone into of late. When you think of bleeding edge technologies like conversational AI, you know, even more years back, I think it’s like five or six years now when we bought the API platform of Nexmo, we wrapped those APIs around these other packaged applications of UC and CC. And it’s really created this extensibility of what we can provide to our client base. And so we’re still we still have those hurdles, right, Phil, of people saying, really, you guys are in business, give me a break, you know, and we still have those authentic discussions of, okay, yeah, I get it. You still remember us back in the day, but trust us, our ads aren’t as annoying now. Well, maybe that’s arguable, but yeah. You know,

Speaker 0 | 06:58.175

I’m gonna have to Google some old ad. You know, it’s funny because we, Vonage is a key supplier in the Rolodex, so to speak, over at CNSG and AppSmart, of which I’m a partner at. And we have thousands, probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of actual endpoints. We could call them end users. on Vonage on various different platforms. And I have seen all kinds of good and bad. I’ve seen, you know, when it was, you know, you guys bought a company down in DC years ago called I-Core. I-Core had both GenBand and I think it was Gen, I don’t know if it was all GenBand, but I know you had GenBand and they had GenBand and Broadsoft.

Speaker 1 | 07:51.059

Broadsoft too, yep.

Speaker 0 | 07:51.980

And it was funny because they used to say, no, we’re not voice over IP. we’re VoP, we’re voice over PI. I’ll never forget that sales presentation that I sat in on years ago, like years and years ago. And someone said, no, no, we’re voice over PI. It’s just an example of how marketing departments like twist things. And all they are saying is, no, we’re voice over private internet and AKA, we’re going to make you buy a T1. I mean, we’re going to make you buy an MPLS tail T1 slash back to Equinix so that we can provide QoS for you. So I would imagine, and the only reason why I bring that up is because when companies buy other companies, you have a kind of a, I guess, a liquidation point where customer service goes downhill at the old company and then customer service takes over at the new company and they’re not used to the network. And then you’ve got to migrate those things. So I guess I’m just making up excuses for you guys. I’m making excuses for you guys. You know, that’s why, you know, so you could have gotten stuck in that. You could have gotten stuck in that area, in that neither world of something that just got labeled Vonage. But how has the what’s it like watching the take seven companies or six companies over the last eight years and and kind of merge the networks?

Speaker 1 | 09:16.393

It’s been interesting. I mean, it’s not been without its challenges. You know, Phil, it’s it’s been difficult at times, but the thing that I would. really compliment the entire Vonage organization on is just the ability to learn from those losses and to learn fast, quite frankly. I mean, we’ve stumbled. We’ve stumbled within the channel specifically. We’ve stumbled on our technology, but we’ve turned around and built something stronger from that. And there’s, you know, this drive behind it, and that’s the people within the organization. But then there’s also this core technology. technology stack that has helped us been able to provide a product that people are still interested in because we’re you know i think you and i spoke about it there’s there’s this commoditization of certain types of communications products and telco products and so what is that niche and how do you do better right um I think that we’ve been able to push that needle and really keep the interest and grow our intellectual property and capabilities enough to really stay relevant in the space.

Speaker 0 | 10:22.235

Like the broad softs of the world have become somewhat, I don’t want to say commoditized, but I would say there’s a good run there for a while where 95% of all the VoIP providers were really a broad soft back end with a skinny over the top.

Speaker 1 | 10:38.642

Right.

Speaker 0 | 10:42.619

With that being said, you as a company have been able to progress and stay, I would say at least stay on top of the curve or ahead of the curve where I’ve seen a lot of, and when you said UC earlier and CC earlier, obviously unified communications or contact center. Or a.k.a. your regular phone user versus your contact center user. Because telecom, we love throwing around acronyms. That’s so true. We love saying LOA. We love saying FOC date. One time I had a post about a hot FOC date one time because we were doing a hot cut on a FOC date. And anyways. So. So we got to be careful not to throw around terms and speak in other languages. But staying ahead of the curve is important. I’ve seen with a lot of contact centers, at least some of the first contact centers that moved to the cloud. I won’t say any names here. There’s definitely like a top three in my head that moved to the cloud that were kind of like a Java-based type of thing. Or they were not WebRTC. Let’s just put it that way. And. They grew fairly large and have a large customer base. And they’re at a point now where it’s hard for them to pivot and remain nimble and kind of, you know, like speed up. And you guys seem to have been able to grab onto that WebRTC piece and maybe just talk about that for a second and why that’s important now and how that’s creating flexibility or, you know, open source stuff or, you know, whatever it is, abilities to, you know. be more flexible with APIs, et cetera?

