HITT- Discussion on On-Prem PBX, Teams Voice, UCaaS, and AI – Aug 27, 2024

Introduction to UCaaS Ruminations

Okay. So today, we’re gonna have ruminations on UCaaS or kinda what’s what’s happening. Right? So the general the general, agenda is, we’re gonna talk about the depth of the on prem PBX.

Then we’re gonna talk about Teams because, hey, what’s the UC call without talking about Teams voice? We’re gonna talk about CX and verticals and why UCaaS is really making, headway in that. And finally, again, it’s not a hit call unless we talk a little AI. So let’s kick this off.

Addressing Customer Concerns About Cloud Migration

Before this is interesting. I I get this a lot. Hey, Mike. I have a customer.

They need a new phone system, but they they don’t wanna move to the cloud. So tell them why they should move to the cloud.

And and if there was a DB, anybody could do it. Right? You have to practice. So one of the things that I really try to teach is this mnemonic of when your customer says, hey.

We have this on prem PBX. It’s only twelve years old. It still got a lot of life left in it. Why should I move to the cloud?

If you if you start with, well, the cloud is, you know, the cloud is, you know, modern and, new. True or false? The more arms you use, the less commission you make. I get an amen out there on that.

Right? You have to be ready. You have to be a professional. You have to know what how to bring up that talking point.

Hey, Mike.

My my fifteen year old, Avaya fill system still has a lot of lights up there. Why should I move to the cloud? Yeah. That’s a great point. You know, what we love about cloud based telecommunications is it’s totally scalable. Now you were telling me that you have some seasonality in your business. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to scale your license count up when you need it and then scale it back down?

The other thing is you complained about that expensive maintenance contract on that on prem PBX. Well, did you know when you moved to the cloud, maintenance and software releases and upgrades are included so you’re always on the current version? And they’ve done automagically where you don’t have to send a tech out and pay two hundred and fifty dollars an hour. But the best thing about it is it’s totally accessible. You told me how hard it was for you to move people home to work from home during the lockdown.

Cloud is built for work from home. There’s no moving anyone home. It’s just how it works.

Now in order to do this, you need a resilient redundant platform. I know you think the cloud might be a little scary, but we only work with trustworthy suppliers who we vet where they have uptime at a critical capacity.

So for your next, next opportunity, be a smart cloud adviser or smart here in the Boston world.

The Decline of On Prem PBX and Transition to Cloud

So, friends, Telarusians, countrymen and women, lend me your ears. We have not come here to praise the on prem PBX. We have come here to bury the on prem PBX. And that’s really what’s happening in our industry.

More and more of the on prem PBXs are going end of life. And you see, this is a bombshell. Right? They have tens of thousands of customers.

Everything from from, Billy Bob’s Lube Shop all the way to the biggest hospitals, have NEC on prem. And they came out with a statement, I think, in March or April that said, thank you for your patronage. At the end of the year, your phone system is dead to us.

Right? These are great opportunities.

ShoreTel, as you many of you know, I spent eleven, almost twelve years at ShoreTel. I probably replace one a week, and a little little piece of my soul dies every time I rip out one of those short holes. But Mitel made a a strategic announcement where they’re no longer selling licensing going forward at the end of this year for a storehouse. So they’re basically dead as well.

Someone in the chat said NEC is selling in a media. Yes. Virtual high five to you, my friend. Yes.

NEC is one of our great suppliers, and it makes an easy transition for someone on NEC on prem to go to NEC, cloud. Now here’s the other thing.

This is the other approach. This works really well with Cisco.

Obviously, Cisco is a great practice, great, cloud hosted, system as well.

I I met a a customer a couple weeks ago, big on prem customer, and they’re like, why don’t we just stay with Cisco?

And I could tell that man, we’re gonna stay with Cisco with their local bar, which cut my partner out. So I said something like this. You know, I envy you. And you look at me like, why do you envy me?

Because you bought Cisco on prem ten years ago, and now you have this awesome opportunity to see what’s new and what’s modern. And it may be Cisco cloud, but the journey you’re about to take will be eye opening as you come from this very Cisco focused world where everyone’s at CCIE, CCNA, CC three PO. Now everything is open with open API and open platforms. I really envy the journey you’re about to go to.

