Sangoma Technologies Corporation

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this latest webinar from Omdia brought to you by Informatech. My name is Alan Tatara, Associate Director of the Omdia webinar team, and I want to thank everyone for joining us. Today's topic is making sure voice is heard in a video world. Video may be the new normal when it comes to enterprise communications, but voice underpins numerous applications that enable businesses to effectively communicate among employees and with its customers. So today our panel will discuss why businesses cannot afford to sacrifice high-quality voice service as they accelerate their digital strategies. Our webinar is co-presented by Amdia and our partner, Sangoma Technologies. So before we continue, let me just highlight some of the features available for you on our webinar. So for starters, you can completely customize your console. So this means you can open, close, move, or even resize any of the windows and arrange the console as you like. And make sure you check out all of those widgets at the bottom of your screen, especially the resource list widget, because this is where you will find the downloadable slide deck from today's session, as well as other valuable resources. You can also join in on the conversation via Twitter. Just make sure you click on that widget and follow us using the hashtag voiceisnotdead. A live Q&A session will follow right after this presentation, so please submit your questions or comments at any time by using that Q&A widget that you see located on the left side of your screen. This webinar is being recorded, and the on-demand version will be sent out to you within about 24 hours. And finally, if you experience any technical issues, all you have to do is click on that question mark widget, and you will get the answers that you need. All right, so now let me take this opportunity to introduce you to our panel. So first leading our discussion is Diane Myers. Diane is Chief Analyst in the Enterprise Collaboration segment at Omdia. Joining Diane is Jim Mackey. Jim is the Head of Product Management and Marketing at Sangoma Technologies. And rounding out our panel, we have David Portnowitz. David is the head of marketing at Star2Star, now part of Sangoma Technologies. So welcome to all of our speakers. It is great to have you with us. So Diane, let me now turn it over to you so we can get started.