Speaker 1 | 12:37.668

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there, so I’ll try not to go too deep into it. But I mean, the technology itself just lends itself to flexibility. And, you know, even when we look at the vast majority of our contact center deployments, they are WebRTC, and it allows a ton of flexibility. And from the CC space, being able to be telephony agnostic is really important, specifically because People may have premises-based infrastructure still that they haven’t depreciated, or they’re in contracts, or quite frankly, they really like their current telephony or unified communications provider, and they just want to replace the contact center. And so having that ability to be flexible was really key to our success in driving contact center acquisition in the market. One of the other pieces and parts is, you know, early on and even before Vonage acquired them, which was new voice media, which is the intelligence of our contact center stack. They were all in on Salesforce and Salesforce was the CRM to beat, still is in many arguments. And because they’re an industry leader, MVM was able to design around this industry leading technology and build a base that as it got folded into the Vonage ecosystem and technology stack, we were able to take that strength and start to build it out in other key systems like Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow and some others that are coming down the pipe. One of the things that you’ll see with the contact center, especially, is that Vonage is really heavy into the CRM and we really believe that A lot of people are coming down to that. They want that single source of truth. They want the ability to have all their data in one place, easy to access, easy to add information, and easy to dissect. And so Vonage being not only integrated, but embedded within these CRM ecosystems really drives more data so that those companies can make better decisions. And then we get to talk about the bleeding edge, you know, artificial intelligence. that can go into it for next best action and you know all kinds of different things for data analytics which is such a hot topic right now so for it directors managers ctl cios out there listening data is very important obviously what we do with that data not

Speaker 0 | 15:10.135

to mention how they house the data to begin with and how they input the data but what Are some of the things, just even in general, in a contact center, what kind of data do we want to be pulling that’s going to provide, I guess, returns for the business?

Speaker 1 | 15:30.866

You know, I think when you look at it like from a sales perspective, you want to know how many touches it took at a very high level to get to a closed opportunity. How long that sales cycle took, how many touches it took. Right. what channels really impacted the most. And, you know, I think you and I joked about it the other day is, you know, was it a mailing? Was it an email? Was it a text? Was it a video conversation? Was it, you know, a phone conversation? Or was it a combination of those things? And when you start to add that data up and start to pull back and look at it holistically within your entire sales org, whether it’s nationally, regionally, or even globally, you really start to get a better picture of your business to say, These are the things we need to repeat time and time again to get those most successful outcome, which is a closed deal.

Speaker 0 | 16:24.258

And how easy is it working with your current contact center slash omni-channel options channels, whether it be integrated with Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics, to change and be nimble and be flexible with how? various different sales departments are doing, is doing that outreach? Or if it’s not sales, maybe it’s operations and how many calls it took to, I don’t know, do anything, some sort of install, or maybe it’d be existing customer base. And how are we focusing on our top 20% of our most important customers versus the, you know, the bottom 80%. Are you saying it’s easy to morph change and, you know, push out a data set that someone needs?

Speaker 1 | 17:14.359

Yeah, I mean, I am saying that, but of course, adoption is key too, right? You’ve got to make sure that the technology that you’re deploying from whatever service provider is easy to use by the agent, if we’re talking about a contact center, by the knowledge worker, if we’re talking about the middle or back office. You know, I think it’s important that you can get those applications either. I hate this term, but I’m going to end up using it, which is that single pane of glass. Everything can come together in one application, or at the very least that it’s only a couple of applications. Because once you start jumping from app to app to app to app in order to accomplish your day-to-day goal, then it just becomes laborious and no fun for the end user. But when you start driving it all into a single location, they can get everything done in multiple channels. They can see their metrics, that data that they’re producing, and they start to feel good about that accomplishment as well. So not only from the end user perspective, but then as it goes up the ladder, people start to see better ideas of how to engage not only their employees, but their client base as well.

Speaker 0 | 18:25.330

Do you think the PSTN is dead?

Speaker 1 | 18:32.513

I love that. It’s a loaded question.

Speaker 0 | 18:36.895

The public switch telephone network, a.k.a. I make a phone call. It goes through all these different switches. I make a phone call in Boston. It goes through various different switches, a.k.a. the PSTN, the public switch telephone network. And that phone call reaches California. That’s the simplicity explanation of it. Are phones dying and how does Vonage fit into the death?

