The Power of Smoothstone

To all partners that work with Smoothstone in the channel, please offer up a warm welcome to Mike Perry.  Mike joins Smoothstone this month as VP of Channel Development and will be responsible for all aspects of our channel activity including traditional Smoothstone channel partners, our relationship with InterCall, our partnerships with Cisco and Microsoft and our Strategic Alliances.

Mike was most recently at Cisco where he led Cisco’s Worldwide Service Provider Channel for WebEx, and brings a wealth of global channel knowledge and experience to the team from his previous roles at Cisco and Sprint.

The December issue of the International Legal Technology Association’s Peer to Peer magazine is telling law firms to get out of the telecom business and take their voice services to the cloud. Authored by James Whitemore of Smoothstone, the article speaks to the challenges law firms face when calculating billable hours and the importance telephone discussion plays in that.

A law firm cannot afford to be inaccessible to its clients, principals, material witnesses, industry experts or internal subject-matter experts. Lost calls easily translate into a lost revenue opportunity, especially when new clients are reaching out for the first time to a law firm.

The solution, Whitemore suggests, is cloud-based unified communications, which not only provides advanced collaboration and voice services but allows firms to actively audit their use of the system.

These advantages hold true for enterprises of all sizes and industries. If you’re exploring the benefits of cloud-based UC in any way, this article is worth a read.

The newly released “Trends in Managed Services” study from CompTIA shows that managed services adoption is being fueled by customers saving money. The study found that customers that rely on MSPs for some or all of their IT needs are reaping significant annual costs savings. Here are some other notable findings:

• 46% of firms have trimmed their annual IT expenditures by 25 percent or more as a result of their shift to managed services, including…
• 13% that have slashed annual IT expenditures by 50 percent or more on the IT functions they are outsourcing
• 50% of organizations have saved between 1 percent and 24 percent in IT costs annually on what they have moved to an MSP-managed environment

For more on this study, see the original article on Channel Partners.

To learn how managed communication services can save your company money, contact us.

In a recent blog post, T1 Rex’s John Shepler makes a case as to why contact centers are follow the lead of enterprises and adopting cloud-based voice services. As a provider of network connectivity, Shepler highlights the Smoothstone ControlMaxx hosted contact center, which gives enterprises the tools they need to run distributed contact centers via the cloud.

The entire blog post can be read on T1 Rex’s blog, Telexplainer.

Smoothstone has added two new conferencing and collaboration solutions to its Unified Communications portfolio – MaxxUM and MaxxBridge.

Smoothstone MaxxUM is a web-based collaboration solution that combines audio, web and video conferencing into a single system. MaxxUM integrates with everyday business tools like calendaring systems and instant messaging clients, allowing users to share files, collaborate on projects in real time and increase productivity.

For audio-only meetings, MaxxBridge is a voice conferencing solution that quickly and easily brings you and your colleagues together to meet business objectives. It does not require reservations or operators, giving users the ability to quickly start meetings, invite participants and provide complete control of conference commands.

The two applications were designed to be integrated into one powerful conferencing solution, with the ability to control MaxxBridge audio conferencing from the MaxxUM web application. You can also quickly and seamlessly move from a MaxxBridge audio meeting into a MaxxUM meeting without ending the call.

These two solutions provide the performance, reliability and flexibility associated with cloud-based solutions combined with the service and support you expect from Smoothstone. As hosted solutions, they both allow users to initiate instant cloud-based meetings without having to manage the applications themselves.

Unified communications is usually presented as a suite of tools – voice, data, contact center, mobile, messaging, etc. – brought together to help you work more efficiently. But what if your unified communications, or the UC solution you’re looking at, isn’t exactly unified?

The key to successful unified communications is taking disparate technologies and making them work seamlessly together – each one leveraging what it does best to add value to the total package.  The key to this is interoperability, that is, getting both new and legacy systems to work together to drive increased productivity.

In the article “UC Interoperability – Technology Separation of Church, State, and End Users” by Art Rosenberg, the author points out several trends in UC interoperability:

A move to the cloud: “Business communications (particularly voice telephony) are transitioning away from hardware-based, location-based technologies to “open” software and “virtual” applications that can more easily interoperate with each other,” said Rosenberg.

Conversations don’t just happen on the phone: “They are also shifting to application-driven real-time notifications and multimedia self-services rather than requiring person-to-person phone calls for real-time information access and delivery.”

UC is controlled by the end user: “Traditional requirements for enterprise communication control is expanding away from just the wired premise desktop to multimodal, mobile BYOD devices that will be primarily controlled by the individual end users through UC and shared for the many different contacts with other organizations that the individual end user has “business” relations with.”

To continue the discussion about interoperability and how you can leverage the cloud to migrate legacy on-prem equipment into hosted UC, contact us.

Despite the many benefits enterprises are experiencing from moving to cloud-based communications, many enterprises are still reluctant to commit to a “true cloud” strategy.

Often times, it’s their legacy infrastructure that is making makes it exceedingly difficult to actually unify communications across the network, yet they are still reluctant to it give up for “new” technology. Also, the sheer complexity of converging the voice, data and video communications available today means that many companies lack the staff and budget to get the most out of their existing communications infrastructure.