Great, Alan. Thank you so much for the introduction. And let me extend my welcome to everybody on this call today. I'm going to kick it off just giving us some market background, some market trends, some things to kind of think about to set the stage for the rest of the discussion. So let me, you know, if you think back to, what are we talking about now? 15, 16 months ago, it's a bit of a blur, right? But when the pandemic hit early in 2020, you know, depending on what country you are and what region, but we think about here in North America, most of that was, you know, the March, April timeframe for many of us, which really necessitated many businesses changing how they worked, right? And how they engage with their employees. as everyone had to move to home offices, remote kind of working arrangements. And that really brought the rise to video conferencing, right? Particularly video conferencing services. It became standard, right? It's how we connected with our colleagues, with partners, and sometimes with customers. More collaboration tools, right? To be able to do chat and share files and collaborate in new ways, right? So we really... in this last year, year and a half for some has really changed how we think about how we work in the tools that we've used. And it's not really going away, right? And I think it's important to understand that even as regions and sub-regions, depending on where you are, are opening up and people are going back into the office, it still doesn't look what it looked like 18 months, two years ago, right? So even going forward, businesses or employees will not necessarily be in the office full-time, right? So you will be operating now going forward with some employees in the office some employees working remote some people's going to be back on the road and traveling and so a lot of the tools that we've become familiar with and comfortable with aren't going away and we need to figure out though how to bridge these gaps right now that not you know it would be very different when 100 of the employees were working remote but now we have this this combination um and and so we have to think about all these tools and how we continue to use them And the fact is, so we did a survey. Some of the data I showed was survey data from last summer, but we do a survey also, or I do a survey every year around unified communications and how people are using, businesses are using communication tools, what's important, what's growing, how they're using it, how it's being deployed. And so I have a little bit of data here that shows some of this, right? And it's not new, right? A lot of these tools that I'm showing here, we ask businesses what they're using today and what they plan to use by the end of next year. and most i would say you know these aren't unfamiliar right obviously video conferencing and web conferencing all immediate meetings just in general kind of rose up in usage in the past year but um but it's so there's lots of different things being utilized and i think it's important to point out what i want to point out is that things like voice right which is going to be the core of what we're talking about hasn't gone away right And then the requirements around voice haven't gone away. If anything, they only become more amplified, right? In a world where we're not sitting maybe in a nutritional desk or a nutritional office or storefront, right? And so a lot of these tools aren't going away, but mainstays, right? We think about chat, we think about voice, we think about text messaging. still really important, right? The world isn't now all of a sudden completely 100% video, even though there is a space for that and meetings will not go away and they'll be important. Some of these other pieces remain core and that's what we're gonna continue to talk about going forward in this presentation. And why UC, right? And so when we think about UC, a lot of those tools I showed you previously in the previous slide can be very disparate, right? You could deploy those very standalone in many different forms. But when we think about UC, we think about really taking a combination of those and putting them into a useful interface and in a way into a single tool for businesses. And why is that? And why do businesses look for that? And in the last year we asked them, right? Why are you using UC? What's driving you to unified communications? Whether to be deployed on-prem or in the cloud, it's really about improving productivity, especially in this last year when employee productivity, we had to think about it in new ways, right? Because COVID really accelerated you know, the necessity for a lot of these tools, right? And you can see that that was one of the options, right? Was, you know, we moved to UC in the last year because COVID forced us to, right? We had no chance, no other choice. But really, I think about it in two buckets, right? Is that business, you know, employee productivity and allowing employees in the business to really work in very mobile scenarios, whether that be from home or other options are really key and UC helps businesses bring all that together. I really want to spend a little bit of time and really queue it up for the rest of our speakers on why we think of voice as being really critical, right? And, you know, the world, and look, we're on video today. You're watching us on video. Meetings and staying connected has never been more important. But voice is still really critical for a lot of businesses, particularly when we think about the business-to-consumer industries, right? So the ability... to reach customers or constituents by phone. Think about industries like schools, doctor's offices, anything you need an appointment with, picking up that phone and being able to reach someone. Because I'm not necessarily going to make a video call or have a set of a video conference just to make an appointment. I might use some other tools, but voice still remains a prime for many businesses, right? There are other scenarios, right? So we have dispatch and warehousing and manufacturing where employees aren't sitting at a desk, right? But they need to be able to reach other employees, right? So this is more the B2B, right, or internal to a company. where I need to reach out to someone, say, hey, there's an issue, there's something going on, and I need immediate attention, and only a phone call is gonna do that. Not setting up a meeting isn't gonna help that. That needs some kind of immediate attention. So voice remains essential, right? It can't go away, and you need to have really reliable, high-quality voice solutions, because that's what people expect, right? That's what employees and customers and partners expect. And I'm gonna spend a little bit of time to the cloud, right? This is an area that I have a lot of expertise in. And when we think about the cloud, we think about it in a couple of different ways, right? So in here we think about the public cloud or kind of a multi-tenant, multi-instance uses, which we kind of fall under the bucket of UCaaS, right? So setting up solutions that many people can access, right? From shared infrastructure, from shared servers. And then there's a private cloud, which is where I may be taking a single instance of a solution, putting it into a cloud. Maybe I'm managing it myself, or maybe I'm using a third party to manage that, that UC application. And this is for UC, right? This isn't for other cloud applications or things like that. This is a question on where businesses today are actually at the beginning of the year, where they were with their UC solution, right? And you can see here, 28% is still on-prem. and then the rest is in some form of a cloud scenario. And I will say, doing this survey for many years now, obviously that UCAS and that private cloud continue to grow and take share, but also it's important to recognize that businesses are a different parts of their path, right? So some may have call control on-prem and some of the other UC applications in the cloud, and they've kind of married them up. Or maybe they have, the migration takes a year or six months. So maybe some offices are still on-prem while the rest have migrated to the cloud. So it's not always one or the other. It's often a combination that we're seeing even today. Some of the benefits of the cloud, especially if we think about in this last year, is the ability to reach employees no matter where they are from a shared infrastructure. The management and the administration of that system goes into the hand of somebody else, especially in a UCAS scenario. lots of benefits for that, but also probably the number one reason we hear for a lot of businesses, access to all of the applications, access to all of the capabilities in a continuous motion, right? So it's not like I have to go and update my system and update my applications to make sure I have the newest and the latest and the greatest features and functionality. I'm gonna have it, right? When I'm in some kind of cloud environment, especially even in the private, if it's a third party managed, right? Who's making sure that that stuff is up to date. And so just give you that level set, right? UC is happening. It hits on lots of requirements. Voice doesn't go away. It still remains a real big piece of that and lots of business requirements around voice. And the cloud is helping to facilitate a lot of those movements, right? So if you're not thinking about the cloud, now is a good time to really be looking at that. So at this point, I'm going to hand it over to Jim. But Jim, before you get into the heart of kind of video can't replace voice, why don't you give the audience a little background? Because maybe they may not be fully aware of what transpired with Sangoma and Star to Star. So maybe touch on that for a minute first.

