Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

This week, UnitedCloud is making Unlimited Audio Conferencing available to all existing and new users for free till May 2020, with full conferencing features and no participant limit or meeting time limits. In this podcast UnitedCloud’s Managing Director, Reo Harb walks us through the details of the special program to help businesses, non-profits, educational institutions, and other organizations stay connected through these challenging times. Harb outlines the detail including the waiving of virtually all fees and an option to obtain a free desktop phone, while the service can easily be mounted on any smart phone. UnitedCloud describes itself as a partner driven company, with a focus on Canada’s MSPs, but Harb notes the firm’s service availability in the US as well.

Visit www.unitedcloud.ca

While the nation is slowing down due to the CoronaVirus, Ribbon continues to move forward by expanding technology and their product portfolio. CMO and EVP of Business Development with Ribbon, Patrick Joggerst provides insight into the ECI acquisitions along with current channel strategies. Ribbon and ECI’s newly combined company allows Ribbon to enhance and broaden its existing customer offerings with ECI’s industry-leading packet optical transport solutions.

Patrick goes on to provide an update on how the integration of ECI Telecom is going as well as providing updates to Ribbon’s Next Generation Intelligent Edge portfolio with the introduction of the EdgeMarc 300. He explains more about the strategy behind the updated portfolio.

Ribbon’s strategy continues to focus on a strong channel and is helping enterprise customers with unified communications and collaboration.

Patrick Joggerst

Patrick also discusses the release of its cloud-based Work@Home offer, which delivers advanced remote working capabilities to enterprises and contact centers of any size.

Ribbon is known for their expertise in transforming networks, security and supporting the largest communications networks, delivering world-class solutions to service provides, enterprises and governments around the world. Ribbon is in a unique position to make a long-term and sustained difference for our societies and planet. Their “triple bottom line” focus recognizes that their business success is deeply connected to the world they serve. While some businesses chase economic gain, often at the expense of others, they recognize that a failure to account for social and environmental impacts would make such business practices unsustainable. They therefore operate with a great awareness and commitment to doing things the “right way” – and they have been rewarded for many years as they are able to attract talented, like-minded professionals to their team, and engage with their customers and their communities in quality relationships.

For more information, go to: https://ribboncommunications.com/ or https://www.rbbn.com

You have privileged access IT staff. They install, configure, and troubleshoot IT and network systems, software, and devices. Do they always document what they do? Do you know the current status of all your IT/network components? Do you have a history of every component’s status, who made what changes and when?

Henry Gold, General Manager of ION www.apitech.com/ion that is part of API Technologies and Gary Audin recorded this podcast at the International Avaya Users Group (IAUG) conference. Henry has been working in IT to prevent and resolve the issues that come with privileged access, its use, misuse, mistakes, and neglect. He points that this is a lesser known aspect of IT security, one that can cause tremendous damage if not properly managed. These problems exist whether in an enterprise, SMB, or MSP managing IT resources. He points to the weaknesses that occur when too many people have privileged access and what happens when there is turnover in the IT staff. If don’t know your components status and history, how do you perform root cause analysis?

ION PRIISMS (Proactive Remote Integrated Intelligent Secure Management Solution) https://www.apitech.com/products/secure-systems-information-assurance/privileged-user-access/ion-secure-appliances/ion-priisms/is a secure web-based gateway application that provides centralized control over security and administrative access to complex network device environments.

ION is the most trusted name in remote device management and secure access technology. ION appliances and software enable service providers, equipment manufacturers, government and military agencies, and corporations to remotely manage, monitor, and secure critical voice and data networks.

More than half of the world's top telecommunications firms rely on ION technology to ensure quality service for their customers. With over 60,000 devices deployed worldwide, ION products are currently in use on six continents.

“People keep customer service alive,” says Jeff Palmer, Vice President of Sales and Business Development. As companies and organizations are forced to close their public spaces, customer service, moves to the contact center.

However, with the crises, the contact center has to move from a fixed site to a distributed model. In this podcast, Palmer discusses the challenges and the promise of a distributed model.

Jeff Palmer, Vice President of Sales and Business Development

One by one, Palmer reviews for major verticals the possibilities and issues for financial services, travel, hospitality and health care. We discuss the special challenges faced by emergency and first responder services, and health help lines run by the British National Health Service (NHS) and similar contact center based services from regional medical providers in the US, mindful that regular health issues have not taken a holiday during the crises, and health care workers responding to patient questions might now have to be deployed from their homes.

Palmer discusses technology and strategies, but also stresses that IT and UC technologies need to be mindful of the human side of a situation where the people answering real-time queries are just as much a part of the situation as the caller. Speechmatics makes automatic speech recognition (ASR) products that that are designed for a high level of accuracy. The company reports that it’s high level of accuracy across many languages has made Speechmatics a big choice among blue chip companies. 

Visit www.speechmatics.com

by Gary Audin

Customer experience (CX) can be more influential on your brand than your product value or your price. In today’s competitive market, CX can make or break a business. Measuring CX through surveys helps but you need more data and you need an automated not manual system to collect, analyze, and troubleshoot your contact center operation.

Tim Armstrong, VP Product Marketing at Nectar www.nectarcorp.com and Gary Audin recorded this EDUcast to provide insights into testing and evaluating the CX of your contact center. Tim covers what CX means today and the changing expectations of the customer. He then moves into how to test the CX and the value of automated vs. manual testing. Tim points out the benefits of a cloud based service solution and the insights to be gathered on a global not just local scale. He finishes with a discussion of the features necessary for a successful CX assurance platform.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

Today’s Contact Center Environment

Introduction to CX Assurance

Architecture & Key Feature Overview

Summary of Advanced Platform Modules

Identifying CX Assurance Opportunities

Competitive Differentiators

Complete Nectar Contact Center Toolset

Nectar 10 is the industry’s most powerful and easy-to-use multi-vendor reporting, monitoring and diagnostics tools. Purpose-built for voice, video and real-time collaboration, Nectar 10 is designed for the cloud era with best-in-breed support for hybrid, premise and cloud-based environments.