Speaker 1 | 18:58.969

Yeah, phones are dying. And I would say not only Vonage, but even our competitors fit into the death. I think that. even to a degree, nature is against the PSTN because COVID helped drive some of the final nails in it, right? It’s interesting because I’ve spoken to so many people and they’re like, whereas before the pandemic, I would religiously use my desk phone. I haven’t touched the thing. There’s an inch of dust on top of it. All I do is jump on a Zoom, a Teams, a Vonage meetings. You know, we’re all in video now. Everything is… utilizing either web rtc or some sort of protocol that delivers via a browser or a desktop application um i i haven’t spoken on a physical phone and i don’t know how long my favorite part was when i shipped literally like eight physical ip phones back to our corporate office they were like why did you send us this yeah like why didn’t you just throw them away or recycle them right because that’s the responsible thing to do yes you

Speaker 0 | 20:04.727

why didn’t you just burn them in the in the brush pile right yeah i’m revealing myself a little not really i’m not throwing phones in the brush pile i do have a yearly mpls I do have a yearly MPLS contract burn, and that’s coming up right now. Yes, I take some old MPLS contracts, and I use those to start the massive brush pile that’s out there.

Speaker 1 | 20:32.755

I love it.

Speaker 0 | 20:33.596

That’s another thing is MPLS dead, and then you get a bunch of technical guys, like, what are you talking about? MPLS is not dead. The entire massive network of the world is. I know, I know. I’m sorry. I mean, on-net VPNs. that you purchase from a telco company for uh three megs or 1.5 megs for uh 600 a month is that dead um to which the answer should be a should be yes but people are still on exchange servers and um 1976 meridian pbx is where they asked me will the new phone system have caller id So I’m assuming you can answer yes to all of that. It’s amazing the stuff that we still run into, the legacy fun. And that isn’t as dead. Let me ask you, I want you to make a prediction. Was the mass migration to Zoom premature? And is that going to equal out and kind of disappear?

Speaker 1 | 21:29.210

I don’t know that it’ll disappear. I do think to a degree it was premature. And kudos to Zoom for creating an easy product. And being in the right place at the right time. And I think that that’s a lot of stuff, right? Is being in the right place at the right time really always helps. But then you layer on to it the ease of use of their product is wonderful. I think, you know, as with anything, when there’s a darling in the tech industry and they grow quick, people start to look elsewhere to see what else is out there. Because now they’re used to this type of technology. And I think that was their education, right? They got educated with the Zoom use. They jumped feet first into it, even people that didn’t know how to spell Zoom. And now they’re used to this, and now they’re trying to see what else is out there. I want this specific feature, or I want to be able to do this, or I’ve got this new idea. Who can I talk to to make this happen? And so, yeah, I think it was premature, and I think people will learn from it, and they will grow, and they will start to find other providers that can provide more specific needs or provide for those needs.

Speaker 0 | 22:37.280

Yeah, for example, we’re recording on Microsoft Teams right now. I’ve been doing this podcast on Zoom forever. But this one, this is the second podcast that I’ve recorded on Microsoft Teams. I found a minor flaw, minor flaw in Zoom. I don’t know if it’s minor or major, but it has a noise canceling feature that if I have my soundboard plugged in like I do right now and I’m recording and I want to hit one of the sound effect buttons. Their background noise reduction feature cuts it off. So I can’t use the sound effects. But I tested it in Microsoft Teams and it works beautifully. So don’t add on the noise canceling feature. Well, Bill Gates really isn’t in charge anymore. But Microsoft, don’t add that on. So Microsoft Teams, I have a feeling, is going to make a quick, I think is quickly going to kind of gobble up a little bit of that market share. That’s just my educated, if I had a gun to my head and I had to guess who would, you know, five years from now have the majority of video conferencing licenses, I would bet Microsoft. I don’t know if that’s a safe bet. What do you think?

Speaker 1 | 23:54.969

I think it’s a safe bet. You’ve got a 50-50 shot. You’ve got a 50-50 on this. So I think it’s a safe bet. And I think that… you know, Microsoft has one.

Speaker 0 | 24:08.346

It’s not WebEx.

Speaker 1 | 24:09.606

Who?

Speaker 0 | 24:10.447

It’s not WebEx.