OK. Thanks, Diane. So about two months ago, Sangoma and Star to Star came together. So we're one company. We are Sangoma. We still use the Star to Star brand for a while here. So that's why you see the name Sangoma and Star to Star. And it might be confusing to people. Star to Star is an important brand. We don't want to just deprecate it right away. And so that's why you see both of those. OK, so that's a good question. So let me get into a little bit more about what Diane was talking about. terms of uh voice i wanted to spend a couple minutes on unified communications first diane mentioned it i think in the last 15 months one of the things we learned about unified communications if we didn't know it already was the ability uh the mobile aspect of unified communications you could get your voice number to ring on your computer your laptop or on your smartphone And that enabled you to take your business wherever you happen to have to be working remotely at home or wherever you were, like not in the office. And I think Diane mentioned that at a high level, but the ability to have your phone number go wherever you were on whatever tool you were using was also really important. So let's talk about connecting with customers and coworkers. They're different. If you start with coworkers, you're all on the same network. You're behind the same firewalls. You can use the same tools. For any of us that wanted to talk to other So let's say David and me and a third person at 3 o'clock, we have a meeting today. We'll just go in the calendar, hit our video meeting service, and we'll do our conference call, what used to be conference calls, and a video call now. And the video calls are great. So the ability to do video calls, is really we've all learned the benefit of it. And that will certainly remain a staple of core communications in a business. But there's other ways to talk to coworkers. Regular phone calls, email, chat, et cetera, is also really important. But let's talk about customers a little bit. You see a lot more multimodal ways to communicate there. You need phone numbers for customers. Like some of the coworker things I was talking about there was all internet. You need a phone number. Okay. But from a customer perspective, let's say you want to make an appointment or you need to call about a service or whatever it was, um, you needed the phone number and you needed to make a phone call. Um, some of the other applications that you see here, like SMS curbside pickup, uh, you know, you would get your, we all learned what curbside pickup was. You get a text message and you go to parking spot number three and they bring, they bring it out to you, whatever you, you, uh, want it to do. But there's other ways that are, that you connect with customers as well. And IVR, for instance, uh, there's good IVRs and bad IVRs, but you still need to call in and go through the IVR. Um, I actually am in our, our Alabama office right now. And, um, So I had to call the airline because there was some scheduling issues. And so I actually had to call and go through an IVR and talk to an agent. Like I did a real phone call. I was a customer that needed to talk to somebody. But there's other ways, you know, you still do video calls. We do video calls with our close partners. People like Diane, we're doing close calls with people like that. But my point is, it's multimodal. You do need voice. Voice is really important. And you need real-time communications. And voice is a key real-time communication aspect. So there's other kinds of real-time communications. Video is one. Social media is one. You see chatbots here. Whether you talk to a chatbot or the chatbot's talking back to you or whether you're on a website and the chatbot's responding to you, that's an example of real-time as well. But many of the real-time things utilize the PSTN network, whether it's a domestic voice or international voice. And a lot goes into a phone call that you may not realize, like DIDs, you got to do least cost routing, you know, doing this SMSs and IVRs. Like they're not easy things to do. And there's been a lot of experience from UC vendors on doing all that. And so the utilization of the PSN or mobile network is key to real-time business communications, especially if you're a smaller customer. Customers that are calling into you you really need to use voice, even though there's other ways, there's self-help ways to do it. And self-help is important. And you keep going as far, you know, more and more self-help is good. You know, I like self-help too. But in that instance that I talked about with the airline the other day on my way here, I did need to talk to them. And so voice was important. And when you're doing video internet calls, they're great to do. They're going to be a staple of life going forward. We have our own video platform, video calling platform, for instance. But there is complexity there, and everything can't be the basis. Your unified communications is a circle of all kinds of functions, which I'll talk about. Video is not in the middle. Video is one of them. uh equal to voice and and there's a lot that goes into doing uh beyond the video internet call you got to do sip trunking there's interoperability with different networks there's different protocols there's different codecs to uh to uh traverse least cost routing you're going to make the best phone call that's cheaper for you getting all the dits um and then when you get a phone call into let's say you get a customer calling into the company like how does that get routed through the uc system or the you know what we used to call the pbx part of the uc system how does that get routed to the right department is the ivr good Can you send an SMS back out? There's a UC client that you have that you might talk to. But there also might be tight integration with desk phones required. There's many businesses still use desk phones. We still sell a lot of desk phones. And the tight integration with the desk phones is also important when you're running a business because There's a lot of things that tight integration gets you, like the provisioning of the phones. I have, you know, when I work out of my house, I have a Sangoma phone at my desk there, and it's a cloud-based system that I'm on. And when I first got that phone, I just plugged it in, and it was auto-provisioned. And there's a lot of things like that that are important. Phone book access, shortcuts for common functions that you have, presence, tying presence of being on a phone call with that phone versus being on the collaboration tool or... our collaboration tool that's part of our soft client. Message weighting indicator. So all this kind of thing is important in a real phone system, tight integration with UC phones. And so my point here is that, When you're doing voice, voice is hard. There's a lot of integration with the voice. You need to run a business with a UC system. The integration with the phones and the clients and the other UC functions collaboration is really important and something that you should take into account when you're buying a phone system. Let me talk about UC a little bit more. I mentioned unified communications, and you see on the right there that unified communications to us involves voice calls, conferencing, the ability to handle mobility, to have your phone number ring on your desktop or your mobile phone, doing video calls, presence, screen sharing. All that is part of unified communications. video is not in the middle. It might seem like video is in the middle because of what we just experienced the last 15 months, but Unified communications involves all of that. And as we exit, hopefully exit the pandemic in the next few months here, maybe it'll take longer, but hopefully it'll end. Video, like I said, is critical and an important part of our going forward communication methods, but voice still will remain important. And integrating your UC system, with all the other hard parts of voice, such as getting to SIP trunking, interoperable with the network, the least cost routing, and all the call routing that you have to do when you're dealing with customers calling in. All this is really important and integrating with your UC system is critical too. Okay, I'm going to hand off to David now. David's going to talk about applications on top of unified communications. Okay, David, go ahead.

