Hey, when you are a REPEAT ShoreTel Partner of the Year, you get to show off a little.
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Packet Fusion to sell ShoreTel’s Cloud Based Services
ShoreTel’s Cloud Division, M5 Networks, has added Packet Fusion, Inc. as an Alliance partner. As a ShoreTel Cloud Division channel partner, Packet Fusion will now offer customers cloud-based voice, unified communications, and contact center solutions, in addition to on-premise systems.
Packet Fusion, a current ShoreTel Gold Champion Partner and two times Partner of the Year for premise-based solutions, has helped West Coast businesses design, install and support cutting-edge unified communications solutions for more than 20 years. Packet Fusion and ShoreTel share a passion to deliver the highest level of customer satisfaction and ensure customers are delighted with their on-premise or in the cloud communications solutions and services. Packet Fusion has won every customer satisfaction award that ShoreTel offers. Packet Fusion intends to bring this award winning customer service to the cloud.
ShoreTel’s M5 Channel Partner Program is designed for value-added resellers and systems integrators who want to provide world-class cloud-based phone systems and unified communications services to their customers. To learn more about ShoreTel’s M5 partner programs visit http://www.m5.net/partners/.
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“Call Before You Dig”
When you have been in the telecom business as long as I have, you get to see a lot of factors that impact the monthly telecom expenses of a business. These factors can range from poor management of the circuit inventory to unmanaged contracts that “evergreen” at old expensive rates. In recent months, I have actually seen the physical address of the business become the most significant and unexpected factor. Here are a few examples of actual customer experiences that I have had this year.
In example #1 there was a glass company that had chosen to move a little ways out of town. They didn’t need a showroom so it made perfect sense to move their offices and lower their real estate costs. The construction on the new facility began and the IT manager was referred to me for assistance with their carrier management. After a simple review of their Customer Service Records we learned that had built their building in a different “rate center” and their old numbers could not be moved. Since they were in the service business, their customers have different telephone numbers to call from all of the nearby cities. The net result was that they had to implement Remote Call Forwarding on all lines and pay for “paths” to accommodate each call. I know it sounds technical but you get the point. Net result: $1,500.00 in unforeseen monthly telecom charges ($18,000 a year) that basically killed the savings of the move. I don’t know if they had a choice as to where they could build but it sure would have been nice to check with their telecom provider in advance and at a minimum get then information to make a an informed decision.
Example #2 is a start-up company that will have offices across the country. They contacted me to assist them in their carrier management strategy for their national rollout. As a small flexible start-up, my assumption is that they could have put their HQ office anywhere they wanted to. Since the HQ office is the hub for their voice and data (VoIP) it requires them to have a lot of bandwidth to properly handle the traffic. As I was looking into helping them expand their current connection, we priced a 10Mbps Internet connection for about $2,600.00 a month. That is a lot of money every month for any company let alone a cash strapped start-up. I am sure you know where I am going with this. You guessed it, less than one mile away from their offices, that same circuit is $1,200.00 a month. Assuming that they will continue to grow, the uneducated choice of locations will be very costly.
Are you ready for the moral of the story? Just like the utility company says “Call before you dig” I am saying “Call before you sign the new lease”. With a Total Telecom Management solution in place rather than dealing directly with the carrier, these could both have been avoided.
Joe Bjorklund – Director of Business Development – vCom Solutions. Contact Joe at: joeb@vcomsolutions.com
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Business Cable? The Emperor is Naked
If you watch any television at all, you have undoubtedly seen hundreds of advertisements for “Business Cable”
The commercials take you into the offices of these business owners that are completely frustrated with the “Phone Company” and the high prices that they push upon their customers. Customer after customer holds up their current bill with a look of disgust and then begins to tell us how much faster and more affordable their new service is from the cable company.
So here is my gripe. It is not what you may be thinking. I agree that the cable companies offer a great product for the home user or the small business. They can bundle telephone lines with the internet capability and the net result is a very nice voice and data solution. I use it at my home every day and it is wonderful. Notice I said my home? The problem with the Cable companies pitching their services to the business is not a feature/benefit problem, it’s an availability problem. In a recent project for one of my customers, we set out to price cable voice and data services for approximately 45 locations. After 60 days of setting up site surveys and pre-qualifying these locations, we found that 4 of them could sign up for the service. The cable companies built out a fabulous residential network but they are still in the very early stages of building out their network to the business locations. The net result for my customer was a bunch of hype about converting to “Business Cable” only to waste over 60 days of everybody’s time and delaying their project into the following quarter. They placed orders for DSL and the project finished up quickly thereafter.
