Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Ever walk into a board room where everything from the collaborative technologies to shades on the windows seemed to act in a synchronized fashion? It was likely Crestron. Crestron is a company that makes products that are designed to, as Nic Milani, puts it, “… make the technology disappear, and push it into the background,” and delivering an experience defined by the content instead of the limits of technology. In this podcast, Milani, who serves as executive director at Crestron, take us on a tour of some of Crestron’s products and their initiative to be a UC company. We get a preview of the new Crestron Flex MX150 (available at the end of April). Milani tells us that his company is taking the luxury experiences once offered only in the board room to the “masses” in spaces such as huddle and meeting rooms. We learn about Crestron embrace of the BYOD model while delivering additional options in outfitting spaces. Looking forward, Milani tells us that Crestron’s approach protect investments by, “…allowing your organization to grow overtime without penalty”.

Visit www.crestron.com

In a matter of weeks, the world’s business has moved home. Everything from whole contact centers to news broadcasts have moved to home offices. Some people have encountered issues: call QoS, poor quality microphones, not ready for prime-time infrastructure. In this podcast, Kyle Oursler, Vendor Business Manager at 888VoIP walks us through ready-to-ship, ready to play solutions that can greatly improve home office experiences. Oursler discusses SBCs from Ribbon that are purpose made to deliver on the promise of Teams and the Microsoft vision of collaboration. Oursler outlines Yealink products that up the game on headsets and speakerphones, designed to make the most of audio and video meetings and other communications. Oursler also points out that 888VoIP is striving to make it easy for actual end users. End points are drop-shipped right to the door of the respective users, avoiding shipping, warehousing and re-shipping. Products are ready to plug and play, already programmed to work on their respective distributed networks, and with direct shipping the number of contact events are reduced, making each transaction as safe as possible. We learn how 888VoIP makes it easy and straightforward for their channel partners to deliver what their customers need as they move whole workforces off-site.

Visit www.888voip.com

“The ability to connect and collaborate is more important than ever,” says Tariq Valente, Vice President of Sales at Surfly. Surfly offers a real-time web sharing technology and enables remote collaboration by showing others what you see in your web browser. “All of a sudden, nobody can sell face to face, and everyone has to sell remotely." That’s where Surfly’s easy to use, easy to deploy co-browsing technology comes into play.

“We don’t want to take the customers or prospects from the existing platform that they are on,” says Valente. “We want to integrate within the processes of the company… we are not a platform, we just make it easy to integrate within the current infrastructure…” Valente points out that Surfly has alliances with Cisco, Nice inContact, Vonage and Salesforce. Surfly does not share the whole desktop, but rather a tab on the browser, creating a better experience for both the customer and the agent, and a far less invasive approach. We learn about examples of how the product plays in various industries, how quickly customers can deploy. “We can go live instantly,” says Valente. Valente discusses what he calls a “radically more simple approach,” where Surfly can go live “even without any IT involvement” to co-browsing. Valente reports that many household-name brands in the insurance market have become Surfly users.

Visit https://www.surfly.com/

Moritz Mann, Head of Technology Strategy at Open Systems provides Don Witt of the Channel Daily News, a TR publication, a great overview of Open Systems. In a world where market disruption is both a threat and an opportunity, and growth requires quick adoption of new technologies, Open Systems provides both the confidence and agility to grow without compromise.

Based in Switzerland, Open Systems is an SD-WAN/SASE vendor. The company is a pioneer in the industry as it’s been offering SD-WAN related services before the term SD-WAN was created and architected its product to deliver integrated network and security before the term "SASE" was being used. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), a new Gartner category, is defined as “an emerging offering combining comprehensive WAN capabilities with comprehensive network security functions (such as SWG, CASB, FWaaS and ZTNA) to support the dynamic, secure access needs of digital enterprises.”

Moritz Mann

They combine next-generation technology, machine learning-enhanced operational processes, and the world’s top engineers to deliver an end-to-end, fully integrated SD-WAN for their customers. Their comprehensive, built-in SD-WAN security features, service quality, and operational excellence result in the highest client satisfaction in the industry and a 98% customer retention rate.

They bring our know-how, resources, and passion to bear to help customers manage network and security operations, ensuring business continuity and network availability, agility, and performance. The Open Systems Secure SD-WAN delivers around-the-clock access to expert-level engineers and a single pane of glass management tool that enables customers to securely and confidently oversee network, cloud, and security operations.

For more information, go to: https://open-systems.com/

According to Nick Wiik, Product Manager of Vyopta, many enterprise network assets were already ripe with inefficiencies before the current crises. In this podcast, Wiik discusses our current challenges and looks ahead to what comes next when the economy begins to rebound this summer. Wiik walks us through the company’s expanded monitoring and analytics for the enterprise. Wiik looks at collaboration and reports on how collaboration experiences can be improved.

Visit www.vyopta.com and https://www.vyopta.com/demo/

“Well never stop communicating,” says Yuri Fiaschi, VP of Sales of Infobip. From modest beginnings in Croatia, Infobip has established itself as a global leader in omnichannel communication for brands, helping companies leverage messaging channels, and tools to better engage customers, enable security and authentication, provide customer support, and build loyalty.