Thanks, Jim. Yeah, we were both clicking there. That was fun. So, you know, I think the next... level of the voice integration is really taking it and then implementing the voice inside of other applications. So we're seeing this a lot from the Sangoma side, integrating the voice into things like CRM, systems like Salesforce or Sugar, into EHR systems like Epic or Allscripts. And then we're enabling that voice also within a virtual desktop environment. Whether you're using Citrix, Citrix VDI solutions or Windows Virtual Desktop, we're allowing our voice or we're enabling our voice to be used within these other applications. We're also extending the use of voice to things like marketing automation or scheduling or mass notifications, things that might happen via text message or e-mail can happen via voice as well. And then, you know, you have seen, you know, over the last 15 months, I know, Jim, you hit on it. Diane hit on it. You know, the integration of UC capabilities to everyday life, specifically around, let's say, curbside pickup, you know, that has become so routine for us. And it wasn't, you know, two years ago. That wasn't something that everybody did. Some companies did it. Some companies did it okay. Now, you know, now if you want to be a company today, you have to be a company today. to be able to offer curbside pickup or something like that. And Star to Star Sangoma can offer you these types of applications without having to go find them in a third party. And you can extend the voice, the messaging, the collaboration features that you are doing in an everyday situation into those messaging applications very easily. It also makes it so that you can send out messages internally, like you mentioned, Jim mentioned around the phone book side, be able to do those kinds of things. You need a full UC suite. And we're seeing this connected worker philosophy being extended into many different companies. Small businesses all the way up to large enterprises are taking this connected worker philosophy. So this idea of bringing UC into your existing applications and making it easier to do work is something that is going to accelerate over the next 12 to 18 months. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about a few case studies, some real-world examples of things that have happened over the last 12 to 18 months of extending the UC into their current business, talking about where voice is important to the customer and where they have used the applications in other areas as well. So the first customer I'm going to talk about is El Nido Family Centers. And El Nido is a really important customer to Sangoma. They are a social services company based in Southern California. They've been there for, gosh, over 100 years. And they had multiple offices, different branches that all needed a unified voice application and platform. They needed legacy services. They needed to be able to have IVR functionality. They needed to have basic routing. And they needed to be able to have failover. And they didn't have this in their current situation. They had an aging system that was disparate with multiple bills and all sorts of different functionality depending on which location you went to. And voice is so critical to their mission. They're often working with families that may not have high speed broadband or may not be able to do a video call because of where they're living. And so voice is incredibly crucial to how they do business. It's the only way that they can stay in contact with their customers and the families that need their services. And the result here is now they've got this super responsive, cost-effective phone system, and they're able to come to one company for that support. And it has made a huge impact on their business. And it's a company that we believe very, very closely in their mission. We've donated to them. We are big supporters of El Nido. And, you know, it just hits home, especially during the pandemic, to help a company like this and to have a company rely on your services is so, so crucial.

So, David, I find this, and so the audience knows, I've known about this. I'm not hearing this for the first time. And I find, and I just, you know, this is such a great example, right, of an organization that really, really relies on the phone system for their constituents, right, for some of the reasons you've mentioned, right? Some of the folks that they're helping may not have access to high-speed broadband and may only have a phone, right? But I have a question, right? So they've moved... to the Sangoma Star-to-Star solution. And my assumption is that they were on-prem, but was it predominantly for that voice? I mean, it sounds like voice was the critical application that moved first, right? Not to say that they're not using other pieces, but voice was the critical piece.

Yeah, voice was the main issue they were having. Like I said, it was very disparate. They had different voice solutions depending on the location. They were getting different bills coming in, each location had different feature sets. So they were trying to unify under one platform. They were struggling to do so, looking for a cost-effective solution. And then they wanted to extend it out, right? They also wanted to be able to take the voice and then extend that into messaging, to extend that into some integrations. And they were paying multiple vendors to do those types of things. Our partner in the area came in, talked to them, heard about their missions, came to us. We have special rates for nonprofits and such. So it is... Like I said, this was a really important customer for us to be involved with. And we felt like we could really help them. And they were very appreciative of that. And they have been a very, very loyal customer to us over the years.

Yeah, roughly how, I mean, just roughly, right? How long did that migration take for them to get up and running on the hosted platform?

Well, one location was really, you know, they could do one location in a matter of days. I think to get all their locations unified, it probably took somewhere within 90 days to get everything unified. But that was, you know, we wanted, they wanted to go at a certain pace, right? They didn't want to do it all at once. They wanted to, you know, so we had to pace with them. But we, you know, we could do a cutover of a customer of this size within a couple of weeks. really usually depends on the porting is the slow part. You're kind of waiting on the current vendor to port your number out, but to get all their locations unified, I think it was around 90 days.

Yeah, but I think that's pretty, I mean, we're not talking about a company here with 10,000, 20,000 endpoints. But I think that's pretty common, right? And I think that's a point that I just wanted to kind of put out there was that, you know, most businesses, organizations, companies do things on a phased basis. And 90 days is actually pretty good, right, when you are doing kind of those phased. you know, step one, step two, or location one, location two. So, yeah, really great example of where voice is still super important and the value that they did in terms of unifying everything under one cloud provider.

