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Welcome to MISAC Connect Audio, the official podcast of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC). This podcast is your go-to resource for in-depth discussions, expert insights, and community stories that go beyond our MISAC Connect forum.
0:00
All right, hang in there, because I have learned the hard way that we have to wait for this whole thing to upload.
0:13
Hello, misat community, we've got a special guest today. We've got Alex. Do you go Alexander or Alex?
0:21
Alex,
0:25
good call. I would do the same. You know, Allen is Allen. It's not short for anything. And I think there's a drinking game right now going on on every time Allen hammers a name, throw one back. And so I'm, I'm hit or miss on the name pronunciation. I'm gonna go with stanich. Am I right with that? I'm gonna take it that is perfect. Give me some weird pronunciation of it. No, no,
0:54
Stan itch. That's that's about how it's said.
0:58
So, all right, good. So we got Alex danich of packet fusion. So packet fusion, for full disclosure, is has been a partner of the city of pleasantons for quite a while. But more importantly, they're a strategic partner to me sec, and that's why we've got them on and and Alex, I'm going to allow you to at the end of this, and I do this just to make sure you hang with me through all the questions. I'll give you an opportunity to share a little bit about pack of fusion and and what you guys do, and why you're a strategic partner with with me, sec, and we'll just sort of wrap up, wrap that up at the end. But this particular episode is about UCAS. And just so people know that I know my acronyms, UCAS is unified communication as a service. And so it's another one of those AAS things. I just finished an episode on our our favorite topic in Mesac, and that's VMware, lot of heartburn with as a service. But I would argue there are some areas that there are some benefits and reasons to go to it and and that's why we got packet fusion on today to to share a little bit about this. So you know, before we jump into the questions, just real quick, let's, let's learn about Alex and what you do for packet fusion.
2:25
Yeah, Allen, first off, I appreciate you, you know, inviting us to this and bringing us on. We value the city of Pleasanton and the Mesac community. It's a big part of who packet fusion is and what we do so but little bit about me. Alex damage, VP of Sales Lead and marketing lead, our go to market at packet fusion been with the organization for set going on eight years now. Started as an individual contributor and moved into this leadership role a little over three years ago as the cloud was taking us by storm and redefining and positioning packet fusion in the next generation of technology. You know, we've been doing this for a really long time, but broadening our horizons while staying true to who we are in the voice and communication space, that's
3:14
great. So for those who are not familiar with what UCAS is, how would you define it, and how does it differ from traditional VOIP and PBX?
3:25
Yeah, Allen, it's a great question. You know, it's one that comes across us we hear day in and day out, and still, kind of candidly, blows my mind that a lot of people don't know what it really is, but it comes down to the delivery mechanism. You know, unified communications as a service is a cloud delivered communication solution, suite of communication tools, from voice, as we all know, with the corporate PBX, to video messaging, conferencing and overall, just collaboration and now in today's day and age, wrapping AI around that whole suite of communication and collaboration tools.
4:02
Yeah, you know, I, I know what drives Pleasanton to move toward it. We're not there yet. I'll sort of share our story and our drive toward it, and, you know, I'll have you follow that up and share some additional context with that. And that is for us, quite frankly, we're painted into a corner. You know, it's like we're a legacy short tail shop. We wave that rally flag, love that product, love that solution, as many of my colleagues up and down the state and Mesac do as well. And then, of course, the Mitel thing happened. And then just all that happened to where now we're all dealing with end of life and to support and to sell end of all of it, and, um, and then, and then sprinkler in, a little bit of covid happened. Remote work happened. And oh my gosh, everybody pivoted, you know? I mean, it was years ago. That we had a short tail system with the app, and we were desperately trying to get people to, you know, you don't really need a phone on your desk. You can, you could do this without it. So, you know, and that was pre 2020, and here we are, and now that's what people want. You know, I received more phone calls internally via teams, via teams, and my phone does not ring, and nine out of 10 calls on my phone are external calls, which I gladly will have as a as a gatekeeper to all the vendors that call me. No no offense there, Alex, but I get a lot of calls on that phone that sits on my desk, which I would love to turn into a door stop. So what are some of the other drivers that have accelerated the move toward UCAS, you know, especially in the public sector, yeah, you know, I think
5:56
you hit the nail on the head with that first one, the remote and hybrid work. We all saw the acceleration the technology was there, but it was the push and the overall adoption through covid that we saw a huge uptick in adoption of unified communication and migrations. He also mentioned a few other ones as well aging infrastructure premise technologies and the total cost of ownership and depreciation of that asset, we we see this wave, and you know, we are kind of at the maturity model right now, where we're in that wave. And I think we're seeing a lot of agencies and enterprises across the board who made this investment into premise based PBX is anywhere from five to 15 years ago. They're fully depreciated now, and it's time to continue to move those workloads and those applications to the cloud, where there's more resent, redundancy, scalability and overall flexibility for an organization to support the new age of not just employees, but also constituents and citizens of your cities. You know they as we see the boomers aging out and millennials becoming the majority of the workforce, they want to communicate differently. They want to work differently. So how do we empower them to want to work for our municipalities and be, you know, actual good stewards to our constituents and our citizens throughout the state of California, another big one is really cyber security and compliance. It's one that we all stay up at night wondering when that cyber security hacks gonna happen, when we might be breached. So now not a matter of if, it's matter of when, and let's go ahead and get that off of our plate and ensure that's one less thing keeping us up.
