In the event that your office goes down, you lose Internet, you have the ability to still dial out, receive calls, and transact business until, you know, connectivity is restored. While also, having deep analytics into Yep. What’s going on in my calls, understanding who’s saying what and what’s resonating with people. Correct. Wow. That’s pretty awesome. That’s pretty awesome. Welcome to Unraveling IT: Expert Tech Talks. My name is Nate Troyer. I’m an account executive with Corsica Technologies. I’m here today with Garrett Wiesenberg. Garrett, what’s your role here at Corsica Technologies? I’m the VP of Solution Consulting. Great. Today, we’re discussing, a pretty interesting topic with the advent of cloud-based, solutions. I’m actually pretty excited to speak with you today about VoIP, voice over IP with cloud solutions. So let’s just start with the basics. For the folks not familiar, what exactly is Microsoft Teams VoIP calling, and how does it differ from, like, the older, traditional phone systems? Well, so Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based calling solution that, you know, has been around for quite a few years now and has really begun to sort of pick up traction in many businesses that are already heavily leveraging the Microsoft platform. It’s a natural sort of integration to the existing, you know, M365 email, Microsoft Teams, collaboration. Mhmm. It just expands on that into to calling. And it differs from some of the solutions of the past by, number one, the fact that it’s a cloud-based solution. Solutions, you know, the days long gone were on prem, at times difficult to manage. They didn’t necessarily come with some of the features. What are some of what are some of the pain points of some of those? I mean so, I mean, not to take anything away from those systems. I mean, they’re they’re premium systems, but what were some of the pain points of, you know, like, Cisco UC, like, gold standard. Yep. What what were some of the pain points there that that Teams is looking to essentially, remedy? Yeah. So if we’re specifically looking at Cisco CallManager UC, you know, it was a a high entry cost. Right? You have to buy your own hardware. You have to run your own software. Mhmm. You have to bring analog phone lines into your facility or, you know, SIP or or PRI, whatever it may be, into your facility and pay for all of these different subscription fees as well as the physical hardware, handsets, everything at everyone’s desk. So with that would come pretty high overhead in terms from a a management perspective. Mhmm. Because you’re not only managing, you know, license renewals and contracts, but you’re also managing hardware life cycles. And there’s just a lot of points within the architecture that that could fail or that could cause more catastrophic failures. You know, most of the on prem providers of of days long gone like Cisco, ShoreTel, NEC have all kind of come out with their own cloud based, SaaS based type solutions. Like, Cisco has moved to Webex Calling, which is their, you know, not only collaboration platform, but also their their calling platform. Similar to what Microsoft Teams based chat is to Microsoft Teams calling. They have their own, you know, flavor of it. And that’s kind of what we’ve seen in the industry. That’s the trend is that more and more often, clients are coming to Corsica and just asking, you know, what can we do? We have this outdated, antiquated phone system that worked and kind of works, but we’re really looking to see what exists today. How do we modernize, you know, our our calling? You know, what are we what are we missing out on by, you know, staying on prem? Do you see that maybe some of these solutions were adopted for their feature sets that probably aren’t now actually being utilized? Like, they they looked great on paper, but then after the implementation, you know, ten years ago, they were never really utilized to their fullest extent. So they weren’t getting the return on investment they thought they were gonna get. Is that is that sometimes part of the equation too? I’d say because I- I’m thinking about, like, reporting. Right? Like Yeah. I would say it’s probably part of the conversation or the equation as, you know, you kinda put it, but I don’t I’m not sure that it’s the primary driver. What do you think is the primary driver? So I think it’s just phone systems or one of those items that it- it’s a pain to transition away from. Right? I mean, it’s a- it’s a- everybody knows it’s a huge pain to move your phone system from one provider to another because Yeah. The phone system is the lifeblood of of the organization. Mhmm. So there’s there’s not only cost to moving it, but there’s also, you know, I’ll say soft cost from a, you know, we have to retrain all of our employees. We have to Right. You know, not lose any business. Calls need to continue coming in, and everybody needs to be ready to go day one. And so phone systems in general aren’t something that get replaced, you know, every three to five years. Like, you would typically see with maybe, you know, server equipment, networking equipment, or or other, you know, IT components like computers and things. Okay. Phone systems typically stay in place for very long periods of time, and companies, as long as they’re happy with the performance, aren’t necessarily looking to replace that phone system. So oftentimes, what I- I see is that an organization is happy with their phone system, but they also don’t know what exists