And he looked at me and he looked at the partner and he said, I didn’t think about it that way. Who else would you recommend other than Cisco? Right? So rule the lure out there, get them on the hook, and now he’s looking at other vendors outside the Cisco world.

Transitioning from Mitel to RingCentral

I wanna talk about Mitel and RingCentral.

This is a false statement. RingCentral bought Mitel. False. RingCentral bought Mitel’s cloud phone system, that intellectual property, that intellectual property, and the customer base.

That’s true. So now if you come across a Mitel cloud customer, know that, RingCentral is trying to move them to to RingCentral. Now if you sold them their Mitel cloud, the good news is RingCentral keeps you as a partner of record, and it all kinda works out smoothly. We do recommend that you do register that with RingCentral just to lock it in, but, from everything that we’ve seen and heard and we’ve right across.

But here’s the other thing is, now you have an opportunity to have that customer look at, again, another application or another UCaaS vendor outside of of RingCentral. Because you know Mitel cloud based phone system, that’s also coming end of life as well, so they do have to move.

Overcoming Customer Resistance to Cloud Migration

K? And we talked about this. So when your customer says, well, we have this cloud based phone system. So you hit them over with a smart, and they’re still not buying it.

So then you have to really hit it home with you’ve talked about these expensive maintenance contracts. You’ve talked about how it’s hard to scale. You’re on the SMB product today. If you need need to to add fifteen users, you have to buy a whole new cabinet and a whole new system.

These are obsolete systems with proprietary hardware and phones. It’s getting more and more difficult to find this hardware. Plus, you said that you’re a huge Salesforce shop and you wanna do more with Salesforce, get your agents into Salesforce. You can’t really do that with an on prem system that is fit perfectly for the cloud.

So some of the goals that you want, less cost, less maintenance contract, less obsolescence, more with Salesforce, more with Zoho, Zendesk, customer, Thrive, etcetera, is all pointing you to the cloud.

Now the problem is they think that if they move away from on prem, they lose control, and I’m using air quotes here.

What’s interesting is that they actually get the same level of control without doing the Microsoft Tuesday patches as they would, with a cloud based system. They still manage it and maintain it. So that level of control doesn’t change. Now they just have less hardware to to, Wilson.

Microsoft’s Teams License Change

Okay. So, there was an earthquake on April first. Now I don’t know about you. I didn’t know if Microsoft was pranking us on April first or if they were serious. But on April first, you know, of all days to come out with a major announcement. Right?

Microsoft said, so that we don’t get any antitrust issues like they did in Europe, we are going to debundle Teams license from the Microsoft o three sixty five license. K? So it’s gonna be sold separately. Now for a deep dive into this, myself and my really good friend, Megan Ty, she’s out on the West Coast.

I’m more East Coast based. We did a whole thirty minute session on that on that. So go back in the archives and find that. But from a high level point of view, what really happened was for any new customers or any customers coming up for renewal, you have an opportunity to either keep the same contract that you have if you’re happy with it or unbundle Teams from some licenses.

The value of unbundling Teams from some licenses is that it’s a lower price. Right? So it’s, so if you have, let’s say, a hundred users or these are the enterprise licenses. So if you have a thousand users and only half of them need Teams, then you can lower your cost by about five dollars a license.

So it’s it’s it’s great for larger customers who wanna really like size.

Scalability and Licensing Options for Teams

So let me go back into scaling. So, David, good question.

You can write you can work with any vendor to put what we call a downturn pause on that. And if they know specifically when they’re gonna go down when they’re gonna go up and then back down, you can build that into the contract. That has to be done up front as a down downturn clause. We find that contact center companies are easier to work it with the seasonality that you see, but, again, we have to have those conversations. That’s a great that’s a great point.

Okay. Perfect.

So, a point here, as you can see, if you have a company, a customer, three hundred users or less, they can buy the business licenses, standard and premium. Nobody really buys dates except for very small businesses. And that’s a much less price point for adding teams to it. It’s only a couple of dollars versus five dollars. So if you work in that SMB market, you’ll you’ll hear, oh, we have, business premium or business standard.

Microsoft Voice Licensing Options

If if that’s the case, then what you’re able to do is add things to it at a lower, per user cost.

