Microsoft Wants You Off Calling Plans

[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Max Clark: all right, so tell me about rosemond. What, um, I mean university education, how many users, you know, distributed one location campus, like gimme, gimme a little bit of background.

[00:00:12] Steve Forcum: Yeah, so Roseman University is a multi-campus facility based in, uh, I believe they're in Nevada. I got, I'd have to look it up. Um, but ultimately they were wrestling with legacy, Cisco Unified Communications Infrastructure, and they. Kind of reached a, a breaking point where they said this is becoming too much to manage with a limited IT staff.

Um, you know, years and years and years ago, they made the same decision that a lot of organizations did when they were looking at on-prem of Legacy PBX versus Cisco was the new name on the block. So, you know, nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco. So a lot of organizations bought those ucs or the ucms and deployed them.

And the reality of operating a, a standalone. On-premise phone system [00:01:00] multiplied and compounded across multiple campuses. It was too much to manage, uh, for their IT staff. The costs were escalating because they were at end of life for the infrastructure they were on. So they were gonna have to invest in hardware, they were gonna have to invest in licensing, and ultimately they weren't seeing the value from just a, a phone on a desk.

So what we talked to them about was leveraging their investments in Office 365. Um, and because they're in higher education, they were able to actually access dramatically discount, discounted licensing, uh, to upgrade to the uh, a five E five. Which gave 'em the phone system license. And then we were able to give them, you know, the calling entitlements, the, uh, they're using our, uh, text messaging partner clerk chat to eng engage to enhance student services and, uh, alumni outreach with text.

And ultimately, the, the value of a centralized cloud-based model has proven itself in cost, in operational efficiency and also in [00:02:00] innovation across the campus. Um, one of the biggest stats that I think is interesting with them is that they had, um, roughly 700, 800 some odd IP phones that they wanted to retire out of the infrastructure.

They were Cisco ip, so they could convert 'em to sip. And the approach that they took with reluctant faculty, we'll use that term right, was just give this a shot for 90 days. Use a soft phone. And what they, what they kind of knew, what the administration knew there was, you're all using your desk phones in speakerphone mode in a closed office.

So there's not really a need to have a dedicated appliance on your desk when you can just do that through your computer. So they took 700 of these phones, they took 'em off the desks, they gave them, uh, the reluctant faculty, uh, soft clients and only 70% of, or 70 phones, not 70%, but so roughly about 90% of them said, nah, I'm good.

You're right. This [00:03:00] is not such a big issue. Um, and they were able to repurpose the hardware for those that didn't. So it wasn't a case of, you know, we made this decision, now I've gotta go out and invest in new infrastructure. Some of the standard space work that the industry has been working on for the past 20 years really starts to shine in this type of an environment because with sip.

You don't have these throwaway investments, and there's a lot of key benefits. There's financial benefits, there's environmental front benefits. We're not putting, you know, all these pieces of plastic out in the landfill somewhere. We're still, you know, squeezing more usable life out of them. Uh, so it's been a, it was a really interesting stat for me, and the way that they chose to kind of roll the solution out to minimize that disruption to the university's operations across multiple campuses was another real interesting eye-opener for me on, um, you know, how they, how they gained adoption, how they were able to roll this out and see success.

[00:03:51] Max Clark: Did they have a dedicated telecom team going into this, or was the IT team already responsible in managing, uh, the CC M platform? So it was [00:04:00] as, as one. Shot.

[00:04:00] Steve Forcum: It was the latter. So their IT team was managing the Cisco unified communications infrastructure in addition to all the other, uh, you know, IT infrastructure that they supported. So it was, it was, like I said, the overhead was becoming onerous for them. 'cause it wasn't just one system. They had multiple systems across different campuses.

[00:04:18] Max Clark: Since the advent of teams and teams voice and then what became direct routing, and we've been through lots of iterations now. Right?

[00:04:24] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:25] Max Clark: It's still iterating on this platform pretty significantly. I think what surprised me more than anything else is just how many different approaches and, and, and perceptions or, um, or goals people really look at this infrastructure with, you know, and, and, now it's becoming this, or at least for my seat, where I never really know when I'm walking in what, what kind of outcome.

gonna get to, 'cause maybe there's a perception that they want to, you know, there's some driver, there's a perception, there's some goal, there's some thought process. And as you work deeper and deeper into it, other [00:05:00] things always come out like. You mentioned phones on desks, right? Do they wanna maintain phones on desks?

meeting room appliances, what does that look like? it's almost like a, an organization by organization now has a lot more options of what can they deliver and what, what.

Where they want to go and what they want to get out of it,

[00:05:18] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:19] Max Clark: it's this, this one size fits all isn't really the case anymore. And it's interesting how this is playing out.

[00:05:24] Steve Forcum: Yeah, and I think the, the problem Microsoft has is they've created, to use the analogy, there's one destination. I wanna turn on calling in teams because I see the, the benefits across, you know, cost efficiencies. I see the benefits on, uh, productivity gains 'cause my users aren't juggling all the apps. And I see the benefits and innovation, you know, to your point, they're iterating on the teams platform itself.

And, you know, new innovations like copilot now copilot agents, um, that's where innovation's happening in communications is on these cloud-based [00:06:00] platforms, whether it's teams in this case with Roseman or, you know, zoom or even Cisco WebEx. And the challenge Microsoft has had, and I think they're relatively unique in this space, 'cause Zoom's story is much cleaner, is that they've created a lot of different ways to get to that destination.

You know, so if you, if you're using a GPS, it's gonna give you, this is the direct route, but then there's like these other side routes if you want to go on the little side quest, so to speak, right? Uh, direct routing operator connect, uh, direct routing as a service. They're all basically the same thing. It, it's getting voice.

It's, they're all leading to the same outcome for the end customer. There may be slightly, you know, different spins on the ball depending on which one you choose, but ultimately it, the, the destination is what most customers are looking for. Like, uh, you know, Roseman University was looking to enable Microsoft as their collaboration platform, as their full collaboration, including calling and, you know, text messaging, digital, digital comms, and how [00:07:00] they?

turn that on didn't really matter, but it creates this, this, um, this research point for a customer.

'cause, you know, they say customers do about 70% of the reach for research before they reach out to a trusted advisor to get more information. It's another kind of needless obstacle for a customer to try and figure out, like, all right, what's the difference? Like, what's the difference between operator connect, direct routing, and, you know?

[00:07:26] Max Clark: Let's talk about that. I mean, this is, this is a great, like, like let's go off of this tangent a little bit,

[00:07:30] Steve Forcum: Sure.

[00:07:30] Max Clark: Okay, so, so Microsoft is unbundling teams

[00:07:33] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:34] Max Clark: as a directive, right? So now. We have, we have to compute what the actual cost of the team seat

[00:07:39] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:40] Max Clark: And, and, you know, presumably people are invested enough in teams.

That teams doesn't leave. It's just they have to add now this cost of teams to

[00:07:46] Steve Forcum: Correct.

[00:07:47] Max Clark: So then you decide you wanna go into teams voice. So you have to buy the PBX license. It's either in your bundle, you know, if you're, if you're on the right tier, you get it. If not, you have to license the PBX component. And

[00:07:58] Steve Forcum: Correct.

[00:07:59] Max Clark: I think this was a [00:08:00] big surprise for a long time for a lot of people because.

Um, Microsoft has, has decreased the cost of the PBX license, but it used to be very expensive to

[00:08:07] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:08] Max Clark: to actually just to purchase the PBX component. Okay. So you've, you've committed to teams, you've licensed teams, you've committed to teams voice, you've licensed the PBX, right? And now you have paths to the PSTN.

purchase licensing directly from Microsoft.

[00:08:26] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:27] Max Clark: The PSTN connectivity. If you haven't done that, I'm just telling you right now, don't do it. Um, we can talk about that more, but then you've, you've rattled off three right? Direct routing operator connect and direct routing as a service

[00:08:38] Steve Forcum: So direct routing was first, and it was designed as a way to bridge on-premise infrastructure into teams. And it was really before a pure cloud environment was really seen, and it was designed to kind of address that, that. You know, healthy middle of customers that are gonna live in a hybrid world for a time.[00:09:00]

The problem with direct routing is it's a bit of a science experiment.