7:49
Yeah, I you know, there's a couple of things I've already got in front of that I wanted to ask you about, and that was about legacy Mitel short tell and but what you know, just on prem solutions in general, you know, we we have people out there who aren't just short term Mitel. We have Cisco Systems as well, as well as others. I've even seen on the forum, some that they're still on PBX, which, some ways, is crazy to me, but another it just does not surprise me. You know, given that the lack of resources and funding that many of us have in these areas, but, but you know, as we see these things happening, you hit on some of them, but what are some of the other challenges that agencies are facing at these these crossroads, I would argue they should not be challenges if they know packet fusion.
8:45
But we appreciate, we appreciate that plug Allen, you know, I think it's, it's the same things that are happening day in and day out across the organization, very much focused around Mesac and public agencies. However, it's happening on the Enterprise too. But the big one is obviously AI. How are we how are we deploying AI? What does it mean? What is our AI strategy? And really, we're being told that we need to deploy AI, but for why? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the outcome we're looking to do, and how do we ensure that it gets adopted? I would also say integrations. You know, we all want to talk about integrations. Integrations on every UCAS providers, a line card on their line cards, a checkbox. Yeah, we integrate with Salesforce. We integrate with service now. But what does that really mean? What does that integration do for the agency, for the organization, and ultimately, the employee and the constituents who are the ones living and breathing and breathing and have to interact with these solutions. So understanding, I think, what the business and the agency's overall challenges really are, and what outcome they're looking to solve, and then finding that right solution is really the biggest overall pain point for this evaluation and these migration. Solutions to a UCAS solution. The other piece that is very near and dear to the Mesac community are the legacy features and the legacy integrations. So we're talking about pots, lines, fire alarm, emergency services, mass notification, these things that, candidly, the UCAS providers of today see as table stakes, as secondary thoughts. That's why organizations like pack up fusion, who know these problems, who actually build a full, complete solution around this by bringing in third party applications like informacast or single wire or PCI pal, to ensure that customer data isn't lost and that it's secure. Also atas and analog terminal adapters for paging, overhead paging things of that nature really wraps a full solution and ensures that value is realized for the city.
10:59
Yeah, you know, we had some conversations earlier this week, just a little peek behind the curtain, and we had a great demonstration in former cast. And it's, it's, it's funny that that solution is actually probably going to beat our u cast efforts, because it was such a great solution, but we also know it's going to bolt on and connect to anything that we bring in. So we talked a little bit about, you know, the impacts of covid and, you know, people's work from home policies thereafter. Let's, let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into the value of UCAS. And more specifically, you know, many of us are using teams. Many of us are Microsoft, 365, customers.
11:43
You gotta be state SLP contract or EA for the state to no brainer for an
11:48
organization, exactly. And so what are some of the the value add of a UCAS system and the integration? Can you talk a little bit about that part of it?