Speaker 1 | 24:11.648

No, I know that was a joke.

Speaker 0 | 24:15.350

Yeah, I know. Someone out there right now is like, what are you talking about? I love WebEx.

Speaker 1 | 24:21.514

And WebEx has a great product too, but there’s so many great products out there. I think it’s funny being in the industry. And even for a specific service provider, I literally have everybody’s video application on my desktop because When I talk to partners, they use something different. When I talk to clients, they want to use something specific. So I’ve got them all, and they all have some of their benefits, but the ease of use ones that are there, I mean, you can guarantee most people have a Zoom app and a Teams app.

Speaker 0 | 24:53.071

Yep. Then we’ve got BlueJeans. What else we got? We’ve got, you know.

Speaker 1 | 24:58.633

Startup Horizon, right?

Speaker 0 | 25:00.094

Google Meet. Yeah, we got, I mean, we have everything. And then we have all the versions of. of zoom that are just white labeled by somebody else. It’s still zoom.

Speaker 1 | 25:08.864

Right.

Speaker 0 | 25:09.565

It’s still zoom. Um, but you guys have a video, you guys have a video conferencing platform built into the built into your UCNCC, right?

Speaker 1 | 25:17.272

Correct. That is correct. Yeah, we do have a proprietary platform that utilizes part of our API stack that we packaged up and put into our unified communications platform. It is an amazing ad hoc collaboration tool that allows a lot of versatility, and it’s included in the UC license. So we’re not competing with the Teams and Zooms of the world. We’re trying to just help with that collaboration piece of it and add easy ways for people to talk, engage. and move back and forth in multiple channels across their communication software.

Speaker 0 | 25:50.999

Immediately, I just thought of the sales rep saying, you know, see, you don’t have to pay for this anymore. We include it for free.

Speaker 1 | 25:56.362

Right. Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 25:58.743

That’s why. You guys are also a Microsoft direct routing partner. So you’re able to not just API into Teams, but just provide direct routing.

Speaker 1 | 26:08.149

Correct. Yeah. And so we’ve been working there. I mean, that’s such a hot topic, right? I mean, Phil, how many times have you said, well, can you integrate with Teams to a service provider? I mean, we all have to do it, but the direct route is the most effective way where you can keep somebody, again, in that single application, right? You get the benefit of the Teams application, which is a great app with a ton of capabilities in there for an entire organization to interact. But then you get the best of breed with. say, a Vonage as a service provider being that telephony back end with all those appropriate and required hosted PBX features, which Microsoft, quite frankly, doesn’t have.

Speaker 0 | 26:52.403

And if you guys are, if anyone out there is thinking, I wonder if they can do this, I wonder if they can do that. Because where this comes into play and where it can get complicated is with contact center, right? You’ve got wall boards, you’ve got wait times, you’ve got… I want to know what my average call time is, hold time, out of work, this, various different, you know, different agents and just all kinds of different call queues and everything like that. And there’s probably numerous questions that people have. The one that always comes up with me that’s like a standout one is the ability to have presence between teams and the contact center. And I think I might’ve asked you this last time you said it was like one way or something like that, or is it both? I mean, just like, there’s a ton of questions that come up. So if anyone has any questions, just feel free to, um, you know, message me on LinkedIn or email or, or just, you know, just ask Jonathan yourself. You can find them on LinkedIn. You can message him if you’ve got any questions about Devon and stuff, uh, from after the show, uh, complete side note, how did you get into this? How did you get into this to begin with? What was your, um, What was your start with technology? How did this happen to you?

Speaker 1 | 28:06.473

You know, that’s an interesting story. I think I started out kind of self-employed more on the finance sector and helping small businesses gain the appropriate financing and building out a web in the box and doing credit card processing, kind of a whole small business in a box type thing. I had a couple of partners there that we all worked together and did that. And at a certain point, I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 28:34.944

A telecom guy that says, and you’re like, hey, man, can you refer me to the credit card guys? And they say, hey, can you refer me to the telecom guys? And you’re like, hey, I think telecom is better.

Speaker 1 | 28:46.170

It was a friend, right? And he led me astray and he got me into conferencing. And then I hitched my wagon to that shooting star and here I am. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 28:54.154

okay. So credit card processing. To conferencing, to telecom, to full-blown contact center at Vonage, and now sales engineer. How’d you end up going sales engineer versus if you started out kind of your own business and kind of building your own way? Why sales engineer? Because it’s just not engineering and it’s not sales and it’s kind of just fun.