And, and I mean that in the most loving way possible, but it is, it, it is like for, for a provider like us, direct routing is like trying to manage a spider web. 'cause each customer has their own individual strand into team, you know, their own SIP connectivity into team. You've gotta manage their dial plan uniquely on their environment.

Um, it's, it's very intensive work to get it up and running. Now, companies like C Pio, um, said, you know, there's not really a need to keep your infrastructure on premise if you wanna move to teams. Um, and the, the, the way to do that in a pure. Cloud infrastructure, less environment was where direct routing as a service was born.

So the only difference [00:10:00] between direct routing and direct routing as a service at the time was instead of the the carrier service going to your site and then you building a link to teams, us as a provider, we would build a link to teams from our data centers to teams, and then you just buy dial tone service from us.

So essentially it was two sides of the same coin. Direct routing, direct routing as a service. It was basically just an operational model. Instead of having the infrastructure on site, I'm just subscribing to a company like C pio. And one of the things that we did early on in the direct routing as a service model was we realized we wanted to deliver some speed, some simplicity, and some flexibility to the product.

So one of the first things that we did in order to enhance reliability is we were an early adopter of what's called dis uh, derived trunking. So basically instead of a million links to, you know, the Microsoft Azure environment for each customer, one by one by one, we built one big pipe into [00:11:00] teams and we had everybody running in our production environment over that one pipe.

So that gave us, uh, some stability. It gave us some speed. Um, the other thing that we did with direct routing and direct routing as a service, and this is part of the reason why I say it's a bit of a science experiment, is there's a lot of PowerShell code to, to get it up and running. You know, you really have to understand coding in order to, you know, configure this thing.

And that meant a lot of professional services to get it up and running. Um, one user required two lines of code. So, you know, scale that out. It doesn't, it doesn't scale. So, you know, for a hundred users, you're looking at 200 lines of code for a thousand users, 2000 lines of code that you're just key whacking, key whacking, key whacking.

So. We went and built a voice panel so that it turned all of the code into a graphic user interface. Six clicks and you're ready to go. You could manage your numbers inside of our, uh, application and push those into teams tenant. 'cause at the time, there was no place in [00:12:00] Microsoft Teams admin center to manage phone numbers.

Um, so it, it really kind of tried to make a. Complicated solution, a little bit more elegant. Um, think of it kind of like the, you know, way we cell phones used to be. And then when Apple basically said, no, you've got one home button, that was really where we were trying to aim for, was to make this, you know, kind of simple and easy.

But at the end of the day, it still was a challenge from a supportability perspective because if Microsoft, there was no reference architecture to direct routing. So when Microsoft makes a change on the teams platform, potentially could ca create cascading issues because now all of a sudden, um, you know, customers were offline 'cause their, their links went down or whatnot.

So Microsoft announced operator connect and this was what we've lovingly called Direct Routing 2.0. And we loved it because it introduced the idea of a reference architecture. In order to be an operator in the Operator Connect marketplace, you have to actually go through a full audit [00:13:00] of technology and business model and everything else.

So for us, it created a sustainable solution. Um, fun fact, we actually failed our first audit with Microsoft 'cause we lived in Azure. And the prescriptive, uh, approach for integrating because every other carrier was outside of Azure and offsite colos,

[00:13:18] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:19] Steve Forcum: was that you have to go through maps, uh, Microsoft Azure peering service.

You couldn't just do an IPSec VPN in or anything else. And We're like, guys, we are neighbors. We don't need to go through maps. That's like basically saying, I'm gonna plug the kitchen, uh, the fridge in the kitchen, but instead of plugging into the socket that's there, I gotta walk out the house with an extension cord, come through the front house or from the, come through the front door

[00:13:42] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:43] Steve Forcum: plug it in using the extension cord.

Like, you know, once we got the two sides talking, um, you know, all of a sudden it was like, oh, this is actually pretty elegant. We're we're running with this. Uh, so we've been Azure native since the very beginning and that's been, uh, a value to us because, you know, being next door neighbors.

[00:13:58] Max Clark: Does Microsoft [00:14:00] still force the uh, SBC selections as part of that? Reference architecture

[00:14:05] Steve Forcum: Yes.

[00:14:06] Max Clark: at the beginning it was like you, you know, service providers had to have, it was like, here's your list. You could be A, B, C, D,

[00:14:10] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:11] Max Clark: they had certified, so they still okay.

[00:14:12] Steve Forcum: Yeah. So there's still supported infrastructure on that front. Again, trying to create some stability here.

[00:14:17] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:18] Steve Forcum: and then in the Operator connect marketplace, when Microsoft is going to make a change on an API, it's cascaded down to the operator. So we have time to, you know, kind of prepare, adjust for it.

So it's a much more, you know, reliable solution. But at the end of the day, it's another route to that same destination of, I wanna turn on calling in teams. So, you know, where do the, where do the, where does the actual operate, uh, the network operations come from? The PSTN. How do you connect it in? This is all behind the curtain stuff that we wrestle with, but the customers don't need to, 'cause the customers aren't looking to buy.

Operator connect or direct routing, they're not products. They're routes to a destination. And that's really where I think they've, they've kind of tried to clean this up [00:15:00] with Operator Connect. They're obviously trying to drive more of the traffic through the Operator Connect program. Um, but to your point, they still have calling plans out in the market and, you know, direct routing still.

out there for those hybrid customers.

So.

[00:15:11] Max Clark: There's still, I mean, I was gonna say there's still examples of people and reasons why you would end up on direct

[00:15:16] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:17] Max Clark: that's, I, I mean, I, the, the main use case I can think of is probably, um, uh, context center applications or call recording, you know, things like this where it actually requires a different, um, a different voice architecture of how the voice traffic gets pinned through the service provider to teams and vice versa.

Right.

[00:15:36] Steve Forcum: Uh, even that's starting to change. I mean, honestly, we have partners that we do call recording with and such, and we run those over our operator connect pipe. So it's, even that stuff's starting to change. Um, the main, the main driver that's gonna drive somebody to direct routing. Still really is, I'm gonna operate in this hybrid environment where I, I need to keep my prem PBX for all or part of my users.

And a lot of times that's because of a contact center. [00:16:00] Um, but I want the uc users on teams, but I want the contact center to, you know, kind of live on the pre legacy PBX, A direct routing solution would be the, the bridge to that. Um, so that, that's where really where you still see it, some of the operator connect.

Um, program doesn't extend as far globally as we operate, you know, so we operate 82 countries. Um, so some areas we're still using direct routing as a service because we just don't have access to offer operator connect in certain markets.

[00:16:28] Max Clark: Something that I struggle with, of course, Microsoft has created a very large platform and a very large ecosystem. So you have a, a very large tam,

[00:16:37] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:37] Max Clark: of users, big addressable market, then creates a situation where everybody and their neighbor shows up and says, Hey, you know, we do this right? Give us money.

Uh, which, which, know, creates a second level of confusion, right? 'cause you start with the. Okay, what do we need to do to [00:17:00] voice enable teams? Okay, we have to do these steps. Okay, then how do we voice enable teams? We're doing direct routing and direct routing as a service operator connect, right?

[00:17:06] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:07] Max Clark: And then it's like, who do we voice enable teams with?

And this becomes complicated because there's a lot of people saying that they're really good in this space, and there's a lot of legacy players that are of course trying to And, and you know, there's, there's other people that you wouldn't even consider that are voice enabling teams now and saying, Hey, you can run our, how do, how do you, how do people make sense of this?

Like, you know, as a, as a, you know, I mean, in this case, right, Roseman University, you know,

you've got a thousand-ish users

[00:17:39] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:40] Max Clark: put onto this platform, or, you know, how,

how do you even begin to

approach this market

and

decide who's gonna be a good partner for me here?

[00:17:49] Steve Forcum: Yeah.

and I think some of it is looking at,

to your point, the legacy folks. You know, there's a lot of folks that built a [00:18:00] full teams competitor 2020 on, you know, 'cause everybody needed something right away. Microsoft was relatively in its infancy with teams. I remember back when, in early 2020 when I got invited to a teams meeting at the time, I'm like, oh, you can only see four people on screen at once.

And you know, and Zoom was just so much more elegant at the time. But Microsoft really leaned in on the innovation and has grown the platform to be pretty robust at this point. Um. But what that's done in its wake is it's created a lot of businesses that are built to serve. Message, video, phone. I used to work for a company that partnered with one that sold it in the, in the marketplace.