11:59
Yeah, absolutely. Teams, the the 800 pound gorilla that's in every conversation. You know, Microsoft does. It's always there, and some organizations love it. Some organizations hate it. But really, and the good thing about teams is they're finally have a strategy that seems like it's pretty consistent, and they're going to continue marching in the same direction. I think we have all felt the Microsoft tip toeing the line as far as enterprise, Enterprise Voice for a number of years. You know, what did they do with Skype? And what are they doing with teams? And how are they interacting, integrating with teams? Or they going to come and eat the market and do everything themselves. The good thing for us and for a lot of our UCAS solutions, is Microsoft is really in that cooperate model for now. If this was 1824, 36, months ago, we would have said that this is all compete, one or the other, but Microsoft now really has three different integrations or ways to consume or integrate into teams. The first and easiest is probably what we call the embedded dialer, a living in that layer seven application layer where there's integration between teams and a UCAS provider, but really it allows your users to live and breathe in teams, but have that enterprise voice quality and SLAs through a room central zoom, a call tower, whoever it might be on the back end, but the users can live and breathe in teams. They don't have two clients things of that nature. Then there's the direct routing model, which is a little more integrated. And there's different ways to do this. The really cool part is, each of the UCaaS providers has a lot of flexibility in what they build and how they integrate into direct routing. And then Gill also gives you that level of redundancy that if God forbid, but we know it's a matter of when, when teams goes down, Microsoft goes down. You do have that second telephony provider in a Ring Central zoom, whoever it might be to pop up and continue to communicate with your constituents. And then finally, and where Microsoft would love everyone to go, because it's more market share for them, is really operator connect, and we kind of joke about it internally. You know this that model, while very smooth and clear and easy, there's limitations, there's a majority. There's major limitations in what teams can do, especially around the leg or feet, Legacy feature functionality and those third party solutions that it's not probably the best fit for a lot of the Mesac members here listening today. However, what it's also doing is really minimizing the value of these UCaaS providers, because at the end of the day, Rayleigh operator connect turns these ring Central's eight by eights, whoever it is, into underlying pi. Being let's go back a couple of years and call it SIP Trunking into Microsoft Teams. But there's a lot of gaps and feature functionality misses there, plus you're still contacting Microsoft for support, which we all love, I'm sure.
15:12
Yeah. So okay, it's, it's Monday morning, and my city manager has come back from a Cal Cities conference where they had a civil leaning seminar on UCAS, or you heard the podcast, and you go, you know what? We got to move to this. So a city or agency is going to start planning their UCAS transition. Where should they start? What's the logical first step? The
15:37
logical first step is to start with procurement. Kind of sounds backwards. However, there are so many ways to consume, to procure and to understand that a new solution that it's really good to start with your procurement organization to understand what they'll allow you to do, what your budget is, what are you doing? As far as government contracts, do we need to go to RFP so that it's clear and a it's a clear evaluation for ourselves as a partner, the UCAS providers, and ultimately yourself and your team that are going to invest hundreds of hours doing this evaluation just to get to the goal line to be set to told that actually you've got to do X, Y and Z differently. You need something else included. And we've seen this happen day in and day out. So that's why I always say start with procurement. But then after that, I would say it really starts with identifying probably a good partner. Once you understand what your what is required by procurement, do we need to go to RFP, great. Let's talk to one of our consultant partners, you know, comstrat, or client first, who are out there, or engage another partner who is able to help you write that. RFP, who's done this day in and day out. I always tell our clients, you know, nothing we're doing your team couldn't do. But really, it's about the experiences and how many projects that we have done in this space, most of our clients, hopefully have only done one, maybe two, PBX or unified communications evaluations and migrations in their whole career. We're doing hundreds on the year. And so where are those pitfalls? Why wouldn't you ask an advisor for that assistance, and then let's understand what that discovery looks like, the researching, the assessing and bringing in the stakeholders. This is a transformational project at its core, and if we don't have buy in from the city manager all the way down to the call center agents, this transition is not going to be a success, and you're not going to get the value out of it. We're at that point. We might as well just upgraded the server and stayed on prem and continue to do it. Really need that modernization. We need that full board of bringing everyone in and understanding and being on board with the project, then documenting road mapping. And let's start with an evaluation criteria to talk to some solution providers, run through some demos, contract negotiations, and get and get moving forward.
18:08
I appreciate that you kind of teased up and segue to my next question. But before we get there, I'd like to just sort of put a echo your comments, actually, regarding procurement. You've never been more right? Because, you know, we started this episode off talking about subscriptions and and many of us are in this same challenge. For some, some it may not be a challenge, and that is, telephony was something that just sat in a a cap x bucket. And, you know, now we're moving to an OPEX, you know, model, to where these will be subscriptions that we have to pay for every month or year, or whatever it is. And so there will be challenges, and there'll be some unique pathways to that procurement. Maybe in some ways it's easier, some ways it's harder, I don't know, but it's certainly something you have to consider, because this is not, this is not your, you know, your father's PBX system that you'll be procuring now, moving forward, there's a lot of you know, as you mentioned, integrations and complexities that are involved in connective tissue that has to be considered. So good advice on that,
19:18
yeah, you know, you hit on something there. Allen, that, I think is even funnier, too. As we as we're making this transition, and local governments are finally understanding and, and I want to say understanding, it's it's legal, it's the back end office, it's how we buy grants, all, all that financial piece to go from a CapEx to an OPEX world. And I was just on another industry panel, actually yesterday, talking about the adoption of AI and how we're now moving from an OPEX model and per seat count to a consumption based model, an outcome driven model, and so right when we start getting comfortable, we're going to throw another wrench over at finance, and they're going to love us for it. So I'm.