Yeah, I think that's, and really to have a partner in this as well, you know, somebody that's invested in your mission is, I think, so crucial. I think that's what makes Sangoma a little bit unique is that we're still, you know, while we're plenty big, we still have a very small mentality in terms of our approach to customer service. And, you know, you have direct access to executives and the team. And, you know, we really, really want to be your partner in your cloud endeavor. And it's crucial to our mission as well. So let's talk about the next one. The next case study I'm going to talk about is a large regional comprehensive independent physicians group. So think about this in terms of you need to go to an urgent care clinic. You have your doctor as part of a larger group in your area. You may go to the same building to go to a doctor's office. You might go to a dermatology office. you know, a cancer center or whatever the case is. So this is a large one of those, one of our largest customers as a matter of fact. They have over 500 locations and they came to us looking to unify again all their locations. They had a massive or they have a massive call center or contact center where if you're calling in to book an appointment with a doctor, you're calling into one location and they're booking all those appointments from one spot. They've got doctors who are taking calls on their cell phones and nurses who are taking calls on their cell phones who don't want to give out their numbers, who maybe want to use a business number instead of their personal number. And they can do all of this with the Sangoma Cloud Platform. So they switch to our business voice. They were able to integrate the contact center. They were able to add individual locations. The soft phone was able to be used for both the contact center folks who want to use it on their desktop, as well as the doctors and nurses who are making the rounds, who want to have that soft phone on their mobile app, on their mobile side, can do that as well. really, really, really important during the past year. I mean, we all know how crucial healthcare was over the last 12 to 18 months to be able to do both voice and video. We're not saying you're not going to do video, but the voice was so crucial for everybody trying to book appointments, trying to understand how COVID might affect them, what should they do if they've been exposed, things like that. Their call volume went through the roof over the last 12 months and be able to scale up and scale back down when needed was incredibly crucial to their business. So again, another customer that we felt like really exemplified how important voice was to their overall business.

Yeah, gosh, another great example, particularly I think everyone can appreciate, especially this last year on the healthcare side, right? Whether you are dealing with... you know, virtual visits, right, or going in to see doctors, right, it was really important. But I think everyone can appreciate that, you know, if you need a doctor, right, or a nurse or something like that, you're making the call, right? Even though we know a lot of, you know, you know, doctors systems and hospital systems have gone to a lot of, you know, virtual and, you know, self-help tools online and appointment making, your first instinct is always to call, right? And to have that phone call. And as you said, right, whether it be a nurse or a doctor who's trying to get back to you very quickly and they're not sitting at a desk, right? They're running or, you know, or moving between appointments to appointments. The easiest thing is to do a quick phone call, right? Because they're doing it on the fly. And so here's another example where In the healthcare industry, we know things are innovating and they're using a lot of things. And I've been on telehealth calls, video calls in the last year, but quite frankly, nothing really replaces the phone. And this is a regional, right? This was across a couple of states, correct? This isn't just in one. Like the last example was the greater Los Angeles area, right? So it was a city, but this is a much bigger, right? In terms of their scope than El Nino, right?

Yeah, this is a lot in Florida, but also Georgia and the Carolinas. You know, a very, very large regional independent physicians group. And they're actually expanding. They continue to expand. They're buying, buying, buying more locations and unifying them. And every time they add a location, they want to add the Sangoma platform to it. You know, it isn't a problem. And just like you were saying with the voice side, I can remember last year during the beginning of COVID, you know, I have two small children and one of them come down with a fever. And, you know, you obviously get so scared right away. You don't know what to do. And I guess, you know, we tried to do the telehealth thing to get on. And we just sat there and sat there and sat there and sat there in a video waiting room. Finally, I just called my doctor's office and the nurse called me back. It was after hours and, you know, I felt bad, but I still, you know, I didn't know what to do. And, you know, she called me back and she said, okay, bring her in tomorrow. We'll take a look at her, you know, monitor her symptoms. And, you know, you just want to have a little bit of that relief, right? You want to be able to speak to someone and to sort of calm your nerves. And I think, you know, listen, obviously we know a lot more than we did last March, but, you know, just to hear someone's voice, I think is so, so important sometimes. Yeah.

They started with the business voice platform and then did they add on contact center? Was that secondary? So they started on the voice and then added contact center?

Yeah. A lot of our customers come to us looking for voice, not realizing that contact center is another thing that we do and another offering that we have. And right away, they had a need for contact center. We sensed it and we talked about it and they were blown away by the fact that we could unify that under one platform, not having to do multiple phone line, multiple types of dial plans and such. So it was a big win for them. They saved a ton of money too.

Yeah, I think it's important for listeners, right, or for people who are looking to maybe migrate to the cloud, right, is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, right? And you can start small. You can start with one piece, maybe just the voice. Or as I had mentioned earlier, we see a lot of people starting with some of the UC applications and keeping voice on the prem, or in this case here, going and adding on contact center, right? There's a lot of flexibility there. with vendors like Sangoma, Star to Star, in terms of where your starting point is and what your business requirements are and how they evolve and how to evolve with you because the delivery from the cloud gives companies a lot of flexibility.

Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about the last case study here. So this is another regional facility, like the doctor's office. This is a car dealership, though. So this is a car dealership with multiple locations in the southwestern United States, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. And if you remember, car dealerships were an essential business, right? You had to be able to buy a car. But for a dealership, they had some people like your operations folks, your marketing folks, the people who were doing all the corporate behind the scenes stuff was working from home. But then you also had a lot of the sales folks, the finance guys and girls, the people who were doing the mechanic type work still in the office or still at the dealership. And they wanted to be able to connect both internally with their own employees so that they could stay together, they could stay in touch, but also take calls from their customers remotely. So we basically allowed them to do so. They were doing video calls with our Sangoma Meet to do internal calls. So they were using our video platform so they could still see each other. But then they were doing, you know, if you were looking for a car, if you were prospecting, you could still call in. You could still make these voice calls and talk to a salesperson and understand what the options were. And, you know, they are now bringing employees back to the office. as pretty customary across the country right now. And video meetings will still be a crucial part of their internal strategy. But, you know, I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to do is get on a video call with a car salesperson. I kind of want to just take a phone call, an email, a text message, and then I want to go into the office and, you know, go into the dealership and have that conversation. And I digress. I'm making a joke about cars. But you want to be able to have that option to do both. And our platform allowed the dealership to do that.