And you know what I would find, when I would talk to customers and I'd be trying to kind of talk about, you know, my message, video, phone solution, I'd run into a brick wall of the customer going, well, that's nice, but I just need the p, you know, I've already got the M and the V figured out. I've got teams.

How does this work with teams? And it creates a challenge [00:19:00] because, you know, a lot of the differentiation of, Hey, look at my messaging solution and look at my video solution goes out the window and now it's just a dial tone based, you know, cell. And it really becomes kind of trying to smack a square peg into a round hole and you end up with a, a, a.

A cost imbalance because at the end of the day, those vendors still have to operate, you know, a, a, a legacy infrastructure that fewer and fewer people are using now. Um, you know, whereas a, a modernized solution, whether it's through us or, you know, like a Microsoft calling plant or whatnot, um, you know, we like to say we're the cheese for Microsoft's hamburger, and we don't mean that in a, uh, and zoom's hamburger, by the way.

Um, but we don't mean that in a derogatory way. We mean that more to kind of frame up that we know what we are in the market and we deliver, you know, cost, value based services that are fit for purpose and add to what you already have. So I think one of the first things that creates a, a fork in the [00:20:00] road when somebody's looking at different vendors is that experience is this person talking to you about how they integrate with teams, but then.

Circling it back to how you use their platform. A lot of these guys have like, Hey, I've got an app for teams and it's great, but then it pops up my app when I make an outbound call. It's like, yeah, that's not kind of what I'm looking for here. Um, and then once you start looking at kind of the modernized solution providers that are delivering, uh, cloud calling or cloud communications for these platforms, teams zoom, WebEx, the next step is who fills the most gaps?

'cause there are gaps, uh, in these platforms. Text messaging is one of them. Microsoft's trying to start getting, you know, a way to fill it. Contact center is another, uh, customer engagement just in general. So not everybody needs a contact center. Um, facts, if you believe it or not. There's still a lot of people that need facts.

[00:20:51] Max Clark: See plenty of it.

[00:20:52] Steve Forcum: None of that stuff is native to the teams platform. Zoom has more of it.

native, but even then it's still, you know, kind of lacking in some [00:21:00] places. So, you know, the, the next kind of decision point of how you separate suppliers is who's going to give me the best cost, but also give me the best solution, you know, who's gonna give me the text messaging, the WhatsApp business, support the facts to really give me a, a more encompassing solution Versus somebody going in saying, Hey, I just want to give you some voice.

I just wanna give you some, you know, dial tone. You know, that's, that's commodity. I'm gonna cut that. Cut that. Cut that. Cut that. It's just a price-based decision. But increasingly what we're hearing from customers and Roseman was one of them is, I need more than just a phone system. I need a communications platform and I need it to operate within this platform.

You know what I mean? So it's it's platform within a platform, if you wanna think of it that way.

[00:21:46] Max Clark: I, uh. I, uh, succumbed to, uh, weaker impulses a couple years ago and got into an argument with, with, uh, somebody at Microsoft about SMS around why aren't you supporting text messaging inside of teams natively? [00:22:00] If if I'm, I'm hoping that at some point in the future, this video is gonna feel really outdated, right?

Because it's gonna, like, Microsoft's gonna have it, but, but right now, and, and in the, you know, years that team's been on the market before, now if you want to have text messaging into a Team's Native Voice environment, you have to have another app running inside of teams in order to get to it, right? Like it's, Microsoft

[00:22:25] Steve Forcum: Microsoft, to their credit, has taken steps here. Um, so they just launched SMS, uh, inside of teams. It's only available for Microsoft calling plans. It's going to be available for operators Like myself, uh, to, to deliver shortly. Uh, but even then it's, limited, you know, and and. What happens if you wanna send a, a multimedia message like a picture can't do it.

So even then it's still there, there's still tremendous value in kind of having that built into teams. It's a, it's a teams admin, it's an elegant solution because I've got a, a [00:23:00] plugin within teams. It's not a separate app that I gotta juggle and everything else. So I'm still keeping everything consolidated into a super app type model.

[00:23:07] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:07] Steve Forcum: Um, but yeah, this is still a weakness on the Microsoft side and text messaging is a bear, you know, with, with 10 DLC registration, um, you know, that, that is a challenge. and for Microsoft who hasn't always offered the

best, you know, end customer support, um, it's one of the reasons you run away from calling plans.

If you, if you love email support, you're, they're, they're the one for you.

[00:23:33] Max Clark: Oh. Um.

[00:23:35] Steve Forcum: 10 DLC gets really complicated over that type of an email structure.

[00:23:39] Max Clark: Look, Microsoft, uh, is very clear that they do not want you using their calling plans. And if you've, you've used their calling plan and you ever have a support issue, you, you learn this lesson very

[00:23:50] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:51] Max Clark: of

[00:23:51] Steve Forcum: So

they've also given operators like C pio, uh, a backdoor, API. So if a customer is on a calling plan and they wanna move [00:24:00] to an operator like C pio, we can do that almost in 24 hours. You know, we obviously don't try to do that for every single one of them, but,

[00:24:06] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:24:07] Steve Forcum: you know, if we had to move somebody quick, we can actually move them in 24 hours because Microsoft is creating the infrastructure to do that.

So take that for what it, what you will. Um, the fact that they're making it easy for operators like us to transition customers from those calling plans, I think is a, an interesting tell strategy wise.

[00:24:26] Max Clark: So team stability and outages are still a, a pretty significant issue,

[00:24:30] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:31] Max Clark: I, you know, I mean the, just the sheer number of, of people on teams at this point makes any issue within teams a significant issue. then if you've got an organization and you're bringing your voice communication into teams as well, like, and, and you teams outages, that's a consideration.

And, um. Uh, what is the Microsoft story around this now? Like, if, if we have, you know, local survivability is always, is always a [00:25:00] factor. And if you're thinking about, you know, certain things, right? You know, access to 9 1 1, emergency services dialing,

[00:25:04] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:05] Max Clark: pretty important. Largely your enterprises like this, you know, just statistically you're gonna have more likelihood of events taking place.

You don't want those events to take place when Microsoft Teams is off. also have, in certain jurisdictions, um, US specifically, let's say you have requirements that not only are you coding and coding the address now, but you have to encode the, the specific location within that address, right? What, what, what floor, what room, what suite, what area.

Um, there's requirements that you also signal, um, your own console internally, right? Like somebody's called 9

[00:25:40] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:40] Max Clark: this location inside of your building. You know, you have to be able to notify somebody. In your, you know, in your location, you know, like, hey, this has happened. So, um, you know, these, these weren't native Microsoft platform things, right?

Like

[00:25:56] Steve Forcum: No.

[00:25:56] Max Clark: is also driven mostly by service

[00:25:59] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.[00:26:00]

Yeah. So our platform, we offer a seat of Rado with every seat that we push out

[00:26:05] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:06] Steve Forcum: address that need from an E 9 1 1 perspective. So everything's fully compliant, uh, in the US with Carrie's law and Ray Baum Act. Um, to broaden that out. You know, Microsoft's come a long way on the, the downtime.

Issue. Um, you know, now they offer a five nines SLA on teams phone. So you're talking about five minutes of, uh, unexpected downtime per year. Uh, contractually with the platform, uh, everybody's got outages. You know, uh, one of the industry leaders in uc had a, a major outage earlier this year that I think lasted for almost 24 hours.

So, and they have a five nines SLA. So at the end of the day, there's some of this that's unavoidable no matter who you choose. In the past, teams had its issues. Um, I think their, their SLA was around four nines, um, not, not more than two years ago. So this is a relatively new thing. They announced it last year at Enterprise Connect that they had upgraded to a five nines [00:27:00] SLA, and it's been pretty rock solid for us since.

Um, but that said, there are backup options and I think there. Some of what's available with Microsoft is actually really interesting. Um, you've got the onsite, you know, options with, you know, local gateways from, you know, companies like audio codes and others. Um, that can cover off on the, the basics around, you know, call outbound, calling E nine one one, but also, uh, fixed mobile convergence.

