Telarus Executive Interview with Eugene Laykhtman of Vocal IP

Josh LaPresto, SVP of sales engineering, interviews Eugene Laykhtman, CEO of Vocal IP, who discusses the company’s history, focus on software development for UCaaS, creation of enterprise faxing and call recording applications, and integration with various platforms. Vocal IP also emphasizes its ability to respond to market demand, provide precise location identification for 911 calls, and offer diverse services, including UCaaS, call recording, emergency services, SD-WAN, security, and video surveillance.

Transcript

Introduction

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another executive interview. I’m your host today, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering. Here with Eugene Laykhtman from Vocal IP, CEO. Eugene, welcome on, man.

Thank you, Josh. Thank you for having me.

Look. Long time Telarus supplier. You’ve been a friend of the family for a long time.

Wanna cover a couple quick bullets with you real quick. Thirty seconds. Background on the company, kinda how you started. Any little quick history there you want everybody to know?

Sure. Vocal IPs originated in year two thousand six.

So in the very early days of our existence, we’ve become friends with Telarus family. And in fact, Josh, I do remember the time that you were working for carrier sales.

Oh, yes.

An interesting fact to mention there is that we were Telarus’ phone system from two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen. So we do have a little bit of a history to fall back on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, it’s one of the interesting things on the path from there. You know, from the earlier days, we’ve embraced software development as a path to market in the UCaaS space.

So today, not that many carriers are capable of expanding boundaries of existing products. So this is the business that we are in today.

UCaaS Platform and Features

Love it. Love it. There there’s a couple key things in that. So I I wanna today, I wanna cover we’re gonna talk UCaaS.

We’re gonna talk, SUN, and then we’re gonna talk surprise piece at the end. But, you know, you’ve got a great UCaaS platform. It’s been around for a long time. You’ve got some core things in there, but I think you’ve also got some other features and benefits that people might not know about.

Can you talk about those real quick?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So from early days, we embrace the BroadSoft platform and pretty much right away recognized the shortcomings of it and the lack of collaboration features, the lack of automation, and and, the lack of an intuitive interface to begin with. So we started a software development aiming to make this a friendly and easy to consume product and service.

We also, identify numerous features and functionalities that BroadSoft did not have. So our software creation put us on a path of functionality creation as well as the creation of multiple integrations. We sort of look at our product today, and we’re offering this, and we like to call it, voice as an integrated service due to our ability to interface with multiple applications, some of which we’ll mention here.

So speaking of, some of the main functions that or some of the major functions, I guess, we put around, the BroadSoft platform, those that never existed on the platform on the platform.

So we’ve created an enterprise fax as, which could be consumed as a part of our portal, part of UCaaS, as well as a standalone application.

So today, the faxing supports any type of client that the customer wanna use starting from, obviously, a fax machine connected to the ATA as well as an ability to send us an email attachment, which would be dispatched as fax as well as being able to log on to the portal and dispatch, you know, that attachment this way. We’re also building hooks into Teams and Webex to make that faxing application available to us today.

We are actively and successfully replacing far more expensive enterprise faxing applications, stand alone faxing applications that, you know, dominate market today. So we welcome you guys to, try some of that.

Call recording is another application that we built from scratch. BroadSoft only pushes off the media, but then we our systems have to record that information.

So not only do we record, we also transcribe with the use of multiple underlying APIs. So this is where another difference comes in. We are not trying to be the best API ourselves.

We would rather use the best API available intelligence underneath. And and this way, a customer would have a choice to use a fairly expensive Google and AWS, limited vocabulary and precise health care targeted Nuance, as well as, other ninety four percent accurate transcription functionalities.

So, you could choose a customer can choose to which of the transcription engines to use, and all of this is consumed through our portal.

As well as integrations that we build allows us to deposit that information inside of enterprise applications the customer would have.

We are building APIs into these applications based on business cases. So to us, this is almost like a market driven path to a software creation. So we are responding to market demand as to where the customer would want our product and and how they would like to consume it. So we are very, very flexible. And as you guys can realize, we are during a sales process, we are able to entertain customers’ wish lists as to which functionality they or which integrations they would like to create.

You know, we don’t blanketly promise to create any and all, but we’ll definitely give it a strong consideration. Right? We are not bound by any kind of limitation of product. These are code, and we can extend it to, you know, everyone’s satisfaction.

And there’s and there’s a and and and there’s some key emergency services in there too. Right? I don’t wanna miss those.

Right. There’s a number of integrations that we had built. I mean, obviously, we integrate with Teams.

Teams could be used very transparently as a softphone. You can also operate inside of Salesforce without leaving the Salesforce with telephony. There’s a dialer inside of Salesforce allows you to receive some calls.

Yes.

Integrations with emergency services, of course. So, I think we are one of the very few carriers in the market that actually know exactly where telephones are.