Okay. So we always kinda talk about this. Right? So what are the ways to go to Microsoft voice? Right? So the two things, you need big dog e five licenses or you have a license, a Microsoft license, either a premium business fee or an easy enterprise fee, and you add the Microsoft phone license to it. Eight dollars US, ten dollars twenty Canadian, six six dollars, UK pound.

So the four really the three ways or maybe even four ways to go, you can go direct to Microsoft. Remember remember this I have this tattoo.

Friends do not let friends go direct to Microsoft.

Doug will tell you, if you let your customer go right to Microsoft for the calling plan, your commission is exactly zero. Bad idea. Plus, it’s bad support.

So the other way you can go is direct routing. That’s what we see most of the UCaaS player, play in. The advantage there is some additional features, some additional redundancy. You can even mix and match.

Right? I sold one deal where a customer said, we’re on a Cisco system. We need to get off of it, but not everybody’s ready for Teams. Can we mix and match?

Like, yeah. It’s a perfect fit for a UCaaS supplier. Might be a little bit more expensive, but it’s really a great fit. And we do have some direct routing partners who are Microsoft gold partners.

Different Approaches to Microsoft Operator Connect

So that, like, the Intelligent IT, Uniboy, CIPIO, a few others as well. The value there is they really know that SMS the the Microsoft stack really, really well, and their price point seems to be a little bit lower than a traditional UCaaS, direct routing. Now operator connect, that’s the you know, that’s hot and happening. Right?

A lot of my, a lot of my clients who especially enterprise, five hundred seats or more, operator connect’s the way to go. It’s easier implementation.

It’s easier administration and tends to be a little lower cost.

But but the key to that is if you tell your client, oh, operator connect is great. You can go right to Microsoft’s website, see all the great operator connects there, and and and and start the process. Well, if they actually do that and start the process and you didn’t register it with Callpower, as Doug will say, how much you get paid? Zero.

So before you drop vendors or talk about operator connect, make sure you register ahead of time so your customer doesn’t click to try it to buy it. K? Come to me. Come to Megan.

We can walk you through that process.

Operator connect, come to us. It’s a lengthy conversation. We’re doing really well right now and, and what success that we’ve had.

Understanding CX and Contact Centers

CX. Right? Oh, man. You know, last year, we talked CX. This year, we talked AI. It it it’s it’s what we still talk about, it’s important to understand, what is CX. Right?

That’s easy customer experience. The other part is to define a call center or a contact center. Is like, is there a difference between a call center and a contact center? Not really. I mean, depends. If you’re in marketing, yes, a contact center. If you’re in the trenches, it can be anything you want.

Because this is the definition you’re gonna use going forward, a contact center, simply put, is a hardworking team focused on gaining new customers, retaining customers, and growing revenue.

Think about it. That’s every company on the planet. Every company tries to gain a new customer. Every customer tries to retain that customer, and every company has to grow revenue. Therefore, every company on the planet has a contact center of a sort.

Okay? Not scary. The other nice thing about that is if you ask IT, hey. Who who who, who’s in charge of gaining customers?

Who’s in charge of repainting customers? Who’s in charge of growing revenue? That’s probably three different people that you just got names of. So going forward, you have new prospects and names to talk about CX.

Differences Between UC and CC Platforms

I but I do I do wanna talk bring it back to UC a little bit and make sure you understand that there are differences between a UC platform and a CC platform on this nature. Now we have amazing UCaaS providers doing amazing things in the CCaaS world. You know?

So I’m not saying that you have to always break it up. Right? That’s oh, so you you see by itself and see see by itself. There are, you know, lots and lots of times when that combined effort is amazing.

But when you go into an opportunity, you have to understand what each team wants. Right? UC is really led by the IT department, and it’s really about that PBX replacement. It’s focused on internal communications and integrating with IT platforms. Right?

Google, Active Directory, o three sixty five, etcetera.

And it’s really it it really affect every single user. So every everyone, when you move to a new UCaaS system, has either a new physical phone, hopefully, they’re not buying physical phones anymore, but maybe they will, and a new, software to go with that. Where contact center, that’s focused on external communication, customer facing, and sustainable as the marketing team. It’s really a revenue generating engagement.