You know, with teams phone, mobile and solutions like ours, your cell phone becomes your, your team's number. So in that environment, if teams is having a hiccup, your cell phone still operates. You can still make an outbound call to nine one one, um, using the cellular network. So it's an environment where your cell phone almost replaces your desk phone, which is what we've been talking about for, gosh, 20, 30 years.

And, uh

[00:27:54] Max Clark: let's dig into this a little bit because I don't think a lot of people understand what this is and what this actually means,

[00:27:59] Steve Forcum: [00:28:00] Sure.

[00:28:00] Max Clark: you've got, for a long time, we've had the option of having an app actually on the phone, and you could open the app and use the app on your phone. Fixed mobile convergence is a little different, so I'm gonna let you dig in.

You

[00:28:12] Steve Forcum: Yeah, so

[00:28:13] Max Clark: steal your thunder here.

[00:28:15] Steve Forcum: let, let's wind it back even farther. So let's jump in the time machine. The DeLorean back to, you know, 2000, 2005. Before the advent of the smartphone and apps, there were features Simul ring or

[00:28:28] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:29] Steve Forcum: on the Avaya stuff for twinning, where incoming calls to my work phone number rang simultaneously or near, simultaneously on my cell phone.

And it was like magic. I remember the first time I had it, I'm like, this is amazing. The problem was when you call out to someone, 'cause then they're getting your cell phone number and their caller id, and once they have your cell phone number, they never call your desk phone number anymore.

[00:28:53] Max Clark: Nope.

[00:28:53] Steve Forcum: 'cause I don't know if you're at your desk, but I know your cell phone is always within a three foot radius of you, right?

[00:28:58] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:59] Steve Forcum: Then [00:29:00] with apps, now all of a sudden I can do voiceover IP using my business phone line, no matter where I am, by simply opening the app, using the dial pad and making that outbound call. And it works. But the problem is, human behavior is still stuck in. When I open my cell phone and I need to make a phone call,

[00:29:20] Max Clark: I just

[00:29:20] Steve Forcum: I don't open the teams app necessarily by by habit.

I open the Dialpad app and I call the number, thus breaking this whole illusion of this is my business number. So what? What fixed mobile convergence or teams phone, mobile and, you know, SIP Mobile by Tango Networks does is basically your cell phone, is your team's phone number. So when you have an incoming call, if you're at your desk, it's gonna ring on your team's client.

It's also gonna ring simultaneously on your cell phone, just like you know, twinning did. But when you make an outbound call. You don't have to do anything with apps. You just [00:30:00] open up your phone. You click the, the phone icon. You can do it one of two ways. You could actually have a personal line and a, and a business line.

So if you want to have that personal business split, or you can just unify it. So my cell phone number is my team's phone number. It's a business phone. It's almost like an IP phone if you wanna think of it that way.

[00:30:17] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:17] Steve Forcum: when you make an outbound call using your cell phone on the far end, the customer sees your business phone number.

So when they call you back, It's.

gonna ring wherever you happen to be logged in or whatever you're using and on your cell. And if you don't answer, then it goes to your corporate voicemail where you get, you know, uh, speech to text, you get voicemail to email, you can get a whole lot of other, you know, capabilities to it.

So it really is where we're finally merging the cellular device with your unified communications as a service. And then the final benefit is because I'm using voiceover, LTE instead of voiceover internet. I can actually do a little bit better quality of service so that it will be more reliable, [00:31:00] it'll sound a little bit better, um, versus doing voiceover, you know, 4G data, which can be dodgy.

[00:31:06] Max Clark: It's. I mean, man, it, it's so, it's so obvious when you take a step back and you say, at the same time, we've been waiting for 20 plus years for somebody to roll this out in a meaningful way. Right? I know two other carriers that do

[00:31:23] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:24] Max Clark: out of over a hundred that we keep tabs on. Right. You know, like it's, I mean, I'm, and this is us

[00:31:30] Steve Forcum: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:31] Max Clark: um, and, um, I, I, you know, like it's, this is one of those things where it's like, I was in a conversation this weekend without going into the details. Like, my answer to the to them was like, just have two cell phones. You know, like, like I can give you so many solutions. And they're all like, they're all like fun tech nerd stuff to do.

And you can, there's lots of different ways you can do this, but like, just get a second cell

[00:31:57] Steve Forcum: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:58] Max Clark: a second cell phone. I mean, [00:32:00] sometimes it's, you know, the simplest, the simplest things are, are the nicest things. the. I want, uh, let's, this is a good tangent. I'm gonna get back to Roseman here.

[00:32:13] Steve Forcum: Sure.

[00:32:14] Max Clark: Um, you know, as you said, like the buyer's journey. Now, 70% of the time they've already done most of the research before you get

[00:32:23] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:24] Max Clark: So at this point, Roseman is pretty much decided. Like we've, we've looked at the cost of renewals for CUCM. they looked at, I mean, they don't call it HCS anymore.

Now it's Cisco Web WebEx, something, something, something, something. Cisco's been rebranding this product a bunch of times. Uh, they decided not to go to Cisco's Voice Cloud when you use all the marketing acronyms, I hate the most. They decided not to go to Cisco's WebEx cloud calling, platform and, and wanted to integrate and go native inside of teams.

And probably around this point is when, when you guys got engaged, how, [00:33:00] um, but I would also assume that you're not the only company that they had engaged at this point to try to figure out how to deliver voice services into. Into teams,

[00:33:10] Steve Forcum: So we actually didn't get engaged at this stage. Um, this happened before we were involved with them. so the, the main driver that led them to choose teams as the platform, this was a kind of a decision tree that happened before we were even brought to Roseman. Um, the main driver was incumbency. The university had adopted teams across campus.

[00:33:32] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:33] Steve Forcum: So it was kind of a no-brainer for them that I'm just gonna keep using what?

I use because ultimately we wanna minimize the impact to the end user community as much as possible. Um, and Roseman is a great example of this. We've got another one on our website that talked about, you know, kind of the ability to pivot quickly because they were using an incumbent platform.

It's gone out the days of like setting up phone system training where, you know, somebody comes in a conference room and sets up a bunch of phones around a table and you know, you gotta sit for an hour.

[00:33:59] Max Clark: [00:34:00] your voicemail? How do you say? Yeah.

[00:34:01] Steve Forcum: How do I transfer a call? How do I park a call? You know,

[00:34:03] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:34:04] Steve Forcum: so they made the decision to go to teams absent us.

Um, they had a trusted advisor that they were working with. It was a Microsoft MVP. Once they kind of realized teams is the answer, because we're already using it, they engaged with their, um, their trusted advisor. And they were the ones that actually brought us to the table. And we were actually, um, the only solution they ended up having to look at from a pricing perspective.

It was the trusted advisor bringing us to the table, saying, all right, if this is the route we're going, these are the guys you want to do it with. Um, and we were able to really kind of win that business pretty quickly because the snowball was already 90% down the hill. Um, the customer knew what they wanted.

The customer knew that it was gonna be teams. The, the, the credibility that the trusted advisor brought to us by bringing us to the table, um, made it a fit. And then, you know, obviously we, we came in with [00:35:00] really aggressive pricing and, and won the deal by showing how quickly we could operate. Uh, literally I think we turned on five seats before we left the first meeting because our platform's fully automated.

So I can literally turn on something faster than you can sign up for Netflix.

[00:35:13] Max Clark: They, I've been, I've been involved with the voice with Telco for a really

[00:35:20] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:21] Max Clark: And, um, what's been really interesting watching this, this, like wave, I wouldn't really call it like the, um, I mean, Gartner wants to brand it like unified communications, right? But really like this current like cloud, cloud wave is.

This disconnect and, um, of pricing models and, and push, right? So you go back to like the two thousands, even early 2010s, 20, you know, I guess two thousands and, and, and 2010s. Um, you know, and you had to do all this like math around like, um, you know, your early calculation and how, how many, many trunks you [00:36:00] needed per space on, you know, number of users based on what the kind of call flow was, right?

So this is relatively disconnected. I mean, I'm, I'm really, I'm not sad that people don't have to think about this

[00:36:08] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm. '

[00:36:09] Max Clark: cause it was annoying. But there was, um, but you know, we also had used to have this math around like the average enterprise user, you know, was 600 minutes a month worth of call traffic right now.