Speaker 1 | 29:17.529

It’s a little of both. I think you hit the nail on the head earlier. It’s one of the funnest positions in the organization is you get to be technical, which that’s where… I’m very interested in how the technology works and what it does and what you can do with it. But then I still get to talk to people, right? I guess I’m that outgoing engineer, pseudo engineer, however you want to call it. I enjoy these engagements.

Speaker 0 | 29:39.221

Engineers. I exist because the engineers can’t talk to people.

Speaker 1 | 29:44.984

It’s kind of a cliche. But yeah, I mean, that was, I was doing, I was in sales. I really enjoyed the sales aspect of it. And an opportunity came up for the SE role. And I said, I want to do it. And they said, hit these benchmarks. And you’ve proven you understand the products and things like that.

Speaker 0 | 30:05.642

What are those benchmarks? I’m just curious, like, how smart do you have to be to be a solutions engineer? What kind of questions stump you? Because we used to play Let’s Stump It. I used to have a part during numerous meetings. Because when I do a meeting, it’s with multiple providers. We’ll meet with Vonage. We’ll meet with Genesis. We’ll meet with, I don’t know, Nice, 8×8, 5x9s, RingCentral, right? And I just have the Stump the Engineer session. Let’s Stump the Engineer. Can we ask him a question that he failed? What stumps you?

Speaker 1 | 30:42.362

You know, it’s new acronyms and technology grows at this exponential rate. There’s this expectation of a sales engineer.

Speaker 0 | 30:49.167

Networking experience, do you think? Like, I mean, like hardcore kind of like technical networking experience. There’s got to be some IT guy that asks you a question and you’re just like,

Speaker 1 | 30:57.594

ah. Yeah, I think it’s the network engineers, right? So like it was interesting when I started out, I worked at Telesphere. That was one of the acquisitions of Vonage and we were heavy into MPLS. And so I was far more practiced in my networking. knowledge at that time but then as Vonage changed over the years we’ve become more of a software driven organization and so now more of my answers and questions and things that I’m comfortable with are API driven so I’ll you know a network engineer will come up he’ll ask me a question I’ll be like I’ll have to look that up or I look to one of my SEs and say hopefully you know this question because I can’t remember the answer I know what he’s talking about I just don’t know the answer it doesn’t

Speaker 0 | 31:39.166

We’re WebRTC, it doesn’t matter.

Speaker 1 | 31:41.388

And then eventually she’ll save my skin because she knows the answer my SE does and we’re good to go. But I think it’s just that there’s this expectation that you know a lot or at least a little about everything. And it’s a really difficult position for an SE to be in sometimes. And I’m not whining or anything. I love getting that challenge. But I also know that SEs get into this role. Because they like that, because they get asked a question they don’t know, and they want to go back and research it. They want to know how to answer that question. And so that’s kind of something to look for is what didn’t I know when I walked into this meeting that now I know.

Speaker 0 | 32:20.192

And I’m only mentioning that for any IT directors or IT managers out there that might not be in a job right now because your business shut down during COVID or whatever the reason is. You know, a sales engineering job. pays pretty well and is pretty fun and you can just you know you’ll you’ll have all the knowledge that that most people don’t have you can just hop right into that role and you know you you don’t have to worry about keeping systems up and ticketing systems or anything like that anymore you can pretty much just show up to a meeting and help the other guy that is in that nightmare um answer all his questions yeah

Speaker 1 | 32:54.311

and selfish plug phil but we do have some open se recs here at vonage so are we at where are they located job Literally, we have a couple in the east and we have a couple in the west. So, I mean,

Speaker 0 | 33:06.860

what’s east, like northeast, southeast? I mean, like a good point.

Speaker 1 | 33:10.841

OK, that’s fair. We have we have a couple in the northeast and we have one on the far west coast. So back northwest. But again, these roles have allowed us to be remote. So while they’re to support certain areas, remote is fine for a lot of these as well.

Speaker 0 | 33:27.448

And I wonder if I’m smart enough. Maybe I should apply. I only want to be on like four calls a week.

Speaker 1 | 33:34.362

That’s it? We’re going to have to talk, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 33:39.564

Can I do like a part-time SE role? Just pay me hourly. You know, we’re just on the… I want to go on that one. I don’t like that guy.