20:00
Gosh, you're right. I could just see the AI vendor coming over and reading your meters, you know, like it's water, exactly right. Yeah. So this is the reason I got Alex and packet fusion on. Because the next thing is about approaching and evaluating vendors. Packet fusion is one of those vendor agnostic partners, a very valuable partner, and I have been witness to this. I've had conversations with Craig, who is our rep, and an awesome one, and I definitely don't feel like Craig's coming at me with the flavor of the month, or the one that's going to put a bonus, you know, in his check. He's really coming and advocating for the city of Pleasanton, because he knows us. He knows where we should be. He knows our challenges, and it's not one size fit all. And so that's why packet fusion is so valuable in this journey, in that they come at you with the different vendors. And I will also add, you know, and many listeners today could probably commiserate with this, and that is, it's very easy to go from one webinar to another seminar to another conference, and then it's like the last one you spoke to was, oh my gosh, that's the one we need. Those guys are the best one. And I find myself doing that too. And sometimes what Craig will do to me is he'll sort of correct my course. It's like, okay, Allen, don't forget. These are the things that we talked about before. Why do you like this new shiny thing over here? And sometimes the new shiny thing is, it might be the thing. Because, as we know in tech, man, you're only as good as what you were doing. You know, I mean, just things just change so fast. So all that to say, how should agencies approach evaluating inventors, you know, as they go through this journey with UCAS, yeah,
21:59
Allen, that's a great question. And the and really the million dollar question, you know, the it starts with understanding what the priorities are for the city, for the water agency, for whoever it is, for the enterprise, and really dictating and documenting those goals, those outcomes that they're looking for. And start with discovery and overall evaluation, road mapping what this evaluation looks like, identifying a partner who can, who has had the experience and can help. Ultimately, you run a data driven procurement process the days of, hey, we're gonna you don't get fired for buying Cisco or are gone. You know, maybe you could say that about Microsoft a little bit. But you know, Google's eating their Google has their fair share in this as well, and they're not they're fighting Zoom is doing some really cool stuff as well, but you are 100% right? The pace of innovation, the pace of change, is insane, and so why go in and do this alone when you can do this with somebody who has expertise? The other thing you know that is just something that we should all take into consideration throughout the evaluation is, what does the timeline really go look like? And let's setting proper expectations. You know this project, while it is about a lift and shift and moving the workloads and servers out of your server room into the cloud, and gaining the security and the flexibility and the redundancy, is still a massive change for an organization who really, probably most of the employees haven't seen a change like this in their tenure at the organization, they didn't switch from a from a Nortel hard phone to a short tell or my Teller and Avaya. They that happened during the last group batch of employees. So making that transition and showing them how to adopt and understanding, really, what those workflows look like, because there's nothing worse than it making a solo decision and then rolling it out to the business users, and it doesn't actually do what they're looking for. It doesn't fit into their workflows, because the days of one thing that pops out daily is the key, the old key system. There's some ways to manufacture a key system and design a key system in the UCaaS provider, but there's not many that do it. And so if you miss that piece for the receptionist, or for you know, whoever that the executive assistant, and you roll it out to them, they're gonna they're digging their heels in, this is not going to be adopted. And so really understanding what the requirements are for every business user, getting their buy in and showing them, hey, how do we change and why we're making the change? Not just here's your new technology and figure it out, but this is what it's going to empower you to do and allow you to free up time to go do more impactful things for our organization.
24:56
Yeah, I. You know, what? Not that you know, pack of fusion is going to lead you down into some pitfalls or mistakes. But what are some of the common pitfalls or mistakes that an organism can make, organization can make with any type of UCAS migration?