Average enterprise user is not using 600 minutes of call traffic anymore. But I see a lot of pricing models where you come into it and you, and you're saying, oh, we want, you know, $20 a seat, $25 a seat, we're gonna give named, you know, named users. And there's this, there's this huge delta. And I think, uh, uh, you know, and, and the other thing I've noticed with enterprise is, especially when you start talking about like these, like legacy incumbent carriers that are trying to, to stick to existing pricing models, it's also creates a lot of friction for a buyer, right?

Like, this is, even without talking about like international, I mean, international is another like, you know, can of worms, we should open up

[00:36:55] Steve Forcum: Sure.

[00:36:56] Max Clark: just from like a domestic US calling plan, like [00:37:00] the actual voice consumption shifts a lot. Like when you go onto teams, like you making phone calls as much as you're making video calls, you know, where's your, where's your default beha, you know, pattern behavior shifting to.

[00:37:12] Steve Forcum: So it's an interesting subject and it's one that we've talked about a lot, and you're right, voice, you know, inbound outbound, PSTN calling, you know, calling external parties is down in teams. I would also say we're still making business phone calls. If you take a, if you, if you widen the aperture up and you look at the average user, they still make business phone calls.

It's just where they make them has changed. Most people, their phone system is this thing, your cell phone, right?

[00:37:50] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:50] Steve Forcum: Like, this is how I communicate. The problem is it's disconnected from your corporate infrastructure. So if you are in a compliance [00:38:00] environment where I need to do call recording, uh, if you are in a, um, you know, like at Roseman in a student student services environment where, you know, students are still calling in for assistance with financial aid, with, you know, mental health services, with, you know, a variety of different needs, uh, the, the main channel is when something's important or something's complicated, I call and not being able to participate in call queues because hey, my, my cell phone's my office line now.

Right? So I think where we're seeing is there, there's, there's this transition period that's happening where. I need to buy a phone system. What's my phone system? I'm not really making many voice calls in my phone system anymore, so I don't need a ton of minutes. Um, I think the next natural phase of this, uh, some industry analysts like Dave Michaels call this like uc three, uh, you know, where mobility kind of really integrates.

And it's basically what we talked about earlier with fixed mobile convergence. I think you're gonna start to realize how [00:39:00] much, how many business minutes are used. It's just today it's kind of hidden because they're off to the side outside of managed infrastructure. But by merging these things together, you can get the best of both worlds.

Your cell phone is your primary communications channel, but now I can do compliance. Now I can do, you know, call queue distribution. Now I can do a variety of different things. I can hand calls off when I get back to my desk and, you know, pick them up with a headset on my screen. So I think that's where a lot of organizations are, are thinking today.

I. In the present, I'm looking at this saying, I, I don't need buckets and buckets and buckets and buckets of minutes, but where they're gonna go really quick is once they see the value of, of mobility, they're gonna realize, oh, we are actually making a lot of phone calls. The idea that voice is dead in an infrastructure is, I think, a, a myth voice isn't dead, it's just not a product anymore.

It's a, it's a feature in a platform. It's not a platform in and of itself.

[00:39:57] Max Clark: I, I think, I mean, you made a [00:40:00] comment to the side of, um, what, what was it? It was something along the lines of, um. You know, it's not a super exciting topic, you know, like to paraphrase,

[00:40:11] Steve Forcum: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:12] Max Clark: And mean, I think that becomes the, like, ultimate level of maturity for any piece of technology,

[00:40:20] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:21] Max Clark: right? You, you know, like the goal of technology really is to exist in the background where it's not thought of anymore, and when it disappears and it's completely out of the mindset where it's just, you know, it's like electricity.

It's just supposed to

[00:40:38] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:39] Max Clark: right? Like you've, you've hit like, like, you know, voice has been around for a long time, but we, we finally hit peak, you know, maturity where people don't think about it. It's just as an assumption. It's gonna work all the time. And now we're kind of getting into this, know, period of modalities of like what actually, um, what actually makes the most sense.

I'm, I'm weird. I dial into most of my conference calls now. Like, people send me, you [00:41:00] know, like teams, whatever, you know, meeting invites. I. And I, I really am annoyed at the ones where they haven't licensed

[00:41:09] Steve Forcum: Love dial in.

[00:41:10] Max Clark: for their, for their dial-in, because then you have to join with, with teams. But the other ones, if it's got an audio bridge on it, like I, I don't know, like 95% of the calls, I, I, I'm, I'm joining just with audio.

Like it's, it's actually kind of nice, you know, to, I don't know, like maybe I'm old enough or I have this like, romance around, like, and not that they have any romance around calling it a conference bridges, but you know what I mean? Like, it's just the experience is different. Like it's, um, there's something exhausting about being on a video call all the time.

And then you get into like the social dynamics of like, you've joined a video bridge, but your video is turned

[00:41:43] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:43] Max Clark: Or if your video's on, or like all these different things, like there's, there's different social pressure that comes from that.

[00:41:48] Steve Forcum: Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And, you know, you and I are both male. Uh, it, it's a lot harder to be female in, in this kind of a communications world because to your point, I'm on stage [00:42:00] as a guy, you know, put a shirt on, do my hair, I'm, I'm ready to go. Right? It's a whole different world and I've had to be conscious of that a lot as a leader.

Um. Understanding that I, what I need is your knowledge. I don't need your vision. Like, I don't need to see you, I just need to talk to you. And having that kind of dial in, you know, I'm seeing it just anecdotally, I'm seeing more and more folks, um, that.

jump on bridges just audio only.

[00:42:27] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:28] Steve Forcum: I don't wanna look at myself and I don't necessarily need you to see me right now.

Right? Like, I got a lot going on in my background. I got a lot happening in my house and how can I help you, you know?

[00:42:39] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:42:39] Steve Forcum: Um, and I think there's, there's a key piece to that. And I think there's also been a lot of, um, there's been a lot of written articles about video fatigue. And I think where the next phase comes is during the pandemic video worked.

'cause we were [00:43:00] all sitting at our desks. We were all, we were all on the same plane. We're all one video in a tile, you know, in a, in a mosaic of tiles. So it was normalized. Everybody was on the same plane. But post pandemic, as people started, um, going back to the offices now, there was an imbalance because the people that are collaborating in person obviously gain a, a, a benefit because if you've been a remote participant in one of those meetings where you're the only one that's working remote and everybody else is in the same conference room, you're dealing with audio issues, you're dealing with, you know, rusting papers and you can barely see people.

And I think the next phase is going to be mobility when people start kind of getting back on the road and, you know, I'm in the car, but it doesn't mean I'm not working, you know, and in the old days, that was commonplace.

[00:43:52] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:43:53] Steve Forcum: I just dial into the bridge. That's the whole terminology. Right. And to your point, we've kind of swung so far in [00:44:00] the other direction to where we, a lot of bridges don't even have the dial in info anymore.

How do you dial in from the car? Um, I, you know, gotta futz around with teams and I got, oh, I gotta turn the video off 'cause I can't let you see me driving. And, you know, so, so the PSTN still has a, a place as that kind of universal connector into all of these different things. But I think today's buyers are really starting to come around to voice for business.

Communications is having its iPhone moment. And what I mean that is the iPhone, iPod. You know, pre 2007, we all carried around Motorola erasers or some other type of smartphone. We carried around an iPod, we carried around a whole batch of other stuff. And then Apple unveiled this world where this is a new platform, IEA smartphone.

And all of those things that used to be physical devices you bought became. Digitized apps on this new platform. And it's just the lifecycle of technology and voice I think is in that same place where [00:45:00] a lot of organizations are just call it what it is. They're looking for ways to cut costs, especially in telecom.

'cause you know, hey, it's just telecom, right?

[00:45:07] Max Clark: Yep.

[00:45:08] Steve Forcum: And I think a lot of 'em are coming around to this idea that voice is becoming a feature in a platform. And those platforms are the collaboration platform you're using. So if you're a team shop, teams phone makes sense. If you're a Zoom shop, zoom phone makes sense.

And if you're a WebEx shop and you know, it seems like they're having any resurgence now, um, WebEx is gonna make sense.

[00:45:29] Max Clark: The the only place where I've heard, I mean, there's, there's lots of, listen, I've got lots of examples of people that did not want to go completely into teams. I'll

[00:45:38] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:39] Max Clark: this conversation specific to teams 'cause I'll get too scattered. Uh, one of the most interesting ones I had was the company wanted to be able to separate their internal and external communications platform, and they wanted a really clean delineation.