today. And there’s a, an architectural difference and feature disparity between what you could do on premise and what you can do in a SaaS based solution. It comes down to a lack of of not knowing what exists and what what’s out there. And and for everybody for everybody, that’s that’s watching, what does SaaS mean? Software as a service. So someone else is hosting whatever application you may you may have. And I think that’s a kind of a great segue into the idea that a lot of people are already using Teams Mhmm. For calling and collaboration. What’s the difference between the, the Teams that they’re using and Teams calling? Like, what’s the difference there in the, in the team Teams phone system? Realistically, not much. So the Teams chat interface that people are, are used to day in and day out or, or leveraging already is the exact same interface you’re going to use to make calls. If you’re looking at the Teams chat, you know, interface, there’s a a call section on the left hand side. Everybody’s probably familiar with that. If you don’t leverage Teams calling today, that functionality on the left-hand side, for the most part, is only going to exist for, for internal calls and things of that nature. All you do when you implement Teams calling is enable the ability to dial out and, and receive calls from, you know, external sources. No. I mean, that seems all very straightforward, but, you know, what should the businesses keep in mind before jumping into Teams VoIP? Like, are there any early hurdles or setup steps or anything like that that that you need to contemplate or plan out first before you, you end up doing this? Well, I think with any deployment of any, you know, technological solution, there’s always the budgeting aspect. With any SaaS based solution, right, so somebody else is hosting it, you’re paying a subscription fee to access those Mhmm. You know, services. It changes the way that you have to budget, you know, CapEx versus OpEx. So if you’re, you know, okay with buying your own hardware and spending a lot of money upfront, capitalizing it over, you know, a, a given period of time, this is gonna be a completely different model, and you need to understand the costs that are going to be associated. There will be costs to also implement this solution because from whatever provider you’re with today, you have to migrate to Microsoft Teams. Meaning, you need to take your pool of numbers. Right? Your, your primary phone line or anybody’s direct phone number, you need to take those numbers from whomever owns them or is hosting them today and migrate them over to Microsoft. So there there’s a, there’s a project involved with getting this up and running. It’s not just something you go apply a license, flip a switch, and you’re off to the races. Can licensing also trip people up? It can. There’s a lot of different ways to leverage, the team’s calling functionality. Microsoft can provide your dial tone, and they have a few different license types based on your needs and desires, specifically. You know, think of the cell phone plans of old. Do you wanna pay for your minutes? My desire would be not to pay a thing for it. I, I know. You know? I don’t think they have that plan. You, you can pay for the minutes upfront. So you could say, you know, I’m gonna use two thousand minutes this, this month, pay for that upfront, and that’s, you know, your, your budget. Additionally, they have, packages that include a set number of minutes that allow you to call domestically. Mhmm. And then they’ll have a different package that allows you to call internationally. Oh, okay. So it’s just, it depends on the use case and how you intend to leverage the system. But you can also leverage a third-party provider to, to really supply the dial tone. And so, you know, it, it depends on the use case scenario. Well, it seems very flexible. It’s very flexible, and it can fit almost any circumstance and- and need or business outcome. Okay. It just depends on what your requirements are and what you’re trying to get out of the system. What hiccups do you do you normally see when someone tries to go through this implementation? Like, they, they take on the responsibility of doing all these pieces. A lack of understanding or planning is essentially just a, a way to quickly fail and have this go off the rails very quickly. There’s a reason organizations don’t typically migrate their their phone systems often because of the complexity involved and because of the potential risk of something going wrong. I mean, if you think about it, think of, you know, hospital, migrating from, you know, Cisco on prem to Microsoft Teams calling, for instance. Mhmm. If anything happens during that migration and they all of a sudden can’t receive calls, patient care, potential, you know, deaths could arise. I mean, it could be very Impactful Yeah. And material and, and the, you know, devastation of, of losing these this functionality. Whereas, you know, maybe an office, right, a, a standard office like, you know, the Corsica office, for instance, it wouldn’t be as impactful, but it’s still if we can’t receive calls from our clients, that’s gonna be a big issue. We can’t support them. With that being said, with, with the complexity that can come up in this and, and the need to be kinda excellent in the execution, where, where does Corsica fit into, you know, adopting, like, Teams phone systems? Corsica can fit in almost anywhere in the process. We can step in in the planning stages where