Speaker 1 | 33:46.546

My favorite is going to be creating that model for payroll.

Speaker 0 | 33:53.108

Outsourced SEs. Wait a second. We could have a website. We could turn that up. you know, part-time, you know, just have like a group of like a thousand of them. And like, we need, we have some slots open today. I get those questions all the time. I get some, there’s this like European, like, I don’t know, they collect data or something and they keep asking me for my professional opinion on things. Like, can you get on a call with this company on this day? They’re looking to start an SD-WAN company and they want to see. what the competition’s like in the United States. Can you get on a call and answer these questions? And I’m like, yeah. Like how much are you now? I’m like 400 bucks an hour. And they’re like, okay, we need you from Tuesday from two to three. I’m like, okay. And like, I literally just, you know, I’m like 400 bucks an hour. That seems about right. You know? Yeah. Okay. Let’s just answer some questions.

Speaker 1 | 34:46.259

I love it. Hey, why not?

Speaker 0 | 34:47.460

And they’ve just got like this database of like telecom people that they just call and ask to answer people’s questions. You know, maybe. se rule sorry a lot of coffee today um So I have a, by the way, anyone out there listening to the show right now, we are looking for reviews on Apple podcasts. You go to Apple podcasts or you go to Google and you type in dissecting popular IT nerds. When Apple podcast pops up, click on that, scroll to the bottom, give us your honest review. Like the text matters, right? Like I love five-star reviews, of course, but you know, your honest review is very, very helpful for. placing us in the top 100 technology podcasts of the year recently was listed in the top 35 must listen to technology podcast of 2021 i don’t know what list that’s on but i guess i got listed on that hey congrats that’s nice yeah um okay so moving on next section of the show is uh that’s a stupid thing you I have a friend that was in telecom, worked for a long time. He went to Microsoft and we used to always laugh and be like, that’s a stupid thing. What’s the dumbest thing that we do right now in telecom? This is advice to IT directors out there listening, CTOs, CIOs. What’s the dumbest thing that someone could do when migrating or choosing a provider or something like that? There’s got to be something out there that you can think. What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Speaker 1 | 36:22.304

I mean, right away, it’s assuming that the sales rep and sales engineer understand your business thoroughly. That assumption will lead you into misses during the install phase. And it could be as nuanced as, well, we expected the call pickup to be two buttons or that you would be able to visually see it over here or over there. I think that that’s the one thing is not like. Do yourself the favor, take the time to scope the project properly with your service provider. I think that all of us are in a rush and we all make assumptions, but we need to work through that.

Speaker 0 | 37:04.653

I didn’t think you were going to say something that mind-blowing. I really didn’t. I didn’t think you were going to say something that mind-blowing. That’s mind-blowing. And I do say that. I never, one of the reasons why I pick the people that I work with and why the people. choose to work with me and I do pick, I do not work with everyone is I, and from, I do not work with everyone. I am biased. I’m definitely biased towards providers. Anyone that says we’re a non biased, you know, of course you’re biased. You’re everyone’s biased.

Speaker 1 | 37:38.356

Everybody’s got some,

Speaker 0 | 37:40.798

maybe carrier agnostic, but you know, I’m just really not agnostic either. I, I’m still kind of biased and, you know, but I’m, I guess you could say we give you options, right? But the main point is, yes, assuming that someone understands your business thoroughly is a huge mistake. That’s why it’s always important to make everyone prove it. If you’re going to say you can do this, this, and this, we still need to do a POC, proof of concept, so that we can implement it in your company. Because once end users start playing with things, it’s never the way that… you know they find a way to break things or not understand something or do something right it’s just not the way and once you’re past the the gartner magic quadrant and in frost and sullivan and the sales rep has made a sale and walks away that order gets passed off to let’s be frank and honest here a butt in the seat project manager who’s completely overloaded with as many installs as we can ram down their throat to get installed because that all equals revenue And there’s very little time in between cutovers and various different things to respond to, you know, anyone’s email. So a POC is very, very important so that we can go through that process, understand what that implementation looks like, and tweak things and make sure that it’s custom fit to your business. Would you say that that’s?