And it was really, it was this, this was not like, this was a while back, but it was a very interesting dialogue because changed a lot of [00:46:00] how like we approach things internally. Like, you know, my

[00:46:03] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:04] Max Clark: I. You know, do you want, you know, like convergence is good and in some cases it's bad. And like all these different things, I, we, we, this

[00:46:11] Steve Forcum: Sure.

[00:46:11] Max Clark: we can get into a philosophical conversation that's completely off the rails.

Let's talk about, um, let's talk about migration and

[00:46:18] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:19] Max Clark: Right? And you, you, you know, you mentioned with, um, with Roseman, like, you know, they'd already made the decision to go to teams. They wanted to go into integrated platform. It's already deployed. I mean, and there's lots, I mean, look, if you've got, you know, teams already on every desktop, it's real easy.

You're already supporting the platform. Like, let's go ahead and voice enable it. I mean, it, it doesn't take, this isn't like rocket science kind of decision making process, right? But from that moment you know, at some point they had a conversation which was, okay, what happens to our user community?

And do people need phones? Or not need phones? Right? So that means they went out and they talked to people before this stuff. So I'm, I'm [00:47:00] curious if you could kind of walk me through a little bit. Deployment. What's a good deployment? What's a bad deployment? What should people really be thinking about as before they start going down this path you know, give them the best possible outcome in making the shift.

[00:47:15] Steve Forcum: So I think there's a few things that you've gotta keep in mind, and I was really impressed with the way Roseman handled their transition because it wasn't just, I. Talking to people and figuring out like, what desk phones did you need? Um, and to, to answer your question simply, the bad deployments are the cut weekend cutovers.

Like those just don't exist anymore and they shouldn't exist anymore. Um, and those were relics of the past. Those were relics of the premise based phone system. 'cause I wasn't gonna come back 12 different weekends and cut over a user by user, department by department. Right. We're doing it this weekend.

We're doing it live. Right.

[00:47:53] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:47:54] Steve Forcum: Um, Roseman instantly [00:48:00] saw this is gonna have to be a gradual project. This is not gonna be something that we do in a weekend. They got multiple campuses, they got limited resources. They just could not digest that level of disruption to the campus operations and they didn't need to.

You know, we, we were able to turn on five seats instantly for them, and it showed the value of, Hey, we can do this stuff gradual. You can add seat by seat as you need it. It, it's fully automated, so there's no infrastructure to go out and buy and procure and, and implement and deploy and whatnot. But then what they did is they said, who are our internal influencers?

You know, we all know them. They, they're, they're the early adopters of New Tech. They're the ones that get the new iPhone and you see it on their desk. Hey, how did you like that? Or, you know, what do you think? Or like, you know, they're the ones driving the new EVs. What's it like driving an ev? How is that Right?

How, what's get range anxiety or anything else. So you find though, and every, every [00:49:00] business, every business unit, every department has these influencers in space that will be able to actively promote new technologies. So Roseman identified them and Roseman moved them to the platform, and Roseman created a feedback loop for these early adopters.

And in, in, you know, in, as a manufacturer, we talk about the customer adoption bell curve. You know, when you release a new product, you gotta find your innovators, your early adopters. You create the feedback that lets you help, you know, kind of the development cycle before you hit mass market. I think adopting that same approach as a business to deploying new technology is going to be a game changer.

And it was for Roseman. So they went out, they found their, their, um, promoters, their early adopters, they gave them the technology, they created a feedback loop and that gave them the tools to kind of test and adjust to realize the adoption of this stuff is [00:50:00] actually really easy. 'cause you're already using teams to communicate internally now it's basically just, there's a new button for, you know, phone and when you wanna call somebody that's not a part of the campus.

You got a dial pad, you make that out, that about call. But because you were already using the product, the adoption rate went really fast because it's just a new feature in teams. This is great. So then they took the next step. Once they had those early adopters, they started mapping out what regions those early adopters could influence.

And they started moving those departments by department to the new platform. So doing these kind of gradual death by a million paper cuts, transitions, uh, enabled them to really kind of accelerate the momentum. Because once they, once they crossed, uh, once they crossed a critical threshold, all of a sudden it became, Hey, that department moved over to teams.

Can I get that? 'cause I'm sick of dealing with this desk phone or whatnot. Um, you know, so there was some of that at play. And then the third thing was what we talked about earlier. They, they, they were [00:51:00] conscious of the reluctance. From a lot of faculty, Right.

In a higher education institution, you deal with a lot of senior level, uh, professors and faculty that are, are kind of put it politely set in their ways and change is disruptive even if it's, you know, even if I know you can handle this, right?

If I take the training wheels off, I know you can ride the bike, but,

[00:51:25] Max Clark: Yeah.

[00:51:25] Steve Forcum: know, I, I want those training wheels on. And for a lot of the faculty it was, you're taking my desk phone away from me. This is how I communicate with my students and I don't wanna talk through the computer. Right? Give it 90 days.

We're gonna take 'em away. If you need it, we'll bring it back. And the, the, that kind of, I know you can handle it. Let me kind of just give you a little push. Really opened up a lot of eyes because like the proof, the results speak for themselves. 90% of those deone are still in a closet 'cause they weren't needed anymore.

[00:51:58] Max Clark: There is a Wall Street Journal [00:52:00] article I'm gonna find and send to you and anybody who's watching this, it's great. And uh,

I'm trying to think when it came out to make this easier, but the. The gist of the article was, um, the phones have 50 million buttons on them. I don't know what any of them do, so I just take the phone off the desk and I put it into the drawer and I, and it's from a university and it's an, it's a, it's an east coast university, so I don't know if it was Columbia or NYU or Harvard.

I mean, it was, know, like a tenure tenured professor at a very high-end elite university talking about how they can't figure out how to use their phones. They just rid of it and they just shoved it in the desk and, it's so, uh, but you're right. You know, like the, the change, you know, the, there becomes a resistance to change, not because of anything else except just I don't want to change.

Like, I don't know what this means and I don't wanna do it. And, and, um, you, [00:53:00] you know, I was laughing as you're telling the story because I'm like, oh wow, this makes so much sense. Like, you mean, I don't wanna start with the people that're gonna be the most resistant to change. I'll give it to the people that actually don't want this in the first place, and let them, let them get it and then let everybody else see it.

Um, now, but doing that kind of migration, you know, we talk about this and we started off, you know, talking about like hybrid deployments with direct routing, right? And direct routing as a

[00:53:23] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:24] Max Clark: into operator connect. How, if you're doing that kind of migration where you're keeping your on-premise environment, you know, they had, in this case, they had an on-premise phone

[00:53:33] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:33] Max Clark: they had a, you know, like one user in a department coming outta that environment.

So you have their phone number, their, their DID coming out or their TM coming out. But now you have to do other things, right, because you have to maintain these, these, these bridges between these environments.

[00:53:46] Steve Forcum: Um, not really,

[00:53:49] Max Clark: No,

[00:53:50] Steve Forcum: because everybody's already got the new phone system on their desk. 'cause in teams you just call people internally. Most, most customers who haven't enabled the teams phone capability are calling each [00:54:00] other internally in teams anyway. It's just, uh, teams, call,

[00:54:02] Max Clark: they weren't using phones to call each other.

[00:54:04] Steve Forcum: no, they were just using teams to call each other.

And increasingly we see that more and more.

[00:54:08] Max Clark: to external guy Darling was being moved off the desk and going. Going into

[00:54:12] Steve Forcum: Yeah. I mean, in, in theory the, the phone system is there, so you could pick up the phone and dial an extension to call somebody, but by and large, uh, most people for the internal calling, it, it's just, you know, I'm in teams, I just click the, the person in the chat.

[00:54:26] Max Clark: So if somebody had dialed like the main number and spoke to a receptionist

[00:54:30] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:30] Max Clark: need to speak with Steve, you know, and they were gonna transfer the call, was they, were they just creating islands at that point

[00:54:36] Steve Forcum: They could have, uh, we had a bridge built, you know, so we have a, a, a bridge solution is what we call it. So we can actually integrate prem with, you know, teams. So to operate in this kind of a hybrid environment. Um, so in that kind of environment, yeah, you would want to have the two systems linked. But you know, primarily what a lot of organizations do is they keep kind of the customer facing pieces as the final pieces of the transition.