Nectar Services www.nectarcorp.com has been committed to delivering market-leading software solutions that empower our partners and customers to dramatically improve management, visibility, and service delivery across global and enterprise converged Voice-over-IP (VoIP), SIP and MPLS networks.

Speaking with Rob Pulkownik, Head of Channel Sales at Telia Carrier, Don Witt from The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, learns about the new Channel Program. The new program, which was announced March 16th, has been under development for the last two years based on information and feedback provided by the channel itself.

Rob Pulkownik

The Program includes the following:

Telia Carrier Customer Portal

Telia Carrier Agent Portal

No Channel Conflict — Master agents will be able to work directly with a seasoned Telia Carrier Account Director.

Telia Carrier’s channel program will help partners navigate their end-users’ life-cycle management to ensure a high-quality customer experience. Telia Carrier will apply the same formula that has regularly earned the operator industry accolades for its customer service.

Users of the new channel program are providing very positive feedback and appreciate the simplified sales process.

Telia Carrier is a fully owned subsidiary of Telia Company. They started building their network in 1993, when their Autonomous System, AS1299, was allocated. Unlike most of their competitors, they’ve grown organically ever since. Their network now stretches 67,000 kms across Europe, the US and Asia and lets you connect directly to more than 2,000 wholesale customers in more than 120 countries. AS1299 is currently the #1 ranked global IP backbone and with more than 450 local access partners around the world, they are the backbone of your business, wherever you are.

To find out more, go to: https://www.teliacarrier.com/

“We only make money when our partners make money,” says Reo Harb, Managing Director of UnitedCloud. “We give them (the MSPs) a full branded marketing tool which includes print, email platform and a recording tool,” says Harb. A portal makes the process simple. In this podcast, Harb observes that many MSPs come from a culture where orders simply came in and the company focus is on execution. Marketing is often a gap for MSPs. UnitedCloud seeks to close that gap by providing a simple and easy to use set of tools to get the marketing done is a way that is familiar and comfortable for the MSPs. The provided tools cover traditional marketing needs and social media. As UnitedCloud is a white label platform, Harb reports that making the MSPs successful is a top company priority.

https://www.unitedcloud.ca/

Despite this week’s Channel Partners conference postponement, SkySwitch revealed several new opportunities for the channel community. With focus on business continuity, in this podcast, SkySwitch’s Andy Abramson walks us through several examples of how his company is building more ways for MSPs to thrive.  Abramson discusses a “performance-based marketing program” where the first 25 SkySwitch resellers who garner sales of 250 Poly phones through the SkySwitch Store will receive their 2020 Vectors registration at no charge along with their choice of a premium Poly headset. Abramson outlines the addition of NTS to the SkySwitch distributor lineup, which in turn expands the number of products ready to sell. We learn about SkySwitch and Marketopia, a part of SkySwitch’s ongoing efforts to enhance MSP marketing tools. We also hear from Ben Macalindong, who tells us about the SkySwitch 3CX story, where MSPs can see more choices. Abramson also tells us about the SkySwitch Store.

Visit www.skyswitch.com

You have a PBX and want to reduce costs. You are looking for more Unified Communications (UC) features. In today’s environment contending with COVID-19, you want your users to work remotely and you need to make the work transition happen fast.

Steve Forcum, Cloud Technologist at Avaya www.avaya.com and Gary Audin recorded this podcast after meeting at the Avaya ENGAGE conference. Steve is both an entrepreneur and evangelist for the cloud. He points out that customers who want to reduce costs go to the cloud and are discovering the features available. In reverse, customers moving to the cloud to access features end up reducing their communications costs.

In this podcast he provides insights and recommendations. Steve covers:

The benefits and value of the UC cloud

How to gain customer trust when moving to the cloud

The Ring Central and Avaya partnership

Why UC cloud services are attractive to enterprises as well as SMBs

How to achieve rapid remote UC services when responding to the COVID-19 crisis

How analytics can be used to measure the effectiveness of UC cloud usage

Avaya www.avaya.com elevates communications to the next generation of engagement, connecting organizations to their customers, workforce, and communities with secure, intelligent experiences that matter.

Bob DeSantis, CEO of 365 Data Centers, speaks to Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, A TR publication, about the company’s acquisitions outside of New York City and the company’s strategy moving forward.

365 has also raised significant funding over the past year and gained a fourth equity partner. Find out what this means for the company’s trajectory.

Staying current also means delivering new services. Not surprisingly, 365 has moved into the hybrid services space since the platform company acquisition. Find out about the new services.

Bob DeSantis

365 Data Centers is a leading provider of hybrid data center solutions in twelve edge markets. With data centers in Boca Raton, Bridgewater, Buffalo, Chicago,  Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Indianapolis, Long Island, Nashville, Philadelphia, New York City and Tampa that serve as regional hubs for carriers, the Company operates a total of 220,000 square feet of data center space, 21 MW of power, and a redundant, low latency, nationwide fiber network, including direct connectivity to the NAP of the Americas. Their robust, carrier neutral ecosystem and secure, reliable edge colocation, network, IP, DRaaS, backup, cloud compute and storage, and business continuity services help organizations reduce costs, drive innovation and improve their customer experience. 365 Data Centers supports mission-critical application infrastructure by providing industry leading SLA protections and adhering to industry compliance standards such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, SSAE 18, SOC 2 and ISAE 3404.

For more information, go to: https://www.365datacenters.com/