25:16
Yeah, I would say the first one is, I hate to say it, but listening to Gartner, and what I mean by that is choosing based on brand and not really fit. And that goes back to the valuation in that criteria, underestimating just the overall discovery process. And it we see it happening day in day out. It is making the decision, we're the best. We understand what our people need, and it's just going to slow the process down by bringing somebody in. So that's that's another one, if you're making this decision on your own, not validating and having that second set of expertise, looking over the shoulder and ensuring that like, Hey, what are we doing about the overhead paging? What are we doing about some of these legacy systems and integrations that we just take for granted to that because they haven't broken 15 or 20 years. Everyone forgets about them, but they still use them on a day in, a day day out basis. And having that enterprise view is probably the biggest mistake. We bring in certain individuals, but how does this platform that we're about to invest time, money, effort into rolling out for our employees? How does it actually scale with the organization? Because, candidly, we don't want to be you could do this. You're signing a three year contract or a five year contract. When you move to an OPEX UCAS provider, but you don't want to do this project again. It's going to be a couple $100,000 implementation and migration, and that change management slows everyone down. So really not understanding what is that product roadmap and how much our value are we going to get out of the solution that we pick? And if the conversation is a little different and it's Hey, this is truly just voice over here and we want it separated, that's totally fine, but actually understanding that that's the decision we're making based off of what we're looking to do in the future. You know an agnostic partner like packet fusion. We used to be short. Tail. That's Allen, how you know us. We were short tells, largest bar, bunch of fun stuff there that we could talk about. But we used to come in and tell you why short tell was the best, why we bled orange, and why everything we looked at looked like a nail. Because the only tool we had was a hammer. We had to tell you why short tell was the best. And even if it was a screw sitting there. We were going to hammer it in. The best part about our job today is it's not that anymore. We can come in, we can partner. We're not We're not a reseller anymore. I'll argue that the value added reseller is dead. The value added partner is the wave of the future. How do we understand how do we use our intellectual knowledge, our experience, and it's ensure that there's comfort built throughout the evaluation process, the assessment process, and that we're making, ultimately, a data driven decision to provide to the board and whoever else needs to
28:13
that's great. All right, so now we've we're committed, we're making the move, and now we got to bring the horses to the water. So how do it it teams prepare for the user adoption and change management, especially when the shift might involve fewer desk phones or soft phone usage or even mobile devices.
28:37
Change change management's the name of the game here. And really it starts with stakeholder involvement. There's many different ways to approach this, and it's really a partnership with the solution provider, with the partner, whoever it is, to understand, how have I always like to start with, how have other technologies been rolled out, and how were those projects? What succeeded, what went well? What would you have changed? Because it's always good to play from experience. Let's watch some game tape, and then let's bring that forward. And now there are some things that we need to change and adopt around unified communications that are unique, but really start there, bring in the appropriate stakeholders, identify and build out a true implementation rollout phase, plan, single cutover, whatever that might be for your organization, and then ensure that there's training deliverables and hands on support for those initial rollouts and all the way through the completion. But you know, typically we like to see Train the Trainer, or live training sessions with as many employees as possible, get them feeling the product. And ultimately, it's trying, probably even trying, to do two trading sessions early on in the discovering to get them excited, to get them the noise going around the organization, allow them to think about how they might. Incorporate that new technology into the workflow. And then in second training, where they can bring those ideas to that trainer and say, talk about it. And this is really more of a partnership in the conversational training, where you're working with the product and you're understanding and hands on. And then day one. Support, go live. Support. You know, we're, we're seeing this is more of a two to three hyper, hyper care approach after cut over and ensuring that everyone feels comfortable and that there's nothing falling in between.