[00:54:59] Max Clark: [00:55:00] Mm-hmm.

[00:55:00] Steve Forcum: move kind of the, the back of house stuff over. So like. Teachers, faculty, that type of thing. A lot of times they're disconnected from that type of an environment in general. Um, but yeah, so if you, if you, if you plan it out and you kind of plot it out, you would, you would keep your front of house stuff towards the back half of your gradual migration or you implement a bridge solution.

So while you're in that transition period, uh, you have the ability to, to merge the two. And it's, it's pretty straightforward to build. And we, using our platform, we can actually support both environments with a unified dial plan. So you don't have to get in the middle of, you know, I'm still manage this, like I so Cisco stuff and I gotta try and connect it over with Bridge.

We just basically move all of that up to the cloud. So it's just a link to the old and a link to the new.

[00:55:43] Max Clark: How long did it take 'em to migrate?

[00:55:45] Steve Forcum: Um, that's a great question. I don't actually know the full answer on how long it took, uh, to migrate?

over it. I wasn't engaged at the, uh, on the back end of that.

[00:55:55] Max Clark: Because I get the sense of like, we're talking, you know, not like a week or [00:56:00] two weeks or three weeks, but more like quarter

[00:56:02] Steve Forcum: Correct,

[00:56:03] Max Clark: of migration. You

[00:56:04] Steve Forcum: Yeah. I don't know, the exact number, but it was, you're right. It wasn't, um, it wasn't measured in like

two weeks, three weeks.

[00:56:10] Max Clark: you said something earlier, I wrote down a note on, we started talking about text

[00:56:16] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:17] Max Clark: Um, I'll again, you do a lot of international, I'm not gonna talk, let's, let's, I'm gonna try to keep

[00:56:24] Steve Forcum: Sure.

[00:56:25] Max Clark: specific, right? I think most people in the US that with text messaging from their cell

[00:56:30] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:30] Max Clark: and, you know, even though RCS is now being pushed into iPhone capability, right?

You still have this like, like bubble versus green bubble experience with text messaging

[00:56:39] Steve Forcum: Sure. Mm-hmm.

[00:56:40] Max Clark: if you're iPhone centric. Um, enabling, enabling SMS within a phone system, a corporate phone system. You now have 10 DLC and you have 10 DLC issues that come out. And you had also talked about, you know, enabling WhatsApp.

And that's, that's, you know, why, why I wrote this down. I want to come back to it. 'cause WhatsApp is [00:57:00] not really, WhatsApp is enormous internationally, you know, and anybody that does any, that has any international work has WhatsApp ex, you know, on their, on their

[00:57:09] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:10] Max Clark: But WhatsApp isn't a really big thing in the United States in terms of like business messaging per se.

Now Meta wants to change that, but um, as companies are rolling these phone systems out, and especially when you start talking about teams, you know, is there big demand? I mean, are people trying to, to SMS enable all these devices? I mean, you have to put and have another app running and there's a plugin that has to exist.

I mean, Microsoft thankfully is gonna start, you know, is, is on the path of fixing this. I'm happy to hear that, you know, but what, um, I. You know, 'cause that opens up another, uh, yet another area. And ex you know, I think of compliance as like the first

[00:57:51] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:51] Max Clark: You know, if you're in a compliance regulated industry, text messaging has to be saved and recorded, like it.

can't exist on cell phones.

[00:57:59] Steve Forcum: [00:58:00] Well, and that's part of the reason why, to deploy a business text messaging solution. 'cause to, to paraphrase Jurassic Perk Tech finds a way, you know, um, just because I say you can't do that, a lot of times we'll end up doing that, you know, um, even in my personal life, if I have a file that I've gotta get to somebody and, you know, for whatever reason my OneDrive's not letting me get it over to somebody, do I say, no, I can't get it there.

Like, no, I gotta figure out a solution. You know? And for a lot of users in the field, the solution ends up, here's my cell phone number. This way we can text and then it breaks all the loops. 'cause now you've got my cell phone number and whatnot. Text is huge. And I think the problem is most organizations either A, don't have a clear understanding of how to do it because it's complicated.

And then two, most of the providers really make it. I almost wanna say unattractive. Like even like with, you know, some of the industry leaders, you get a hundred text messages [00:59:00] per month to use as a user. Like each user gets a hundred text messages. And if I'm an IT leader, I'm looking at that going, this is the opposite of voice,

[00:59:08] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[00:59:09] Steve Forcum: I, I, I don't know how many people are making so many minutes, but I know it's not a ton text. I am scared to death of what that bill would look like if I'm paying per text message. 'cause think about it. Hi.

[00:59:21] Max Clark: also

[00:59:21] Steve Forcum: That's one.

[00:59:22] Max Clark: 2000 you know, like, what are we doing here? You

[00:59:28] Steve Forcum: Yeah. I mean, You know?

I, that's one message. How are you? That's a second message. I, I can see the meter running really, really fast with my end users.

[00:59:36] Max Clark: and, and by the way, uh, you know, this is really inside baseball, but, uh, message length at this point will still show up as one message, but then you have a character limit that becomes a segment, so that becomes, you know, long text messages. You know, the wall of text, right? That's multiple text messages.

[00:59:52] Steve Forcum: So I think there's, there's a lot of appetite for it in the market. I'm seeing more and more customers are looking at it specifically in higher ed [01:00:00] because this is how, you know, if PSTN was kind of the, the unique universal connector text messaging is becoming the universal connector to the student body.

[01:00:09] Max Clark: Yeah.

[01:00:10] Steve Forcum: You know, and frankly, faculty, you know, it's, it's not just students that are texting, faculty, texts, admin techs, everybody is, you know, dig, communicating digitally.

[01:00:18] Max Clark: Yeah.

[01:00:19] Steve Forcum: So a lot of universities, specifically Roseman adopted, uh, they're in early in stage, but they've adopted our, uh, text messaging, partner clerk chat.

Um, they've adopted that solution. And we're seeing more and more demand for it. And the reason why we really love the clerk solution and, and made it core of our offer is it does so much more than just text. You know, it does S-M-S-M-M-S, uh, so you can send a picture as well as, you know, a text

[01:00:45] Max Clark: We'd never do

[01:00:46] Steve Forcum: back to 2025 or back to two oh thousand five.

[01:00:49] Max Clark: Yeah.

[01:00:50] Steve Forcum: but then it also supports WhatsApp business. So for international students who live on WhatsApp, now all of a sudden the, the. Faculty and admin can [01:01:00] embrace a connection to that, Um, they have some really interesting stuff around outbound campaigns. Um, so you can, you know, run alumni outreach. You can do fundraising through it, and your, your results are dramatically higher on outbound, uh, digital comms, text, WhatsApp,

[01:01:18] Max Clark: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:19] Steve Forcum: whatever versus, um, outbound calling, you know, to alumni to, you know, or other fundraising mechanisms.

So we see more and more of it. And the thing we love about, you know, our partnership with Clark is their app is really elegant. But the other element of it is it's unlimited. You know, it's not, you know, here's a hundred messages and then it's gonna cost you this much per month. Um, it, it's unlimited. So for a customer, I have that peace of mind.

It's a fixed cost. In my environment, I'm not sitting there going, you know, can you please cut down on the number of text messages you're sending? And I've seen the lot, you know, and, um, and it integrates natively with all three platforms. Teams, zoom or WebEx. So it, no matter what platform a customer's using, it's covered.

[01:02:00] And the other really key point for us, I don't need you to move your voice to CPI o necessarily. So for us, I can give a customer that's keeping their voice OnPrem. I can text message, enable their numbers, so in teams they'll see, you know, the text messages with those numbers while The phone service is still being delivered on-prem by another carrier.

So that flexibility really is key to us to give customers that, that kind of. To bar to, to, you know, use the Steve quote jobs, quote, a a cold drink of water while you're stuck in hell, you know, while you're stuck in that, you know, on-premise infrastructure, I can't move off 'cause it's, you know, I've got contractual issues or whatever else.

We can still add more capabilities to your existing environment if you're using teams. We'll give you text messaging there. We'll give you fax. Um, so this way, you know, you're, you're, you're enhancing your communications infrastructure without having to do everything all at once.