It may be more omnichannel in nature. It could be one to one or one to many, and it only affects a portion of the users. Oh, someone asked, who’s the good, better, best good, bad, and ugly in UC and CC? Well, I can’t say that out loud because we have so many wonderful suppliers.

But if you wanna just ping me mike b at flurist dot com, I’m I’m I’m more than happy to have that conversation with you.

Focus on Specific Verticals in UCaaS

Okay. So what verticals are are shot?

It’s crazy, but we are not selling into the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn space. I never thought you’d pay that because of the all those analog phones and, you know, you have cards like, well, you can get as cheap as, like, nine dollars a user for that analog phone, but that’s about it. What we’re seeing, we’ve have we have three or four amazing suppliers focusing in on that hospitality space. Now are they focusing in on the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, which I lost to Avaya when I was at ShoreTel?

No. I’m not bitter about it. I’ve obviously forgotten it. It was fifteen years ago. But, no, it’s more a lot more the boutique hotels, the resorts, the spas.

Assisted living is hot. Assisted living, I had a great tech adviser. His first win was replacing an on prem Toshiba phone system with a hosted provider in our ecosystem.

So now if you do have, hospitality or assisted living in your portfolio, go after it with UCaaS. It’s a land and expand. Right? You start with getting their pipeline with two pots in a box. Then maybe you do their Wi Fi assessment and finally you do their phone system. I’m telling you, this spot, we never were successful, but we are now.

Again, hit us up. We’ll let you know who’s doing well in that place.

Health care and finance is amazing. We’re we’re doing so well in those two.

Here’s some points.

Don’t ask health care or, banks or credit unions about their CRM.

Oh, so Smith Possible, what CRM do you use? We don’t use one. Oh, crap. What question do do I ask now? Right?

Health care, it’s all about the electronic medical records platform, electronic health records platform.

Banks. Credit union is about the banking core.

K? Now unless you’re the ultimate hall of famer, Zach Schechter, you don’t call a credit union a bank. I think he’s the only person on the planet that can get away with that.

A credit union is not a bank. They they’ll take big offense. So if you walk into a credit union, so tell me how your bank operates, right, that’ll be the fastest meeting you ever had. Now both health care and finance, they’re usually coming off an on prem system. They’re still handset heavy, and they typically have a small call center.

These are really prime targets of moving to the cloud. We have some amazing, yeah. Alright, Zach. I see you now, buddy. It’s we have amazing success there. Alright.

Understanding CPaaS

To CPaaS or not to CPaaS? That is the question. You know what the question is? What the heck is CPaaS?

Right? We we we throw this acronym around like we know what it is. CPaaS means many things to many people. It’s basically an API integration.

Okay. I I still don’t know what that means. Basically, what it means is it’s a cloud based platform that takes humans away from the equation, and it takes a caller and integrates that with some type of platform for self-service.

It could be like, I wanna pay my bill. I wanna check my balance.

Right? Anything that doesn’t require a human and needs an integration to some back end staff or database product, that’s what CPaaS is. Now, typically, how we view CPaaS is, like, a math messenger. Hey. School is closed today due to snow. Right?

Hey. Go and vote. It’s, primary Tuesday. Things of that nature. Right? Hey. Take this survey.

Things like that. Great for CPAP. Now what’s interesting, the big dogs in CPAP tutorial, we don’t have access to them, but we have access to the other three dogs up there in the Luger’s quadrant. Right? Our friends at Vonage, SIP, and Infobit.

So, come to either Megan and myself about about when CPaaS is a better fit than CCaaS.

AI in UCaaS

Okay. Last topic really quick here, AI. You know, is it scary? Where’s views? And what’s the opportunity when we talk to UCaaS? Well, what what I find interesting is if you’re if you grew up in same times time period I did, when you think AI, it’s all these scary, scary people trying to eliminate us.

Well, gas, Elon Musk, that’s still true. But, you know, I I think not all AI is bad AI. Well, at least I’m I’m hoping it’s not. So what we’re seeing in the UCaaS space and more and more of our UCaaS players are adopting this is transcription of call recordings or transcription of calls.

How awesome is that? Right? How many notebooks I want you to look at your desk right now. How many physical notebooks do you have?