Yeah, I think the point here that stands out for me, in this example, it's an auto dealership. But the reality that many companies have but still will be operating in the potential where people are working from home and people are working in an office and being able to support them no matter where they're working. And even in a very traditional face-to-face business, like an auto dealership, right? Where a lot of businesses conducted very face-to-face, right? But the reality is that, and a lot of industries aren't necessarily that face-to-face driven, but the reality is that being able to connect or stay connected with customers, And with, you know, other employees, whether you're not your home or you are, you know, you're actually in the office or in this case, the dealership, and being able to support that in the same manner that they would have in 2019, right? So regardless of where they are, and I think that's an important point for this example.

Yeah, I just think, you know, you mentioned this early on, I think it's an important point is, you know, we thought last year was hard with terms of like getting everyone to the cloud very quickly. I think it's going to be incredibly difficult in a hybrid world, you know, for companies to make decisions on how they're going to have some employees working in the office and some employees working from home and what does that schedule look like and what systems do they use and what applications are you using at home and how do you control that? And one way to do something like that is in a virtual desktop environment, is in a DAS environment. because then you can control the applications and you can control the security and things like that. So, you know, we're seeing a lot of customers looking for that virtual desktop environment. And that's something that I think we'll see more and more over the next 12 months. But anyways, I'll turn it back over to you, Diane.

Great, thanks. These were really applicable case studies for the time we're in, the times we're living in, but also really demonstrating the different ways that people were using communication tools. So I just want to at this point remind everyone we are getting questions, but now is a good time to start, you know, as we're kind of wrapping down, we are saving about 10, 15 minutes for Q&A. So now is a good time to put those into the Q&A, the question window, and we will work to get to those at the end. So at this point, Jim, I'm handing it back to you to kind of wrap up and, you know, why Sangoma?

Okay. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Diane and David. So I have a few slides here, and then we'll get to the questions. So one thing we heard through Diane and through David with the case studies, voice is still front and center for communicating with customers. There's a lot of other ways to do it, obviously, and they're all important, but voice is still front and center. And from a Sangoma perspective, We have two premier UC platforms. Switchvox, you heard David talk about that. Switchvox is for prem and the cloud offering, and Star to Star is a cloud offering. Switchvox is more for a smaller size business to the medium, and Star to Star is for medium and larger. That's how we... Both of them, so I talked about it and David, we all talked about it, integrated voice, video, chat, SMS, they're part of the UC offering that we have. And so video is part of our standard offering right now. Both of our platforms have internal call routing and rules, so when you have calls coming in, really good experience, years and years and years of experience of doing this call routing and having the rules there. We make our own phones and our own clients, so we have tight integration with our UC system with those phones and clients. We also know how to do external connections and interop. We have our own gateways and SBCs. And if you're a reseller out there, We feel like we're a really good channel-friendly company. We honor the channel, and we like to do business with the channel. So if you're a partner like that, please contact us. So why Sangoma? Why would you want to do business with Sangoma? We have a variety of multi-tenant deployment options for you. So whatever you're trying to solve, whatever kind of business you're in, you know, we have a platform for you. We feel like we provide extraordinary customer service under two minute waiting times typically. One of the things that we get all the time though is that, you know, are the value we offer. And value is a lot of things. Value is price, but also the quality, the features you get for the price and the service. So we get all these features that are available, really good value for the money that you pay. And all the complete solution that you would get in a UC system is all from us. Like I said, our phones, if you have a prime solution, then we have SIP trunking available for you. It's all of our technology. And David, finally, David mentioned this also. Beyond the UCAS, we have other communication as a service offerings. We have different types of trunking. We have wholesale services for you. We have our video platform. We have fax as a service. In one of Diane's charts, fax was shown to be potentially growing in the next couple of years in terms of that survey. And David mentioned the desktop as a service. You forklift your desktop and bring it wherever you are. In addition to UC. So we feel like we have everything you need in terms of a solution, UC, UCAS and beyond UC. So that's where we are, Diane. And I guess we can go to your wrap up here.

