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.