Packet Fusion / ShoreTel / MPLS / SIP
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vCom Solutions updates on Verizon strike

By
Joe Bjorklund

This is a reprint from the TEMTalk blog at vCom Solutions.

Written by Heather Faison: VP of Carrier Operations Monday, 22 August 2011 09:13

East Coast Verizon workers are returning to work.  The 45,000 land-line employees who have been on strike for two weeks will return to work Tuesday, August 23, though contract negotiations are ongoing.   The previous contracts will be extended with no specific deadline for a new contract.

Please note that Verizon workers will initially focus on trouble issues relating to priority services such as schools and medical facilities.  They do have a back log with regards to maintenance issues which need to be addressed. Verizon will begin issuing new “due-dates” on orders processed after the strike and we expect those dates to be secured later this week or early the next.  vCom Solutions will be updating you on those new due dates as they are secured.  Provisioning escalations will not be permitted except for orders impacting Public Safety, Medical, E911 or Out of Service situations.  As a reminder, the areas that may be affected with ordering and provisioning include:

  • Connecticut
  • Delaware
  • District of Columbia
  • Maryland
  • Massachusetts
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • Pennsylvania
  • Rhode Island
  • Virginia
  • West Virginia

We will continue to work closely with our management contacts within Verizon to minimize potential customer impact, related to repair activities and installations.  We will pass on relevant information regarding this matter as it becomes available.  As we continue to monitor this situation closely, please feel free to reach out to your vCom Account Team with any questions.  Our technical support team is also available 24×7 at (800) 804-VCOM if you experience any service issues.

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Is this Telecom’s New Big Three?

By
Joe Bjorklund

When I got into this business in 1985 the “PBX Big Three” was AT&T (Avaya / Lucent), Nortel and Siemens/Rolm.  These products represented the “nobody ever got fired for buying X (insert one of the big 3 here)” method of thinking.   Boy, I can’t begin to tell you how much I hated that.  Sorry, post PBX sales fatigue flashback.

Today I got confirmation that the original Big Three has been replaced by the new and far superior Big Three.  We all have seen Cisco flex their muscle and take over market share.  You may or may not know about Shore-Tel’s dark horse run into prominence.  The third member of the group, and in my opinion, the leader is the new Mitel.  I say new due to their acquisition of Inter-Tel a few years back. 

In the past, I had always considered Mitel to be an industry leader bringing a strong dealer network and quality products to the market, but, to be honest, a little boring.

All of that changed for me today.  I had the opportunity to attend the grand opening of the Mitel Solution Center in Seattle.  When you walk in the door the first impression you get is that you are about to see something very cool.  That is just the beginning.  The facility replicates an actual office environment with remote locations and off site employees. It is divided into separate technologies ranging from Unified Communications to Remote Teleworkers and everything in between.  Every work station is completely integrated with the next. A potential customer can touch and feel every technology that they are evaluating and many other applications that they had not even considered.  All of the call flow and features are used in real time right in front of you. Attention Customer: That is how you make an intelligent buying decision in this industry.  

I could not help but think back to the days when I would sit in a conference room with a dead phone and demonstrate the features.  The phone was not plugged into anything so I never made a mistake. It never made the wrong beep or flashed the wrong lights. You don’t loose many sales when the demonstration goes that smoothly. That style worked when the phones had 12 features with one feature being hold and yes, hold was actually a feature. 

Needless to say, the days of 12 features are long gone and communications technology has taken on a life of its own. If you are evaluating a new communications platform for your business, you owe it to yourself to contact Mitel or one of their dealers and find one of these Mitel Solutions Centers in your city.  Prepare to be impressed.

If you are wondering what my motivation is to give such a glowing review of this facility, there is none.  In fact, the Mitel offices sell a carrier service offering, which actually makes them a direct competitor of mine.  Now, to be completely honest, if I loose a carrier services deal to them in the future, I will probably come back and delete this post; especially if the customer says “nobody ever got fired for buying Mitel”

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Validas Blog Post – Interesting

By
Joe Bjorklund

I read a lot of telecom expense management blog post and most are, well, boring, irrelevant and unintelligent.  When I read a good one, even if it overlaps what I sell, I like to post it and give them their props.  The guys at Validas are doing some pretty cool things.  Here it is.