What if I could eliminate all those notebooks and every talk call I took, it was already transcribed for me. I can go back and search on it. That’d be amazing. The other part of AI that’s moving into the UC world is that quality mark marketing.

Is this a good call, a bad call, a happy call, an okay call?

And the other thing that AI is really doing is that faster training. Right? How do you take a day one employee and turn them into a day one thousand caller? And we have awesome UC vendors with amazing CC products that are the good guys when it comes to AI.

I always, I love this, cartoon. I I, I won’t mention the vendor, but they stole it from me. I was on webinar recently. I’m like, hey. That’s my slide. But, you just can’t do AI for AI sake. There has to be a business reason behind it.

So if you go to your customer and say, hey. We have AI for you, or they better yet, they say, how much does AI cost? If you ask Josh Hazelhurst, and if you don’t know Josh, then he is the man here at Telarus Engineering. He’ll tell you AI costs three dollars just like SD WAN costs three dollars.

We don’t know what AI costs. Right? It’s not a SKU to pull down. It’s not in a box in the shelf to pull down.

It’s a business it’s a professional business serious conversation about how to use automation to either gain customers, retain customers, or grow revenue.

That’s it. That’s the big speech today. Thanks for your time. Again, reach out to my good friend, Megan Tai.

She has to the West Coast in the middle, of the country. Reach out to me, mike b at terrace dot com. I have the East Coast and the lower half of the of the central. I’m happy to talk to you about who’s doing great, whose, marketing might be better than their engineering, and, round out round everything out.

Thank you, Mikey Bee. Powerful presentation.

That was terrific.

Hey. We covered a lot of ground here today. We’ve got a number of questions from some of our, advisors as well that we wanna throw out here. But I had to comment on that picture of, oh, let’s call it the water closet that had all of the, I think one of my former employees had that very closet.

Discussion on Scaling

Yeah. They’re out there, Doug. I I you know, my old days, I’m in the old I don’t know if you knew that. I’m a old on prem PBX guy. I’m I’m Billy Bob’s, punch down tool. And let’s just say I run cable in some interesting places.

Well, in that case, you’ll appreciate this. Hold on to your butt set because we’re gonna take some of the questions that have come in here.

We had a number of questions that came in toward the start of the presentation about scaling because we talk a lot about that in terms of these new technologies.

And yet, scaling in the sense of what that means today can be very difficult because of requirements within the certain products.

What are some of the considerations that you would recommend partners take a look at going in in terms of what scaling might mean for their clients, and how can they head off some of the difficulties that might occur?

Yeah. So scaling means a couple of things. If I have an on prem PBX today, in in the old days, there was a a small size, a medium size, enterprise, and a, oh my god. We can’t afford it size. Right? So they have all these different size phone systems. And when you scaled or grew past the small to get into the medium, you either needed definitely need more hardware and more licenses.

In the cloud world, scale means where they have two users or two thousand users, it’s the same user interface. It’s the same type of license. It’s the same training. It’s the same administration. Everything is the same. It’s awesome.

So the product can really scale without worrying, oh my gosh. I’m going to the enterprise side now. Now I have to relearn a whole new phone system. And the other thing about scaling is talk talk to the suppliers about a downturn clause. Tell the suppliers, these people have real seasonality.

Right? They’re gonna go, let’s say they’re an online source online store. Super busy in February and May. I want you guys to figure out why. But can they scale up in February and then scale back to their contract date in March. A lot of suppliers will do that, but you have to have that conversation upfront.

Don’t assume Tony Randall taught us what assume means. Done?

It’s very true.

Specific Client Requirements

We talked a little bit about health care, and that was an important distinction. We also talked about the difference between credit unions and banks. Shout out to Zachary. Very nice.

We had Laurie that commented here, and this is a great point too. We we have a lot of our partners that deal with law enforcement and other government agencies that have very specific requirements, requiring their communications to be on identical platforms across multiple types of communication and devices.

What sort of questions or what sort of things should partners be aware of before talking with customers and clients in those scenarios as it affects the, the newer technologies that are available? Yeah. The Yeah.

The first thing that we have to understand, and I’m putting my serious face on now, we don’t have access to the e nine one one systems. The big one is called Viper.