So my advice to the cable companies: take some of that advertising money and build a network that my customers can sign up for.
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True Single Point of Contact
I will be working on my latest post this weekend. I will explain why it is so beneficial to procure your carrier services from the VAR that deploys your PBX
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How to Buy
I was recently giving a presentation to a group of telecom decision makers in thePortlandarea. They asked me several questions about the telecom “state of the union” as well as where I thought things were moving to in 2012. Near the end of the meeting a man in the front row asked a very simple question. He told the group that he was in the middle of a telecom project and has several proposals from a variety of sources. His question was: “We are talking to carriers, resellers and agents. They are all recommending different solutions. In your opinion, who is giving me the best chance of success?” I actually laughed a bit, paused, stalled, pondered my answer and told him to look to my blog for the answer.
Here you go: To start, you need to remember that he asked me for my opinion. This is how I see it. I have been in the telecom business from February of 1985 and my opinion has not changed.
The Carrier Rep: This person has ONE job to do. Convince you to buy circuits on THEIR network. Period, end of story. Is their solution the best one for your application? It doesn’t matter. They MUST sell you their network. This one is self explanatory.
The Reseller: The reseller has a group of “underlying carriers” that make up their network. They have wholesale relationships with the carrier like Verizon, Qwest, AT&T, XO, Paetec and Level 3, to name a few. Like any retail business, they buy at wholesale, mark it up and sell at retail. There are some good resellers out there with some really nice software tools but there are problems. The biggest issue that customers have with a reseller is the lack of control. They do not like having a “middleman” between them and the carrier. Oh by the way, if the reseller doesn’t pay the carrier’s monthly wholesale bill, what do you think happens? If you find a good reseller that you trust then this is a good option but not the best.
The Agent / Carrier Partner: The Carrier Partner is the best of both worlds. These companies have a portfolio of products to bring to the table for their customers. They are sales agents for the carriers and the customer pays nothing for their services. The customer gets three distinct benefits from the Agent / Carrier Partner.
- Diverse product mix to choose from assures proper network deployment
- Carrier Partner that works for the customer during contracting and project management
- Security of dealing directly with the carrier without middleman
Those who read this blog know that I work for a ShoreTel VAR as their Manager of Carrier Services. TRUE. A few years back after I sold my hardware business, I wanted to get involved in network services. I met with all of the big carriers, master agents and resellers. I made my career decision based on the exact information that a customer should use in choosing how to procure network services.
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Tough to beat #Paetec these days
PAETEC Holding Corp. (NASDAQ: PAET) today announced that it will provide Rural Area Health Education Center (R-AHEC) with a a high-speed IP-network for the Western New York Rural Broadband Healthcare Network (WNYRBHN). This work is part of a 60-month contract valued at $6 million that will serve 38 facilities with advanced Internet and MPLS-based VPN over PAETEC’s fiber optic network
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No longer, Same, Same, Same
Several years back, I would go into a meeting with a potential customer that was looking for a new PBX and begin the process of learning about their business and their telecom needs. I was going to show them how my product could help with all of their problems. My goal was to show them that my product was so superior to my competition that it was the only intelligent option. After years of this it dawned on me that we were all selling the same thing. Reliability was no longer an issue and there were more “features” than any 10 customers combined would use.
A typical customer would tell me that they were looking at Avaya, Nortel (me) and Cisco. My reply would be to point to each of the demo phones left behind and say “same, same, same” because they were. The industry had made some great telephone systems that lasted for years but that was it. The industry had hit a plateau and there was no innovation.
It got so old that I sold my company and moved on.
I recently made a decision that I was going to look under the hood of the telecom industry that had treated me so well in the past and see if I should spend the last 10 years of my working life doing what I had done in the first 20 years of my working like.
My approach was simple. If I was the director of IT for a 500 person company with multiple locations, what would I buy.
Long story short, here I am back in the industry and finally I no longer need to say “same, same, same”. I am excited to write about how I picked the product and service to sell for the next 10 years. Please stay tuned.
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What it takes to be Partner of the Year
Packet Fusion is awarded the Shoretel Partner of the Year. I think its important to know how incredibly hard that is to achieve.