we are discussing, you know, what is your system today? What are the requirements for a new system? And, you know, what’s it going to cost or what is the cost going to look like. We can come in during the execution phase where we’re helping, you know, an organization to migrate, you know, phone numbers, set up new call routing, schemas, and and things of that nature. We can also come in from a support perspective where, you know, day to day support of the system and management of the system, you know, we can partner alongside an organization or, or help from that perspective. I think one of the questions I was thinking of earlier today was how do you secure, or how would Corsica secure, you know, a, a phone system that doesn’t exist on prem. Right? And, and I think, in just talking with you before, before the episode, I think one of the immediate things we pointed out was, like, you know, how are these companies securing their current phone system? Because it’s on prem, and that tends to be intrinsically, less safe Yep. Than the cloud. So yeah. I mean, walk me through how a company like ours would, would secure a, a Teams VoIP solution. Well, I think, you know, to, to some extent, the question implies that we have to implement security to the system, but with Microsoft, the security is already there. So Microsoft already is the, you know, largest identity provider. So the the calling system is going to leverage ENTRE Mhmm. And MFA for access. It’s going to make sure that calls are encrypted whether through certificates or, you know Oh, yeah. And, like, what devices can even call. Yeah. Exactly. There, there are Teams-certified devices that have to meet certain criteria in order to even join the systems. Microsoft is, is handling 100% of the security on their end, and they are heavily incentivized to ensuring that compromises and breaches do not occur. Because if there is a breach, you know, there’s potential that many customers are impacted across the entire globe. But also, that’s a huge loss of trust for them, and organizations may, you know, go somewhere else that at that point with their their calling solutions. So if I’m a if I’m a VP at an organization, say, in the C Suite or whatever, what experience can I expect? You know, moving from like I said, Cisco UC, gold standard. Right? I moved from this $750,000 solution that I bought ten years ago that’s been rock solid, but that I’ve paid a lot of soft cost for too. You know, I have to have a guy on, on my staff that knows or at least, you know, be in a support contract with somebody who knows how to fix it if it breaks Yep. And knows how to reconfigure it if I have any organizational changes. Like, what experience can I expect on a day to day basis when I go to use Teams over, you know, my former system? Yeah. So your your former system, you you probably had Jabber. Right? If we’re talking Cisco specifically, there would have been some sort of communication type platform, whether texting, calling, simplification, maybe Webex depending on what iteration you were on with Yeah. We we actually as a corp as a company had Jabber and Webex. Yep. So depending on where you were at, it depends on, you know, what your experience was today. But the way it’s going to differ primarily is the ease of of calling. Mhmm. Right? So, great example is, you know, every morning when I’m driving to work, I’m usually on a call with with someone. Second I sit down at my desk, I’m able to transfer that call from my personal cell phone to the computer. And it’s a seamless transfer. Right? Because I’m moving directly from my personal cell phone with the Teams app installed there. Yeah. I would actually like to know how they do that because that’s actually that’s pretty cool. I know. That’s pretty cool. Just add this device. Yeah. You can either add call and broadcast. You can transfer it to that device. Yeah. And so, really, the the benefits or the experience is, you know, if you’re used to Microsoft Teams from a chat perspective Uh-huh. This just adds another layer on top of it that is the exact same sort of interface functionality. I mean, we call internal employees. Like, I call you every day. You call me what? Well, I call you from Teams. Oh, okay. And it’s it’s that same experience, except now instead of it only being allowed internally, you’re taking it externally. So, you know, if you’re used to Teams, the experience is not going to be much different. If you’re used to a different phone system, I mean, the the biggest thing that I discuss with clients is the need for handsets. You know, it’s it’s funny because typically, you know, like, we we all don’t have handsets. There’s not a single handset in the Corsica office. That’s true. Yeah. We all use the cell phone, or the application on our computer or on our personal cell phones. A lot of organizations still want that physical handset that they have to pick up and that they can talk on and that they need to, you know That tactile, like tactile feedback. And that’s fine. They make devices for that, but Teams is really designed to kind of begin to get away from that. Right? It’s leveraging the application itself. And if you look at these phones, all they are is a piece of equipment with a screen that is running the Teams application on it. Teams is just software. Yeah. It’s just software running on that hardware. Yep. So it’s like a small little computer that happens to have a microphone and a speaker. Yep. And there are some use cases where, you know, maybe