Right? We don’t have access to that. So if you go to a sheriff’s office and, like, oh, we can do everything. We can’t do everything.

We can’t do the e nine one one. Okay? We can do the the, nonemergency lines. Right?

And we can do the standard phones.

In fact, I would imagine a a sheriff’s office or a local municipality would appreciate the mobile app because if you’ve ever dealt with with the sheriff’s office, whatever, you know, you see them on their mobile phone all the time. Now they can use the mobile app and the call come from I live in Rockingham County. Rockingham County Sheriff’s office versus Sheriff Bill or officer, Mary. Right? So I think that’s a that’s a that’s a plus.

There are some call recording, requirements as well. So if you do have something in the government space, it’s always a little challenge with that. Come to me and come to me and we can walk you through.

We talked quite a bit about some of the changes, in the CCaaS market, and, obviously, AI has played a tremendous role in that evolution.

Convergence of UC and CC

A year or two ago on this call, we were speaking a lot about the convergence between UC and CC. Do you still see that as being a converged market, or is there some separation now that’s occurring between those two?

Yeah. It’s still convert so whenever I I, I talk to clients with with with the partners, I always get a little philosophical buzz. Hopefully, I can wax poetic here, but I have that Robert Frost moment where two paths diverge in the woods, and cap a isn’t cap a is an all in one solution. Hey. I want I want dial pad UC and dial pad CC. I want Broadvoice UC, Broadvoice CT, etcetera.

The other cap is, listen. I want the best CC I can get, and then I’ll figure out the phone system part later. So, which would be best of breed. Right?

So best of suite is all in one. Best of breed is you get, the best contact center, and then you figure out the best you see. Now sometimes it’s an all in one play even if you do the go that particular tab. Every customer is different.

Right? Every customer is a box of chocolate. You don’t know what you’re gonna get, but I have that Robert Frost conversation with every single one, and someone like, listen, Mike. And I’m working with a large health care company right now in the state of Florida, where they said, Mike, we wanna focus on the contact center, and we’ll figure out the the UCPs down the road.

So they wanted the classic over the top VC vendors, while I have another opportunity with they’re like, listen. I need the easy button. I want one contract. I want one, one back to Pat.

No. Don’t give me, you know, don’t give me independent vendors. I want one phone call for any issue. Like, okay.

We have that too. I will say the UCCC vendors, they they do an amazing job. But if you do have an enterprise account or upper mid market account, those, you know, those, you know, Five nine, NICE, Genesys, talk to our great friends at NewJET, my good friend Jeff Works, Connex One, they they still have a a real important, part of our ecosystem. So both you gotcha.

We’ve done a couple of calls since, April on the unbundling of Teams from Microsoft three sixty five.

Mhmm.

Impact of Teams Unbundling

Now that we’re a few months into this, what have you seen in terms of that impact that it’s had on both existing customers and folks that are considering taking the plunge, with Teams? Has it been as big of an impact as we expected, or is it just something that needs to be figured into the mix and partners shouldn’t worry too much about it?

You know, keeping on the Shakespearean theme, it’s been full of sound and fury, but it’s been really been signifying nothing, Doug.

What’s interesting is I thought this would slow down our Teams voice sales, and it’s not done that at all. I think most of the customers have a contract that’s okay, that they can live with, and they’re just staying on it. So now when they’re coming to us, they’re like, yeah. We have an e five license. Yeah. I’m standing up to buy the eight dollar license.

Or some custom you know, this is on a full speed ahead. As a reminder, some of our great UCaaS providers can do what’s called the embedded app where they don’t need that eight dollar license. Now it is a little bit of a different experience to the customer, but if if they wanna go all in with Teams, that’s a great option as well. I thought it would slow things down. I think Megan and I had the blueprint versus the rule of Choo Choo.

I don’t think it’s done that. Maybe a little bit bit of a speed bump, but other than that, we’ve been full speed ahead.

AI in CPaaS

We touched on, CPaaS as well, and, Robert Estes had asked a great question about the enhancements in AI and machine learning that are being integrated into CPaaS and how that’s contributing to that technology’s evolution. What are you seeing there as important points that, partners need to be aware of and be able to talk about with their clients?

Yeah.