In the event if nine one one call is made from our telephony, we identify the location within the twenty feet of uncertainty. So we supply quite a precise location information. We supply that to the police, but, the greater value is to supply this to the local emergency management person. So we mentioned this would be a school or educational institution.

Any nine one one call made would be sent, and a pin drop would be received by the local emergency management group or, perfect, security guards who would be able to immediately respond and, you know, whether it’s a health care or or a different type of emergency, and to respond a lot quicker than the police.

You know, police also gets far more accurate location of the caller opposed to just get a post office address, which they would get without such intervention.

Love it.

And perhaps the last item to mention here, in a financial services, community, we have adapted to all three providers of our inbound lines, which we can now overlay on the top of our hosted telephony, whether that’s being IPC, five nines.

These services are appearing on our hosted phones, and they work exactly the way that IPC say, intended them to be. You know, immediately ring down, somebody picks up on the other side. So we’re actively replacing two hundred fifty three hundred dollar accounts with, you know, our twenty, thirty dollar accounts.

So that that brings us significant recognition in financial services space.

Enterprise Faxing and Call Recording

Love it. Good stuff. Let’s talk about real quick here, let’s let’s jump into you’ve got some great SD WAN, Fortinet Fabric. Give us just kind of the the quick one to two minute overview. What are you guys doing in SD WAN? What’s different for anybody that’s not aware?

Right. We embraced Fortinet Security Fabric due to the diversity of its product set. There’s also, we performed sort of a evaluation based on amount of features on the horsepower where we get per dollar.

And in that comparison, Fortinet stands far apart from many other platforms.

So that became our sort of default, choice of the SD WAN platform. And as soon as we say SD WAN, as you know, Fortinet within the same devices offers a full firewall functionality, which we find quite useful for different applications.

So all of that is managed and connected to a full stack of Fortinet management, applications. So that’s Fortinet manager, Fortinet analyzer.

We’re actively deploying Fortinet zTNA.

And in the zTNA deployment, one of the challenges is to actually support installation of clients and users’ desktops.

You know, sometimes the process is not terribly automated. We do have an internal group that would support users through all such trouble.

So that that proliferation of, forty nine products has, is is quite exciting for us, and we’re able to deliver very featureful, aggressively priced solutions to the market. So we win a lot of business with this.

Good. Love it. And and last but not least, you guys are always in this conversation lately, it seems like, around surveillance and security, and we’re talking AI and all of these things. I see your guys’ name popping up out there real quick. Tell us about, you know, what is it that you guys are doing there, and and and why is that turned into a niche? What’s that product?

SD-WAN and Fortinet Fabric

Yeah. Sort of. When we look at video surveillance, we we gonna have this vision where, the video surveillance today is mostly known known as a premise service. Well, looking forward for ten years, we expect all of this to be a cloud service.

So we’ve sort of, early on in this path embraced this transition and, offering video surveillance as a managed cloud application.

The managed cloud application that does not force users to replace their cameras, our software is able to adapt to twelve thousand or over twelve thousand existing cameras, makes, and models. We We can even digitize your analog cameras and convert them into same unified system with the same workflow.

Video surveillance is where is overlaid by analytics, and those could be selected based on your needs. You do not need to purchase large and expensive analytic package.

You can selectively choose whether you would want to know about, you know, break ins, crossing a line, loitering, looting.

All of this is available and sends users notifications and alarms very, frequently to convert into savings to the physical security personnel existing at the site. As well as video surveillance, our video surveillance application integrates with forty different access control applications. Now we’re not delivering access control itself, but with our app, you’re able to obtain a centralized view and a centralized logging for access control and media surveillance together.

So the conversion of this, it’s it’s also a fully managed service where we are responsible for the video integrity as well as notifying you if the camera is on blast. Allows us to roll the truck and fix it quickly.

And so this new approach is also is is a very good winner for us today.

Video Surveillance and Analytics

Love it. Yeah. Twelve thousand cameras, I mean, that’s huge. You guys can slot in pretty much anywhere.

That’s the whatever you have, whatever the tech is, take it over, sell the new, huge piece, obviously, physical and security and all these things that we’re talking about right now. So awesome stuff in there. Look. We got UCaaS.

We got tons of integrations, differentiators, call recording, emergency services, SD WAN, security. No wonder you guys fit into all the different spots that you guys have. So, take us home here. How do partners find you?

How to Contact Vocal IP

How do you want them reaching out? You know, SPDMs, where are you at? What’s the website? Just take us home here.

Yeah. VocalIP.com is how you find us. Everybody, I think, in Telarus world knows Michael Cortes. So MichaelCortes@vocalip.com is our leader in Telarus. Please feel free to contact. You can also call us, obviously, and call our sales team. 877-620-4170.

Beautiful. K. Love it. Eugene, thanks so much. Awesome executive interview. Eugene Laykhtman, Vocal IP. Until next time.