Carriers can work with Infobip’s omnichannel solution for email, voice and chat communications in one place instead of different vendors, providing timely, relevant and personal messages. Infobip has the capacity to reach more than seven billion devices in 190 countries and staffs 65 offices on six continents, with headquarters in London and Vodnjan, Croatia. In this podcast Fiaschi provides an overview of the company, including a new focus on providing customers with a “holistic cloud-based communications strategy”. Fiaschi discusses today’s opportunities in the CPaaS market and looks at emerging 5G and AI possibilities and impact.

Visit https://www.infobip.com/

Eric Stark, Director of Sales for Global Business Solutions, Viasat discusses the Viasat fast growth and channel satellite internet products with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication. They cover 96% of the US footprint with primary or backup broadband connections which can be installed in 3 to 5 business days. This includes speeds of 35Mb X 4 and up to 100Mb a second.

Eric Stark

Ryan Cunningham

Ryan Cunningham, President, of ClearConnect is a reseller of Viasat and in many cases did not have solutions for the customers they were talking to until they started working with Viasat. Even when cable and other solutions are available, the Viasat solution provides the business the security of a backup-solution in times of emergency. Based on the situations that we are experiencing now with more remote workers due to CoronaVirus, there is a greater need for satellite in more rural areas.  Rural areas now have solutions with Viasat.

Viasat specializes in redefining what’s possible to make a difference in their customers’ lives today and tomorrow. They’ve made it their business to solve high-value, hard problems that create a real impact in the world and deliver the experiences that people want, need, and expect.

 

They out think the competition in pursuit of innovations that others view as impossible. Their culture encourages revolutionary thinking to bring connectivity where it’s needed and wanted most: to homes all over the world, to faraway communities, to warfighters in the field, and to people in the air and at sea — just to name a few.

For more information, go to: https://www.viasat.com/ or http://www.clearconnectco.com/

Bandwidth demands have increased significantly with the “Shelter inside at home” requirements placed on citizens.  Businesses have been scrambling to setup additional resources to make it happen.  If you are not ready, there are providers like Open Systems that have the technology in place and ready to go for those that need it.  Jeff Brown, CEO Open Systems, describes the Secure Access and Secure Edge concept to Don Witt of the Channel Daily News, a TR publication.

Jeff Brown

As a part of their SASE implementation they also have Mobile Entry Points (MEP) to provide their customer’s employees working from home with secure, high performance connections to their Microsoft Azure installations.  In just the past few weeks their clients have deployed more than 200 MEPs to enable nearly 47,000 employees to remotely connect.

They can scale their network quickly to add more clients based on their SD-WAN and Managed Detection and Response services which are built for an ever-changing, hybrid cloud network.

More about Open Systems:

Open Systems provides the secure connectivity vital for business continuity, ensuring all employees and offices can connect to each other and critical systems at all times.

Proven by deployments in 185 countries, Open Systems can connect anywhere in the world, even hard to reach locations.

Open Systems’ Level 3 engineers monitor 24/7 to identify, diagnose and mitigate security threats and issues affecting network performance.

For more information, go to: https://open-systems.com/

On Monday, Poly announced Voyager 4245 Office, a Microsoft Teams-enabled, Bluetooth headset solution. The headset offers three ways to wear, with all the configurations included with each product. In this podcast, Chris Thorson, Senior Director of Global Solutions Marketing at Poly discusses their new 4245. Thorson discusses the popular Poly Voyager family of headsets, including the 4200, 5200, 6200 and 8200, which deliver high quality Bluetooth performance and will be offered in Microsoft Teams certified versions available as of May 2020. “The real message is, we’re all in on Teams,” says Thorson. Poly is also offering information and blog content on our era’s newly minted distributed workforce. “We’ve been in the business of working at home for so long,” says Thorson. Visitors to the Poly website can visit a special work at home space filled with information from a company that pioneered the products that have enabled people to work from home, and away from a fixed office, for decades.

Read this week’s Poly announcement.

Visit www.poly.com

AVANT continues aggressive marketing research of their data and other resources to produce a critical and timely IT security report.  The report is freely available to executives for their review and scrutiny providing them the knowledge they need to make essential forward-looking corporate decisions about the security of their company’s communications network.

Ken Presti

Ken Presti, Research Vice President at AVANT Research and Analytics speaks with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, about the report which includes:

The common types of attacks with which you must be familiar

The key building blocks of IT Security

The “People” aspects of IT Security

The benefits of compliance – even when it’s not mandatory

Defense-in-Depth vs. Zero Trust: Which approach is best for you?

Coordinating Technology, Policy, Operations and Response

Leveraging the expertise of Trusted Advisors and MSSPs

This is a very comprehensive report which is a must read for executives to keep up with the constant network and internet attacks and how to best prevent them.

Developed by AVANT Research and Analytics, leveraging sales data, customer feedback, surveys, external data, and extensive interviews with subject matter experts, this report will help you to assess your attack surfaces, the attack vectors, and whether your current responses are truly adequate to the task. Working in conjunction with your Trusted Advisor, the AVANT 6-12 Report will help you maintain the security of your company’s data, enhance the confidence of your customers, and develop the appropriate response plans in the event that a successful attack does occur.

For more information, go to: https://ta.goavant.net/security-report or https://ta.goavant.net