it makes sense more than than others. Maybe a receptionist, for instance, you know, maybe it makes a little bit more sense. But there’s even software applications that can give receptionist the, sort of full functionality of, you know, the the receptionist phone days of old, right, with all those sidecars attached. Yeah. Yeah. You hit a button, and it can transfer to that person quickly. There’s there’s pieces of software that can make that experience for the receptionist similar and even more feature rich than what they’ve they’ve had in the past. Okay. So so for organizations that have, the need, maybe they have multigenerational staff. Right? And and who are very used to doing it in a certain way. They can have a handset. They can have that tactile feedback. Meanwhile, you know, people that are born in in the nineties who are used to touch screens for everything Yep. They don’t need one. So you can cut down on the cost Yep. Of your system by removing the need for for a lot of handsets. Yeah. You remove the need for a lot of handsets, and there may still need to be hardware involved. So, you know, a great example is faxing. Mhmm. Right? That’s that’s a question that you can comes up during, you know, these migrations as well as what do we do about our faxing? Well, if you’re paying for analog lines coming into your current facility, you could continue to pay for those lines. And there’s a piece of equipment that will convert the analog signal to a digital signal and connect it to Microsoft Teams. So there’s a way forward if you need There’s a way forward for that, or you can migrate to an eFaxing solution, which is often what we, you know, try and, you know, recommend or or help understand. Like email but for faxing? Yeah. Exactly. Email but with faxing. Okay. And so there’s options even from from that perspective. What about and we’re probably going down a rabbit hole. But, you know, since since there’s a lot of manufacturing where we’re at in the in the Midwest, is there, you know, any any support for when you need to have, like, a speaker out in the Paging? Paging. Yeah, paging. I don’t often I don’t often, page. But, anyway, yeah, is there an option for that too? There is. There’s options to integrate the existing systems you may already have depending on the age of that system because, again, paging is also something that typically doesn’t get replaced often. So Mhmm. What we found is, especially with manufacturers, they’ve got an older paging system depending on make, model, age, things of that nature. Use it in hospitals. Yeah. We may not be able to, you know, integrate it. And if we can’t, you know, we can help you go through options for ways around it or ways to implement new solutions. It all seems very flexible. Like, you get It’s a very flexible system that can integrate into almost any ecosystem. And and and a great example is, you know, Teams calling five years ago, we probably would not have recommended for call centers because there just was not a a lot of in-depth reporting available at the time inherent within Teams. So to get around that, we we had some workarounds and things we could have done in the past. But today, for instance, there is a plethora of of options when it comes to advanced feature sets and capabilities. And a great example is, you know, our our own service desk. We have we we have our own call center. Yep. We leverage Microsoft Teams calling now. Mhmm. And we leverage Microsoft Dynamics on top of Teams calling to give us the analytics that we need. And and certain examples would be, we can measure sentiment live as a call is occurring. So client calls in. They’re talking to one of our service desk team members. If the client starts getting frustrated for whatever reason, you know, it’s going to send up an, an alert to the service desk manager saying, hey. We have a call. Something may be going on. You should probably take a look. The manager can sit in on that call then and and make sure things are going smoothly. They can help. They can jump in and and help. But also from a reporting perspective, we can report on absolutely any metric you could ever imagine because of the depth of Teams integrating with Dynamics. And so it’s this entire ecosystem that just works so well together that Microsoft has built. And, you know, again, for organizations that are already leveraging a lot of the Microsoft features and functionality, I I cannot stress how beneficial Teams calling can be or, you know, where you could even go with it because the the options are are almost limitless. So if I’m in the c suite again, I’m gonna have a better experience because I might have a mobile VoIP application. Basically, I can make calls wherever I am. And it’s take calls wherever I am. Not dependent upon your physical office location. Meaning, in the event that your office goes down, you lose Internet, tornado comes through and wipes it out Mhmm. You have the ability to still dial out, receive calls, and transact business day in and day out until, you know, connectivity is restored. Also, while having deep analytics into Yep. You know, what’s going on in my calls Correct. Understanding who’s saying what and what’s resonating with people. Correct. Wow. That’s pretty awesome. That’s pretty awesome. Well, Garrett, thank you so much for being a part of this episode. My name is Nate Troyer again, account executive. Garrett, what’s that long title of yours? VP solution consulting. You heard it here, folks. It’s great to be here, Nate.