Speaker 1 | 39:05.409

I think that’s very fair. And I would also add, too, I mean, as an IT professional, make sure you do yourself the favor of reaching out to the other. people you’re going to impact, not only maybe end users, but leaders of those end users, because there’s nuance in those departments, that while you understand how a technology works at a certain level, you may not understand exactly how that end user is using it, say, in the marketing department versus the contact center versus the sales department. And if you want adoption, which we all do, because that helps the ROI, it’s you’ve got to make sure you understand those. So while you… think you’re protecting them from salespeople by not including them in the process um you’re ultimately creating gaps and knowledge that that will be missed again in in that install i if i was

Speaker 0 | 39:59.242

If I was your boss or part of your team, I would say that I’m proud of you.

Speaker 1 | 40:06.006

I appreciate that, Phil.

Speaker 0 | 40:07.546

I’ve never heard that answer in my life from a telecom person, ever. Never, ever, ever. I’ve heard a lot of speak on ROI, on how our product can help, you know, just ROI. I’ve heard a lot of ROI speak, but adoption, roundtable. reaching out to other people on your team, really making sure that we say even survey our end users. I mean, I know there’s a lot of speak of that in the IT management field. Of course there is. But is there a lot of speak of that in the vendor sales process? I would say that there’s not.

Speaker 1 | 40:48.021

Not as much. I mean, sometimes there’s a hurry to get ink on the paper, right, which is the unfortunate part of it. But. You and I both know, Phil, that the way to a happy client is to make sure you’re providing them the product they need, not the product you want them to have.

Speaker 0 | 41:04.026

Excellent. So much fun. I would say, you know, if I was going to ask you, like, if you had any advice for anyone out there, but that’s the best advice you could give. Don’t assume they understand your business thoroughly. Reach out to people within your business. i.e. all the various different departments, which you should be doing anyways. You should be connecting with your end users in various different departments and communicating with them and not hiding in the server room, which should not exist anymore.

Speaker 1 | 41:33.600

Right.

Speaker 0 | 41:35.442

You know, you should be doing that anyways. So that’s great. So we need to ask you the advice piece. Let’s ask you what not to do or what’s the worst nightmare scenario thing that’s ever happened to you that you can imagine? And why did that happen?

Speaker 1 | 41:49.882

To me specifically, we chose the wrong outsourced company to help with an install because we did not have people in a specific area of the U.S. And so we were going through an install and we were configuring everything appropriately. Everything was going smoothly. And then it came down to the physical component, which was the rack and stack with switches and routers. lighting up the the network and then also the ip phones and we would just get these random calls from the client saying should a switch be on the floor and i’m like on the on the floor where like is it just being waited to be installed i’m like i’m i guess with

Speaker 0 | 42:34.758

an ashtray on top you know and should this guy be like putting beer bottles on the you know right it was it was all those things and like

Speaker 1 | 42:46.090

they sent me pictures of like a switch sitting on somebody’s desk. And I’m like, where’s the data closet? And they’re like, oh, it’s around the corner. I’m like, well, okay. Like it was the strangest thing. And it was really that install. And, you know, an install can really ruin everything. You can bounce back from it, but it really, if you start off with such a bad taste in your mouth, it’s really hard to overcome as a service provider. And so that’s the one that always sticks out in my head. And I think that that was. Oh, probably eight or nine years ago.

Speaker 0 | 43:18.412

Yeah. I found that usually the biggest pain point is on the cutover day. It is. It’s not like, well, this product’s work. I’ve even seen POCs go fine. And then why did the install be so, why was it so mismanaged? Why was it a circus act? Why, you know? So again, though, to get more detailed on that, the failure was the people. The failure wasn’t really the product. The failure was the people on that one,

Speaker 1 | 43:47.187

it sounds like. Yeah, I think to a degree, but I also think it’s the business too, because we trusted in a sense, we did not vet properly. So I don’t think it’s all just on the fact that we had an unprofessional person do the install. It was, we were in a rush. We didn’t take the time to vet this third party. And we pushed forward because we took our own business for granted. We live in this world. We eat, sleep, and breathe it, right? And I think a lot of technology professionals do this is we just expect people to understand things at a certain level that we already understand because it’s second nature to us. You know, it’s one of those things. It was like, I’m trying to think of the best example. Like, when you’re first teaching somebody to drive a car, you just assume they’re going to pick their foot up off the gas if they get nervous instead of just mash it down to the ground. But you have to tell them, hey. slowly take it off slowly apply the brake don’t stamp your foot down you’ll get a better result type of thing um do you have any kids that are 16 or 17 not yet not yet i’m bracing for impact on that okay my daughter’s 17 i just it was like a special moment going with her it was like the thing she did with dad yeah

Speaker 0 | 44:59.444

like learning driving going and get her a license or anything she learned pretty fast and um she did pretty well she wasn’t like you know Like even like the, even like the, the officer that did the test and everything like that, you know, the drivers at prison are like, oh, it was just, you know, it was like a pleasure having your daughter because it wasn’t like, you know, complete fear. Ready to drive. I’m ready to drive. Some kids are like, I’m not ready to drive. But I know what you mean. Like you have to, you have to tell them like, it’s not turn into the intersection going straight and then do a 90 degree turn, like, and then turn the wheel. It’s kind of like a, you know, more like a 45 degree.