[01:02:57] Max Clark: The legacy PBX [01:03:00] players are not doing themselves any favors. Right. You know, because you, you, we started this off when we're talking about like what drove this and, you know, the cost and complexity of maintaining the system on site, you know, I mean, just

[01:03:10] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:11] Max Clark: You have a specialized skillset in order to maintain these things, but you've already got a, an investment already.

But then you look at licensing costs, hardware, refresh cycles, um, software subscription support, subscription licenses, you know, like all these things, you know, you know, add up and, um, you know, and it's, it, it's, I've seen this a lot of times where a provider will shoot itself in the foot, you know, coming into a renewal cycle thinking that they have an organization captive and, you know, doing a little strong arm tactics.

And the next thing you know, it's like, well, we just decided we don't wanna be here anymore at all, and we're just gonna move. And, um, and especially if they have a disjointed, know, cloud platform approach or a non, I mean, at this point, non-existent cloud platform approach. It's, uh, know, it's opening this thing light up.[01:04:00]

Um, I'm trying to think what else I wanna ask you, Steve. I mean, we've talked about like,

[01:04:05] Steve Forcum: So, I mean, to that point, the opportunity in the market lies in prioritization. You know, a lot of these legacy providers are clinging to complexity, as in it's, gonna be disruptive for you to leave this spider web that you've built with, you know.

the on-premise infrastructure at its middle. So you've got all these other IT prioritization or IT priorities.

You've got, you know, security, you've got these other things. You know what, let's just leave the, the, let's leave that, let's let sleeping dogs lie, right? That's where they're depending on, it's not that they're delivering new innovation. The, the licensing, they've gotta, they're walking a tightrope because they've gotta walk this tightrope of the de laws of diminishing returns versus the increases in, in cost.

You know, they're, they're not increasing value there, there's no innovation happening on those systems. [01:05:00] Um, if anything, they're adding more strands to the spider web by trying to integrate with another UCAS provider, right? What we see is, is tipping this with customers is when does, when do you, when do you cross that line?

When do you, what's the straw that breaks the back where this price increase now all of a sudden prioritizes this infrastructure? I haven't been dealing with it, not because I love it, but I haven't been dealing with it 'cause I'm afraid of it. And now you've got me to the point where I'm looking at what else out there.

And once you get to that point, you kind of realize that the, the monsters under the bed aren't there. A lot of these platforms have prebuilt integrations to the stuff that you're using. You know, most of your IT stack is probably I, you know, cloud enabled SFDC or HubSpot or you know, Zendesk or some of these other things that you've, you know, built these integrations to, and you've convinced yourself that these are ear, you know, un uh, repeatable.

I can't do this elsewhere. And then, you know, you, you look at something cloud-based because something caused you, [01:06:00] you know, usually it's that, that value versus cost versus priority, uh, discussion in algebra there. Once you start looking at something else, it's like, oh man, I was afraid of this. And there was really, you know, I don't wanna trivialize it, but there was no real reason to fear this.

'cause in the past I spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars getting those integrations working. 'cause it was, to a certain degree, the wild west. Everything was built one by one by one. Lots of pro services in a cloud-based world, it's scalable because all that stuff is repeatable. It's all pre-built for you.

So it's, it's a matter of. If you're on that legacy infrastructure, I, I think every organization looks at it and says, this is on borrowed time. It's just a matter of how much time that is versus when you force me to look. Um, and a lot of these organizations, these legacy companies are struggling. Um, so they're in, they're trying to pass along increases to those end customers.

'cause to your point, I think I've got you Costage, I think I've got you captive. And the reality of the situation [01:07:00] is you really don't, I've got you hostage. You know, as long as you don't make this painful for me, as long as you don't, you know, overstep your bounds, then I'm content to leave that as is.

'cause I got other things I'm trying to deal with. So, so it's actually the opposite. It's, it's, the customers have those vendors hostage, but they don't realize it.

[01:07:17] Max Clark: Yeah. My brothers and I were talking about the Bane meme the other day. You know, do you feel in charge, you know, with that, that kind of thing.

[01:07:23] Steve Forcum: Love it.

[01:07:24] Max Clark: One of the things I like about, and you touched on this briefly, was, um, how easy you make this to pilot and

[01:07:30] Steve Forcum: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:30] Max Clark: Can you talk a little about that before we wrap here?

[01:07:33] Steve Forcum: Yeah.

so our core is that we wanna make technology Fast, easy, and flexible. um, because it has not been that for decades. So, we talked a little bit about our history. You know, when we first launched with direct routing as a service, we looked at it and said, this is a science project. How do we make this easier?

And it's basically guided our, uh, development all along. Um, so today we basically take pride in the fact that we don't have, you know, a a, [01:08:00] a really complicated customer experience tool. You know, it's like shopping on Amazon. There are three calling plans. You choose which one fits for you based off of how much usage you want, or you know, what features you need to have bundled in.

Um, you click buy and for some customers. You can just give us a credit card and off you go. And unlike the days of the past where I had to have professional services and somebody, you know, manually provision your system, everything's fully automated. So if it's new phone numbers, you're up and running in literally minutes.

Uh, we can push the new numbers up into the teams tenant. Usually it's within five minutes. We're waiting on that acknowledgement back from Microsoft that they're there and, uh, you're ready to assign the numbers and get going. Um, so that gives us a lot of benefit for customers is that, that simplicity.

You're not dealing with a bill of materials that's six pages long of, you know, zeroed out costs. And it's like, why are you putting this here? You know, some Siebel quote or SAP quote that has to account for every little widget. Um, so the, the [01:09:00] simplicity matters, the speed is, is crucial. You know, to be able to say to somebody, here, I'm just gonna give you five seats, hold on.

And they're in the system right away before the meeting ends, um, is really valuable. And then the other thing, especially for higher ed, um, a lot of times you're not in. A homogenous environment, you know, you're not gonna have a singular platform like Roseman did. Uh, and even Roseman is still in the process of trying to kind of fight out some of the, you know, third party gremlins that are in there.

But a lot of times you operate in a mixed environment. I may have some users that are on teams. I may have some users that are using Zoom. That's their preference. So with our platform, being able to support all of the leading, you know, collaboration environments, the teams zoom and we're gonna be onboarding WebEx here in the next couple weeks.

We don't force customers to choose and we become a nexus point of connectivity. So you can move users from end to end if you have. Somebody that, you know, say you acquire a company in the business world, you're making a merger and they're using Zoom phone, you can connect them in. [01:10:00] So this way you don't have to port it a second time.

And when you're ready, you can move those users gradually over to whatever environment, or you can leave them there and just manage it centrally. So for our customers, the, the simplicity of the platform, the scalability of the solution, you know, I can support anybody from one seat all the way up to, you know, two, 3 million seats and a customer, sorry, dog started barking.

Uh, I can support two or 3 million seats on a customer. Uh, because I'm Azure native, I don't have to go out and buy servers to support somebody. Um, gives us the ability to serve them. And then the global network, I, I can give you the simplicity of one hand to shake, uh, and one bill to pay for coverage in over 82 countries around the world.

So if you have remote users, if you've got a branch office somewhere, uh, I can get you service where a lot of others can't.

[01:10:48] Max Clark: Fast, easy, flexible. What a line. I love it. I'm gonna use that and steal it for myself. I'm sorry, but I'm, I am, uh, I'm announcing it publicly so at least everybody knows where it came from.

[01:10:58] Steve Forcum: There you go. [01:11:00]

[01:11:00] Max Clark: Steve, thank you very much for the

[01:11:01] Steve Forcum: No problem. Thanks for having me, max.

[01:11:03] Max Clark: it's fantastic. Uh, I love your background, by the way. I was, I was,

[01:11:06] Steve Forcum: Thank you.

[01:11:07] Max Clark: jealous actually.

So,

[01:11:10] Steve Forcum: Yeah, it's a properly decorated office. Doesn't need virtual backgrounds.

[01:11:14] Max Clark: no, I love it. It's fantastic. Um, it's, you know, I, like I said, I'm, I'm, I'm part of me just jealous. So, you know, maybe, maybe in the future we'll see a change over

[01:11:23] Steve Forcum: Sounds good.

[01:11:24] Max Clark: Steve, thank you very much.

[01:11:25] Steve Forcum: Thank you.

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