So you use data on your cell phone. How much? What tier of data user are you—can you save money by getting a light data plan or are you a data hog who runs through a bunch of gigabytes every month? Verizon Wireless and Sprint make it simple, offering only unlimited plans for Smartphone customers. AT&T and T-Mobile offer tiered packages, both with 200MB set as the lowest data plan.
Picking 200MB of data as the threshold is an interesting choice. As you can see from the graph below, 200MB is about half the average data user’s monthly data consumption across the four main wireless carriers. (Ranging from 345.8MB for AT&T data users to 429.4MB for T-Mobile data users, the exact average comes out to 391.9MB.)

The spread here makes it seem like the 200MB plan would be the option for just a minority of light data users. After all, if the averages are twice that 200MB limit, wouldn’t most data users require one of the larger packages (up to 4GB on AT&T and up to 10GB on T-Mobile)?
No. In fact, around 60% of data users across the carriers consume less than the 200MB threshold every month:

This discrepancy between average data use versus most people’s data consumption points to a data hog minority whose extremely heavy usage rockets up the overall average and inflates the apparent necessity of bigger data plans. With around 60% of customers under the lowest tier of data, unlimited-only plans and 200MB minimum plans might be considered unnecessary subscription, if not mandatory over-subscription.
The imbalance becomes even more striking when we look at the median data user’s consumption, not even close to the 200MB minimum plan:

As you can see from the graph above, half of Verizon Wireless data users consumed less than 79.9MB monthly; half of AT&T data users consumed less than 88MB monthly; half of Sprint users consumed less than 93.4MB monthly; and half of T-Mobile data users consumed less than 133.8MB monthly. Average these median numbers together and we see that across all four carriers combined, half of data users consumed less than 98.8MB monthly. When we compare this cross carrier median data figure of about 100MB with the cross carrier average data figure of about 400MB (from the first “average data” graph above), we get a real sense of how much more data a few users at the top are consuming compared to the vast majority of the users at the middle and bottom—and how imbalanced the comparably low data usage of that majority is with the available heavy data plans.

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Managing Conferencing Costs

By
Joe Bjorklund

I was demonstrating our software platform to a telecom consultant yesterday.  We went over all of the different tools that his clients can use to manage their telecom costs.  In the consulting world there is usually a particular type of telecom spend that gets them in the door and starts the relationship with the client.  In this case it was the audio conferencing costs.  The primary goal was to find a lower monthly per minute (more on that later) cost for the customer.  Lower per minute charge = savings.  It’s pretty simple stuff.  We went over the ability to have all conferences tagged with cost centers and G/L codes as well as the fact that it is included in the single master bill. This was all very well received, however, the demonstration took a huge leap forward when I showed him the report that we call “under used conference bridge”.  This report lists EVERY conference call that has 3 or fewer participants on the call.  Many had just 2 participants, otherwise known as a phone call.  These conferences could have been completed by using the customer’s telephone system and not a cost per minute bridge.  Do you think that the conferencing providers would produce such a report?  One more reason that dealing with the carrier, or in this case the conferencing provider is an outdated strategy.  Oh, by the way, our cost per minute was 34% lower than their current solution.

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The Trouble Ticket Dance

By
Joe Bjorklund

The life of a telecom trouble ticket

There is one constant in the management of telecom services; circuits have problems.  This is an unfortunate truth about the technology that we all depend on so much.  With that fact in mind, the next thing to consider is how a company manages those events.  Let’s take a hypothetical look at a company that manages the carriers directly as compared to one that outsources that process. 

In this comparison, ABC Enterprises manages telecom for all 70 of their locations, while XYZ Corporation outsources the management of their telecom.

The branch manager of ABC Enterprises realizes that their T1 is down and production is at a standstill.  Based on the time of day and time zone, he either calls corporate or takes on the task himself.  Assuming that the “telecom department” is handling it, the investigation starts.  Who is the carrier, what is the service, what number do I call?  Eventually call is placed to the Customer Service call center of the carrier and the process begins.  The trouble ticket is verbally explained to the customer service rep.  What is the address of the facility, what is your account number, do you know the circuit ID of the T1, and is there any trouble history with this circuit?  Please hold while we generate a trouble ticket.  Compare that to the company that uses an outsourced Telecom Lifecycle Management service.  The manager learns of the T1 problems and notifies corporate.  The IT department logs onto their cloud based telecom management tool.  They click on the site that is having the problems.  Site information provided includes but is not limited to address, circuit type, underlying carrier, circuit ID, install date, long distance provider, associated other services and complete history of that circuit from day of installation.  The IT manager clicks on the open case tab or calls vCom customer service.  The ticket is opened and the management of that trouble is in place.