Yeah, thanks, Jim. So I'm going to just spend about a minute just kind of pulling it all together, right? And then we're going to get to questions. I had to think about really three things that I think are important, right? That if there were three things you remember, Right. And at a high level, it's that, you know, businesses now are having to operate under lots of new models. Right. And that is for the foreseeable future. And there's a lot of different communication tools that are going to enable businesses to be effective and to be productive. But voice needs to continue to be at the core. And it will remain critical. So don't go throwing out the voice. Make sure you remember and you're really keeping the heart of that voice at the core of what you're thinking about and what you're doing. But there is value in integrating that with a lot of the UC applications. Things that Jim just mentioned, right, when we think about video and collaboration and even things like faxing, right, there is value in finding that solution that brings it all together and you can manage it, you can utilize it, and you can pay for it all from a single source, right, and there's value in that. OK, at this point, I'm going to turn it to audience. So I'm going to kick off with audience questions. So just a second here. OK, so hold on. Let me get to the question window. So Jim and David, I'll let you guys decide who wants to take this, but maybe it's just a group discussion, right? So someone had said early on, they said, you know, they wondered why I was talking about a preferred cloud usage versus years of just really stable PBX communications that is working quite well, right? And quite satisfactory, right? So I thought it was important that we kind of address that because someone else may have that question. And we see, right, so... I'll start, and then Jim and David, you can jump in, right? So where we see businesses moving that PBX to the cloud, right? We're not talking here about, you know, your video or your meetings and some of that, but we're talking here about just the voice piece. And the business that we've seen do that, there's a couple reasons. One is they have a really old system that isn't supported anymore, right? They might be on a TDM system. and they need to upgrade, right? And at this point, there's lots of options for the cloud, and they take all, and the management of that system now goes to somebody else. I actually helped a company, gosh, maybe 18 years ago now, and they had an old TDM system, right? It was an old Nortel system that wasn't supported, and they had to move, and they chose the cloud back then, right? We didn't call it UCaaS, we called it IP Centrics, or, you know, hosted PBX at the time. But they were a manufacturing environment, probably about 150 employees. And the IT manager was just overwhelmed. He needed to take something off of his plate, and I was helping them. And he just said, look, I don't have the ability. I have to take the management of something off of what I do because I do everything. And turning it over to the cloud was a very easy solution. So it's some of that. It's resource, freeing up your resources. if you need to migrate, if you have out-of-date systems. But it's also helping in supporting a really broad set of businesses who don't have just maybe one location, right? They're disparate companies across many locations. David, you gave a great example, right, with a couple of your examples, right, where they're using multiple platforms and they need to unify. And so going through these transformation projects and unifying and trying to, instead of supporting five systems, supporting just one, and moving to the cloud just makes it very simple. But if you have a system that works, I wouldn't throw it out, right? If it's getting the job done and you're happy with it and it's paid for and you're supporting it, then yeah, I mean, a lot of companies will continue to remain. I mean, the world has not fully gone to the cloud, right?

Yeah, Diane, let me... help with that answer too. Part of the question was about also if you have a simple, stable PBX functionality being satisfactory. And I think in today's environment, um, you needed to handle mobility and, and the fact that you could take a phone call on your desktop and your mobile phone was also really important. And, uh, during, uh, last March when, you know, March, 2019 happened and we all had to work from home in that, you know, one day when we all kind of did it. Um, we had people that had prem platforms, some of our prem platforms that wanted to use their phones at home and we were able to do it. So, um, you know it was and and it's a because we have a uc platform and i think some of the older pbx's if they work they work but i think it's not good enough anymore to just have an older pbx you need really a uc system to handle the needs of today whether it's cloud or prem okay so i think that was part of the question too but i'm not sure yeah and jim there's another question that i have which is around um supporting remote workers

with an on-prem PBX. And, you know, can that be done, right? Do I have to move to the cloud if I need to support remote workers? And I'll say, yeah, that was, you know, right? Because most systems, if you're on a, you know, if you're on a more current system, not something from 20 years ago, but a more current system, you should, from your vendor, be able to get a soft client, right, or bring your phone home. If you want employees to slug a phone home, but most should be able to get a soft client up on a laptop.

Or a laptop or your smartphone, yeah, and be able to handle taking phone calls into your work number, even if it's in California and you happen to be in Montana or vice versa, you can make phone calls out too. So, yeah.

So, Jim, someone asked a question. It was towards the end of what you were talking about and how you defined a medium to large business. Yeah, I saw that question. Yeah, that could be the context for probably just give someone context.

You should also answer that question, too, because I think it depends on who you are. I will. Yeah. Small to us is sort of like under 20 seats, okay? So that would be a small business. Medium is probably more like 50 to 100. And then large... Yeah, you know, over a couple hundred. I mean, I don't think there's any hard and fast rules there, but that's sort of how we look at it.

Yeah, we look at it a little differently on the research side, right, when we're researching and we're segmenting. A small business to us is any business less than 100 employees. And we have micro businesses, right, which are like less than 20. And then for us, a mid-market is from like 101 employees up to like about 999. And the large enterprise is 1,000 and above. And then we start talking about multinationals and, you know, the extra large enterprise, which you have. you know, across multiple countries and, you know, tens of thousands of employees. So, but that's how we do it from a, you know, and that's, it is a good question to ask if people are trying to understand the context. So what about, so someone asked a question or I have a question here in terms of, gosh, the best kind of experience, right? So if I, this is from a reseller who asked, should I be selling kind of that hosted experience and really, you know, for new business? So, you know, companies who are looking to make a change or with the existing base, right? So maybe they're an existing Sangoma longstanding customer and should we now be pushing them and kind of marketing them on the kind of the hosted experience or should we only be doing that with new customers?