What many companies don’t realize is that a cloud-based approach, combined with a hosted application-aware network, can easily address many of the issues that may be delaying their efforts to move forward into unified communications, including:

1. Legacy MPLS network services and a multitude of service providers
2. Legacy TDM PBX equipment that they intend to keep in service
3. On-premise IP PBX systems that they also intend to keep in service
4. Contact center platforms and services that must be incorporated in a unified communications solution
5. The need to add new locations in places where they don’t yet have the infrastructure built out

Want more information on cloud-based communications for your enterprise? Check out Smoothstone VoiceMaxx and Maxxis Application Network or contact a Smoothstone representative right now.

In today’s business climate, contact centers must be agile enough to adapt quickly to changing business conditions, handling unpredictable or seasonal call volumes, meeting and exceeding customer service expectations and adhering to corporate governance policies. For many companies, the contact center is their lifeblood and each call is important and can’t be mishandled.

But traditional telephony and on–premise contact center offerings just don’t deliver the agility and real–time control that an enterprise needs to stay ahead of the pack. That’s why many enterprises are looking at cloud–based contact center solutions. These systems allow for unlimited scale of users and call handling capacity and provide administrators and agents the tools they need to ensure excellence in customer service.

Here are five benefits of a cloud-based contact center:

1. Improve quality & drive productivity. Cloud-based contact centers help the enterprise achieve quality and productivity goals. Sophisticated call routing capabilities put administrators in control of call flows across distributed centers and agents, ensuring callers reach the resources best able to serve them. Administrators benefit from total transparency of queues and agent activity and can manage traffic across queues in real–time.

2. Stay nimble. Delivered as a cloud–based application, a hosted contact center’s on–demand nature provides a flexible, scalable solution that moves at the pace of your enterprise. Contact center managers will experience the flexibility of real–time queue management, adding or removing users from queues as call flow dictates, accommodating high traffic periods and busy seasons.

Invest wisely. Cloud economics can deliver real busi­ness value to the enterprise. By deploying a hosted contact center, you can reduce or eliminate the need to purchase, upgrade and maintain complex on–premise systems and reduce the load on internal help–desk and support staff. User-based pricing models and the on–demand nature of the applica­tion help eliminate over–provisioning and over–spending on infrastructure and services, resulting in more rapid integration and enhancing agent productivity.

Ensure business continuity. A good hosted contact center solution provides for unlimited scalability of services and is delivered from highly resilient, secure application servers located in geographically distributed data centers. The application provides a powerful set of business continu­ity and disaster recovery features during times of critical need, allowing for on–the–fly changes to ensure that your business continues to operate.

Integrate business processes. Understanding that your customers have high expectations for service delivery and are intolerant of delays and inadequate services, hosted contact centers enable voice & data integration into enterprise business processes and applications. Incoming call and caller provided data can be used to facilitate intelligent call routing and integration with the applications and services an agent needs to deliver a high quality customer experience.

With more financial institutions debating whether they need to move their computing functions to “the cloud,” IT teams are working harder to implement more cloud-based applications into their infrastructures. And while the benefits of the cloud are plenty, making the migration to the cloud isn’t always easy for large enterprise banks and financial institutions.

To help FIs through the transition, BAI, the information and intelligence provider for the financial industry, published an article entitled “Five Considerations for Cloud Banking” authored by James Whitemore of Smoothstone IP Communications. Smoothstone a leading provider of cloud-based communications for the enterprise and has more than 10 years of expertise in moving large-scale organizations from analog to cloud-based communications.

West Corporation, a leading provider of technology-driven voice and data solutions, today celebrates the 20th anniversary of its subsidiary, InterCall®, the world’s largest conferencing and collaboration services provider.

InterCall launched in 1991 and provided services to facilitate conference calls for sales managers with their direct reports.  Since then, InterCall has grown into an industry leader, serving organizations in 179 countries.

InterCall has been on the cutting-edge of the way people and organizations conduct business from its inception and through a series of strategic acquisitions.  “InterCall has integrated communication tools into corporate business processes to such an extent and with such speed and transparency that people don’t even think about it any longer,” said Scott Etzler, InterCall President.

Highlights of the company throughout its history include the delivery of high-quality, reliable, easy-to-use services that include automated, self-service options.  Long-time customers also appreciate the company’s rigorous emphasis on customer intimacy, which is the focus of more than 1,500 operators, customer service representatives and meeting consultants.

“At West, our goal is to meet our clients’ business communications needs by providing best-in-class hosted and managed communications services,” said Todd Strubbe, president of West’s Unified Communications operating segment.  “As voice, data and video communications continue to evolve and converge, InterCall will be an even more integral component of West’s industry-leading unified communications services.”
For a timeline of InterCall industry milestones, please visit www.intercall.com.

About InterCall

InterCall, a subsidiary of West Corporation, is the largest service provider in the world specializing in conference communications. Founded in 1991, InterCall helps people and companies be more productive by providing advanced audio, event, Web and video conferencing solutions that are easy-to-use and save them time and money. Along with a team of over 500 Meeting Consultants, the company employs more than 1,500 operators, customer service representatives, call supervisors, accounting, marketing and IT professionals. InterCall’s strong U.S. presence, which includes four call centers and 26 sales offices, is bolstered by a global reach that extends to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. For more information, please visit www.intercall.com.