In the case of ABC Enterprises, the IT manager is informed that the ticket has been created and they can check back later.  As the day moves on, the IT manager makes random calls to the call center to track the progress of the ticket.  Throughout the day, there are many calls and a lot of time that the well paid IT manger is sitting on hold with the carrier rather than managing IT.  It is now 6:00 in the HQ office and the process needs to be handed off to the west coast IT team to manage.  The IT manger attempts to verbally explain the situation to the west coast office without missing any critical information.  The west coast office now sits on hold with the carrier. 

Meanwhile XYZ Corporation checks their TMaaS tool for constant updates (24/7/ 365) including ticket status, notes from customer service as well as EVERY e-mail regarding ticket from customer, carrier and anybody else involved in repairing the circuit. All of this is stored in the history of that circuit. The service is repaired and the notes reflect the nature of the problem and the ticket is now closed and archived.

We often run into situations where the customer wants to manage the carrier rather than have us do it.  Based on the cost of managing those services in house and the lack of tools to do so, it is apparent that there is a far batter way.

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Politics and Wireless Data Usage, Seriously!

By
Joe Bjorklund

 In trying to keep up with all of the changes in the telecom industry, I come across some interesting (sometimes worthless) information.  This is a re-print from Validas.  Validas.com isolated the Top 10 states with the highest average data downloads per user. This week we threw those results onto a map of the country as split between Red (Republican) and Blue (Democrat) states in the 2008 Presidential election. In an age of politics so hostile that our government nearly shuts down as a result of partisan hackery, it’s striking to learn that Democrats and Republicans are unified as Americans in how we engage our wireless technology, an integral part of our daily lives. As the map below indicates, Americans in states that voted Republican average about 447 Megabytes (MB) per month in downloads. And states that voted Democrat? Check this out: 449 MB per person, per month.

So for all our clamoring, we tend to live our lives as wireless consumers pretty similarly. Our experience as Americans in today’s modern technological society, and how we engage that society, is remarkably similar. So much for derogatory stereotypes about Republican states as “country” or “backwards” and Democratic states as “elitist” or “out-of-touch.” While small percentages of people will always pack the extremes ideologically, and while our nation certainly varies regionally in many ways, our wireless consumer profile of the average American suggests we’re closer than we might expect.

Besides our commonalities, the wireless usage map might also tell us about our differences–here when it comes to selecting the President. Think about this: Of the Top 10 states with the greatest average data usage per person, six voted Democrat (including Washington, D.C.) and four voted Republican in 2008. Can we predict our next President based on which party appears more often in that Top 10 list? It works for 2008! Or consider this: Two “swing” states with razor-thin 2008 victory margins are included in that Top 10: Missouri (voted Republican, with 539 MB average monthly usage per person) and Virginia (voted Democrat, with 654 MB average month usage per person). When the swing states in the Top 10 are split down the middle like this, will the Presidency go to whichever party wins the state with the greater average monthly use per person? Again, works in ’08! Stay tuned for future Validas usage studies to determine if these kinds of conjectured patterns and predictors do actually exist. Will Validas be able to call the next President of the United States based on Americans’ wireless usage?

For anyone interested in the methodology of the study; while Americans from all 50 states use Validas to evaluate and reduce their cell bills, the study focused on those states with heavy usage of Validas to give accurate results about the average data consumed per person. Thirty-eight states (again including Washington, D.C.) had enough data to qualify, while seven Republican and six Democrat states did not and were excluded.

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Telephone Bill Processing

By
Joe Bjorklund

This is how most companies process their huge pile of paper phone bills.

Invoiceflow

This archaeic process will be be a distant memory as companies move to more efficient distribution of carrier services.  Managing the carriers in hou

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A Debate About Outsourcing

By
Joe Bjorklund

I recently had a passionate conversation with a potential customer that I still find very interesting.  I had been given his name by a customer of mine when I asked for a few referrals.  As you know a happy customer that refers you to another company is solid gold.  When you have a unique offering such as our vManager platform, that introduction is even better.