Speaker 1 | 45:34.801

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 45:35.870

increment you know people don’t it’s funny because you’ve been driving and doing it unconsciously you don’t even remember driving you know you know we don’t even remember driving on a two-hour drive like oh it just happened and that’s that’s i think you know for any technology professional out there it’s take

Speaker 1 | 45:51.597

a minute breathe and make sure that what you’re explaining is in enough detail for somebody who doesn’t live in your world to understand and it’s that that you I kind of believe in that extreme ownership as well. That was on us for not taking the time to talk through it with this install person. And we just made assumptions and thought, hey, he said a couple of right acronyms. He knows what he’s doing. Let’s move.

Speaker 0 | 46:18.735

I asked you last time what was the best part about Vonage, and you said you’re the most flexible platform.

Speaker 1 | 46:25.200

Yep. I said it was the best part.

Speaker 0 | 46:27.602

But what does that mean to people out there listening? And why is that important?

Speaker 1 | 46:32.206

I think it’s important because, actually, let’s start with what it means. I think that’s a better place to start. What does that mean? I think not only do we have the entire stack when you think of unified communications, contact center, and then API capabilities. So somebody could come for us for just one, or they could come for all, consumption of all of our products. But also to the extensibility of the platform for us to integrate and do one-off. and unique scenarios. And when we talk to partners, that helps us really fit specifically into a client’s need, whereas out-of-the-box products don’t always do that. So we have development professionals on staff so that if you need to get advice on how can we utilize these APIs from a dev perspective to complete our communications infrastructure or go-to-market strategy.

Speaker 0 | 47:33.067

Do you have dev people that can development software, development professionals that could write the code from start to finish for someone for a simple API?

Speaker 1 | 47:41.811

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 47:43.532

Okay. So I’ve got this janky old server that is running some crazy old software for my I don’t know. manufacturing company, manufacturing, there’s so many thoughts that came in.

Speaker 1 | 48:03.283

We’ll be stopping there, Phil, real quick. Real quick, I want to ask this.

Speaker 0 | 48:07.246

We’re manufacturing syringes. Can you guys build the API for the screen pop into their weird, janky old CRM?

Speaker 1 | 48:15.793

Can we? Possibly. Should we? That’s a different discussion. And I think that’s the thing, right? That’s why you’re around, Phil. That’s also why the approach we take, which is… what is best practice as well? Like, what is your long-term strategy? If you’re holding this together with bubble gum and Band-Aids, maybe we should be looking at what is your, like, let’s get you to a better database strategy first before we engage on all these other screen pops and go down this path. Because if that falls apart on you and you’re forced to switch that technology, then dev costs come back up again because we would have to engage again to integrate into a new platform.

Speaker 0 | 48:55.830

Yeah. Sometimes it takes, in that particular case that I was thinking of, the actual IT director had quite good development skills and he built the API himself in like, I think it was like four to eight hours. That’s awesome. He just wanted to read an inbound caller ID and pop a screen. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 49:14.019

And a lot of times we just advise on it because there are other folks that can do that, right?

Speaker 0 | 49:17.781

You just allow them to do that. You allow them to do it. You have some kind of sandbox. You guys allow them to build into this type of stuff.

Speaker 1 | 49:23.905

Correct.

Speaker 0 | 49:24.945

Okay. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Is there anything that I forgot to ask you that I should have asked you that was just like, you know, any other mind blowing stuff? Because we already got the assuming the vendors understand this thoroughly. That was that’s just a gem.

Speaker 1 | 49:41.464

Well, I’m glad it worked out. No, nothing that I can think of right off the top of my head. But I really appreciate you inviting me on, Phil. And I hope your listeners got a little bit out of it.

Speaker 0 | 49:52.131

Yeah. Thank you so much.