I think it depends. You know, we want to do what's right for the customer. If the customer wants to buy prem, we're happy to sell them prem. If they're in prem, And, you know, they want to stay in-prem. You know, we want to support them. If they want to transition to cloud, it's easy because it would be the same user experience because it's the same platform if they go to Switchbox. So whatever they want to do is good for us. There are a lot of people that, you know, during 2020, What year are we in? Yeah, 2020. That transitioned from – I just can't remember when the thing started. That's a blur. There are a lot of customers that did go from prem to cloud, from one to the other. They transitioned last year. It hastened the rate of moving from prem to cloud. That was going on with our platforms. probably because of COVID, right? But the answer to the question is we want the customers to be happy. Whatever they want to do is good. If they have questions on whether they should move to cloud or what the benefits are, we're happy to talk to them about it, but we won't force it.

I think the best advice I tend to give on questions like that, just generically, right, is that whether you're a reseller or a direct salesperson or, you know, where you are in the line, if you're talking, if you're dealing, if you're interfacing with the customers, it's really understanding where they are, right, with their requirements and what they need as a business. Because a lot of business, Jim, as you pointed out, had to kind of go through unexpected transformations in the last year. Yeah. So understanding their pain points and what they're ultimately trying to achieve and what they need and, you know, how they interface today with customers or, you know, internally employees is pretty important. And I think there's not a business out there that doesn't appreciate someone listening and taking stock of what their business is about and then making the best recommendation for that company, right? So another question is, you know, future of desk phones right so we all just talk about um voice and is is desk phones kind of dead and um i'll take a stab at that and then you guys can write but you know i think the key is that voice is not dead right but how we how we access that voice is absolutely evolved, right? I think, especially in this last year, right? And that kind of goes into some of these other questions, right? People have become very comfortable with clients, whether it be on a laptop or a mobile phone, right? Everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket or somewhere close by, but having that extra application that connects them on the business side. So in a long about way, desk phones aren't dead, but they are absolutely, there's a recognition by a lot of companies and employees that maybe they don't need that extra real estate on their desktop or their, you know, or their kitchen table if they're working from home?

Yeah. I mean, I, I, that to me, that answer is similar to, uh, 10 years ago, like the PS 10, it'll be over in a couple of years. And here we are still here. Um, you know, we, we make our own phones and, uh, we have a healthy demand for the phones. Um, so we don't, we don't see that maybe people want a phone and a soft client. And that's what we see. Um, We see people taking both. They definitely, you know, in our business, there's a very, very high attach rate of phones to the number of seats we sell, right? So we don't see, you know, at least in our target markets, we don't see that people aren't buying phones, okay? So it's still healthy there. So I think ultimately what you said might happen, but I think it's a long way away.

Yeah. Someone had a question about migrating from a competitor to Sangoma or star to star system. And I'm not going to say who that competitor is. But I think whenever you have, and this was a partner, a channel partner, right? Whenever you have a customer going off of one system and looking to make a change, this is a great opportunity to introduce those customers to other options. Now, if a customer has been doing something one way for 30 years, right, and they're very comfortable with the platform, yes, that can be a little bit more challenging. But there are so many great options today to look at and to evaluate, especially because of the cloud, that I think it's an avenue in for those discussions, right? So just because you've been on one vendor and you're moving to the cloud doesn't mean that the company needs to stay with that one vendor, so. Okay, so I think, you know, if we had one last question, so someone asked a question that was kind of more kind of also very, very general, but it was talking about, you know, looking at all these options, right, looking at things around APIs, looking at the cloud, looking at options for prem, what would be the best advice you could give someone? Because it can be overwhelming. It can just be a lot to take in and to understand. all of those pieces if you are a business, especially if you're a smaller company, right, with only 50 or 60 employees, to understand all of that. And so what advice do you give, you know, a seller or even the end customer on how to kind of go about evaluating everything?

You mean other than just come to us? Other than just come to us?

But what should they be looking at? What should they be evaluating? What are the critical points for them to look for?

yeah they really got to think about what is important for for them like what do they really need to do what are they trying to do and what do they want to do next year um because otherwise you might get some have real super heavy system that you don't use all the features and you're overpaid or something like that and And, you know, really part of this, the message of this webinar was, you know, we all got sucked into video last year and it might be tempting to go to a video centric platform, but really, and maybe that's the right thing for your business, but also make sure that you take into account all the other things your business really needs from a customer perspective. So, you know, prioritize what you really need and what you want to be next year. So that's what we tell people.

Great. I want to thank you guys so much. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart lately because, and Jim, you and I have talked about this, right? Everyone wants to talk about video, right? Video, video. And it's not really to put down the importance of meetings and videos. They have been extremely important this last year, but it's also to recognize that voice is still just really important. So thanks, everyone.

All right, Diane, thank you. Let me kind of jump in here and conclude for everyone. So thanks to all of you for participating on our webinar and for submitting your questions and comments. We certainly do appreciate that. I do want to thank Diane for leading our discussion today, and a special thank you to Jim and David as well for this. a very engaging and informative discussion. So an archived version of this webinar will be made available shortly. In fact, we'll be sending you a link on how you can access that archive, or you can simply use the same link we sent you earlier. Come back, view the session, pass along to your colleagues. It's all well appreciated. Please take a few moments to complete the survey that will conclude our webinar today. And make sure you continue to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for information on future webinars from Omdia brought to you by Informatech. So again, thank you for joining us and have a great rest of your day.