The conversation started off well there was a lot of chatter about the telecom business etc.  He was anxious to look at options to lower his telecom spend.  I assured him that we would be able to offer significant savings and things were really starting to gel.  I got to the part of the conversation where I explained that we are a telecom management provider and we offer a solution to our customers that not only lowers their hard costs but has a dramatic effect on their soft costs.  That is where I lost him.  He replied back to me that he was not interested in handing over the management of his telecom to us.  The implication, of course, was that he could do it better than we could.

Now, I have been in sales for many years and don’t need to be reminded that the last thing you want to do is get into a conflict with a prospective customer.  Here was the problem:  He was wrong!  I am sure that he is great at what he does and his IT staff of 2 seasoned telecom veterans works very hard to keep things in tip top shape.  That being said, he was still wrong.

Realizing that the potential for a sale was rapidly fading; I made a decision that one day he will thank me for.  I decided to stand my ground at any cost and show him that he was wrong.  You can’t pay your bills with moral victories but it had been a long day and I was determined to passionately vocalize my point. 

He began telling me about the voice mail box that all of his branches leave messages regarding problems with lines and circuits.  He told me how the mailbox pages him to let him know there is trouble.  He explained that he has every piece of information regarding his circuits in a spreadsheet so he can manage the carriers.  Smelling a little blood in the water, I asked him to bear with me as we did a test.  I asked him to think about how he is currently managing his carriers as I explain what my customers do.  I gave him 5 questions to find the answers to while I did the same in the software that my customers use.  I asked him to find the following information on one of his remote offices.

                What is the Circuit ID (from the LEC) of the PRI installed at that facility?

                What are all of the DID numbers assigned to that circuit?

                When does the contract expire on that circuit?

                Get a copy of the paperwork that was signed to have that circuit installed?

                What cost center is that circuit assigned to?

I was able to complete all of the items above in the time that it took him to write them down.  I could have gone on a lot longer with many more examples but I knew I was pushing it a bit. At this point, one of two things could have happened.  I was either going to hear dial tone in my ear or he was going to admit that there is a better way to manage the carriers.  He didn’t hang up on me but he also didn’t tell me that I was right.  He did say, however, that there may be some value to the accounting department and he would forward my information.  Change is very difficult for many and the way our customers manage their telecom IS different.  It is not only different, it is better.  My prospect realized that after our test but was not going to admit it.  I expect to be talking with him again soon.

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“Call Before You Dig”

By
Joe Bjorklund

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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In Search of a Better Wireless Experience

By
Joe Bjorklund

For those that follow this blog, you know that it is all about total telecom management with the net goal being a lower total telecom spend.

In recent months, the most common question asked here has been: where is the best place to buy my wireless services?  The honest answer: I have no idea.

Here is what I do know, along with a plan to find the actual answer to the question.  In business (wired) telecom, the days of working directly with the carriers are rapidly coming to an end.  This distribution method is archaic and will soon go away completely.  Here is analogy that I often use.  In the old days, you would go directly to the farmer to buy your eggs.  That was a time consuming task with varying results.  Today you get higher quality eggs, a much better egg selection, lower egg prices and better overall shopping experience based on the distribution model that the grocery store has created

That distribution model is why our customers love us.  The success of our company is based on a few simple business concepts:

  • Our customer service is far superior to the carriers (now granted, that is not  hard to do)
  • Our aggregated purchasing power gives us pricing far better than a customer can get from the carrier directly
  • We have over 30 carriers that we manage which gives our customers every option that they would ever need
  • You have better things to do than managing the carriers (plus, we are better at it)
  • Your business matters to us.

It stands to reason that the wireless customer would benefit from this same distribution model. A wireless provider that can offer the same value proposition to their customers would be a gift to everyone from the IT Manager all the way to the individual user.

To find the answer to the question above, I have been conducting an informal survey of my customers, peers and friends to find the wireless provider (not the carrier directly) that offers the same value to its customers that we do to ours.  I am not quite ready to let the cat out of the bag, but a few names keep coming up with one of them far outpacing the others.  I am waiting to hear back from a few more IT managers that I work with before I post the results.

Stay tuned

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