So how many people have sold in Telecare SIP trunks back in the day? Right? Probably almost everybody on this call. Great, great company.

Well, now they are an AI company. So now if you go to their website or if you talk to my good friend, you know, Chris Pokari or somebody at Intellipier, they’re gonna say, we’re an we’re an we’re an AI company now. So I think what we’re seeing is the understanding that the transactional business is sort of going away, and now it’s all about AI. If I can give you any pointers, AI is only as good as the data it has access to.

So if your customer says, hey. We want AI self-service. Your first question has to be, where is that single source of truth of the data?

What do you mean? Well, if if if you want people to to check their balance, where would an agent go to check that balance? But we don’t really have anything like that. Then AI is not to you. Right? You still need a human being for that.

So what’s very interesting is AI is always about the data. And, yes, CPaaS companies, contact center companies, and stand alone point solutions like Yellow AI and Smart Action Now capacity and Replicant and so many others, out there that are point solutions to that core AI, They’re taking advantage of that as well. Again, get me involved. Get Megan involved. Get for AI. The king of AI here, is my good friend, J Lo. So, not only did he do great AI, he also is, continue to great tune with karaoke as well.

That’s great.

CCaaS vs. CPaaS

I wanna finish up with Eric’s question here because I think it’s a valid one. UCaaS and CCaaS, we did a pretty good job of talking about those two, areas of technology, but he makes a great point here. A lot of folks have confusion between CCaaS and CPaaS, communications platform versus, you know, contact center.

How would you define that, and what do you think we’re gonna see in the industry as far as is one going to be emphasized over the other?

Yeah.

It’s a it’s a bit hard debate. I think I I I defined it as self-service without human agents. Right? That’s two good definition of CPaaS. Remember, CPaaS is all about where the data is. How can I access the data?

Right.

That’s the same with any AI vendor. I think we’re gonna see more and more standalone CPaaS opportunities, but I think you’re also gonna see our CCaaS vendors. I know a couple of them have positioned themselves as, oh, we’re a CPaaS organization as well. Like, I what you’re gonna see is you’re gonna see more CPaaS vendors say, oh, we’re CPaaS as well.

We can do that. Where CPaaS vendors fall short, typically, is that mass messaging. That is CPaaS one zero one. That is Finch, Infobip, Vonage, couple others as well.

But that’s that’s in their wheelhouse all day every day.

But when you have an opportunity where, hey. They want, self-service for survey or self-service for, pay my bill, I can go to a CCaaS vendor for that. I can go to a standalone AI vendor for that, or I can go CCaaS.

Options and Decision Making

You know, what I love about that is you have lots of great options. The hard part, Doug, about that is you have lots of great options. Right? So Right. Come to us and we can walk you through that. But, basically, if they don’t need human intervention, CPaaS is a great way to go.

Well, fantastic presentation. Great job with the questions as well. You had a lot of participation on the call from our advisers today. Terrific job. Now I am very proud of the fact that I know how to spell Balarjan, but a lot of people don’t. And you said earlier in the call that you’ve got a different email address that they can use, mike b at telarus dot com. I’ve been doing it the hard way this whole time.

Yeah. You’ve been doing it the hard way. Yeah.

So, usually, Mike b is, our my West Coast brother there, Mike Papillion, o g, Tolaris.

But you didn’t take that email address, so I, I picked it up. So, yeah, just mike b at teleris dot com.

Megan is m pye, t h I a I, at teleris dot com. So hit us both up. We’re happy to take good care of you.

Last Names and Special Email Addresses

Yeah. Or or as my wife says, I have a last name that our daughters can marry on it. And with that, I’ll send it back to you then. Awesome.

As Zachary says, the big guys at Telarus get special email addresses. And, yes, Zachary, I can pronounce it with the actual French pronunciation. So there you go, but I won’t bore you with that. Oui.

Hey, Mark. Great presentation. Always good to have you on the call. Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Oh, I was just gonna say, or, a pro tip is, buy IT lunch and you get special email addresses.

Oh, here we go.

This changes everything.

Appreciation for Mike

Hey. Great to have you on the call, Mike. Thanks so much for the, the insight and all of the knowledge. You make our lives so much easier both internally and externally to Telarus. Thanks a lot.