30:36
Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of the the multiple training, or if, even if, the first part of is it is sort of like a steering committee, if you will, you know, to get the get the users to feel ownership of this. I found that's where the most successful projects are, when it comes to change, is, let's let those users feel like they're the ones who made the change, you know, and they're big part of it. You touched on this earlier matters related to security and compliance, and I think that's something that you know on our telephony systems today we didn't quite ever consider. But now we're even though we had VoIP before, we're more digital than ever with these integrations. So with security and compliance front of mind. Always in it, what should agencies consider around data security, call recording, retention, when it's related to matters with UCAS? Yeah,
31:30
it's, it's a topic and you know it's, it's one that continues to change. I'm going to take it a little different approach and then get circled back to the security piece, but like the the unified communications, UCAS and CCAs, also migrations are probably the largest digital transformation and most impactful transition that you can make for an organization. And what I mean by that is because it's really around what all this unstructured data and interactions that no one was utilizing, no one was capturing, no one was analyzing to make decisions and really understand. It was all this. You know, Allen, I How was your day today? Oh, my day was good. I got yelled at by this person because they got stuck in this phone tree and blah, blah, whatever it is, and it's not empirical. It's not actually data driven. And by bringing a UCAS solution in, able to have all that data structured, filtered, focused, and help you triangulate where the truth is, between what Allen's feeling with the cut, what the constituents feeling, and me, as you know, the city manager, what am I ultimately looking for, and how do I deliver that solution? So having that transition definitely now pivots, if we're going to get there, where does that data live? Who is responsible for that data? And first off, I know I did start by saying buying, don't buy off brand. But really, a lot of the big, big name brands out there, the zooms, the ring Central's, the eight bytes, the call towers of the World, are your safest bet when it comes to where does your data reside, who? How do you have a partner that handles that data up to the compliances that we all have to live and breathe in, day in and day out. I would also things that get overlooked from time to time are PCI compliance if you're taking credit cards over the phone, what does that PCI and retention policy really look like, and who is dictating that and ensuring that the new contact center manager or public utilities or whoever it might be, understands what they have to adhere by HIPAA compliance is one that We're seeing huge in healthcare. But the good part about this security and compliance piece is a majority of the UCaaS providers, I hate to say it's a checkbox and it's just table stakes, because it minimizes the complexity of it, but really, that's kind of where it is, and that's the beauty of cloud is let's checkbox that, and let's put it out over there and let them deal with it. We we feel comfortable that throughout our evaluation we made the right decision, and we evaluated their contract, their compliances, their security levels, and that's, you know, why we ultimately chose and I think that's one of the major evaluation criterias that need to be going into and considered through a UCAS evaluation.
34:24
That's great. So, you know, I probably speak on behalf of many organizations like ours. I know we are this, and that is, there will be no forklift upgrade over a weekend as we move to UCAS. And so can you speak a little bit about that, about, you know, us not being able to go to 100% cloud immediately? And so what is a smart, phased approach? Yeah, so there's
34:49
so many ways to go about a phased approach and phased rollout, but you're you're not different, you're not unique. There Allen and do not doing a single cut over. Uh, well, we're recommending what we're seeing. You know, we're about to do a very large college, the encampment, 10 campuses, over 300 buildings that we're going to be migrating. And this is an 18 month project. And so we're starting with the satellite campuses, ones that are out there that you know don't have local trunking that might be connected over the LAN and back, hauling some Ethernet traffic into pris that are out of their HQ, and starting with those rollouts and those satellite offices, understanding and getting everyone comfortable. But also, while we're doing that, building integrations and sip tie lines in between the previous solution and the new solution, so we can carry over that dial pad. So Amy in finance, who knows that 1234, gets me directly to Allen when I need to reset my password, still has able to dial 1234, and talk to Allen. And that you can do some really cool things with the local presence and screen pops and overall, just integrations that allow that seamless transition. And one of the crazy ones that we have seen also is running two systems in parallel, standing them up, getting everyone comfortable, do call for getting the systems built, and then doing Call Forwarding and allowing two phones to sit on the desk for a week, two weeks until we're comfortable. And everyone knows that, hey, we're now looking at the right we're looking at the Ring Central, the Davao, the poly phone, whatever it is, and then take away that, nor tell that. Sure. Tell environment is another way that to go.
36:39
Yeah, by the way, 1234, is my extension, so I
36:42
don't think you want to put that out in the public. You're gonna get too
36:47
many of being the it. Director, no, so All right, we've, we're now at the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And you've, you've touched on many of these already, but just to crystallize it, what are the benefits that agencies are going to see fully transition, both operational and culturally?
37:09
Yeah, the first one is really increased agility. And what we mean by that, it's not, oh, we're we've got another with another pandemic, and we all got to work from home, which allow this, empower UCAS, empowers that, however, I mean more of like, where are we headed with AI? AI, 18 months ago, was just chat GPT, and now we're talking about agentic AI and doing outcomes. And, you know, language processing that allows multiple steps to get us to a an outcome that we had no idea. And so having this platform of the future and being able to understand that I don't need to go do another evaluation, they're going to continue to build and integrate and really transform our organization. This platform that we have for the future is one of the biggest things that we see. It is futurizing, modernizing the IT staff and the overall city. The basic ones, though, are, you know, reducing overall it burden and change management, moves ads and changes, upgrades, you know, the the annual hardware refresh, all of these things kind of just go away. The noise settles down a lot by going over to unified communications as a service solution, and one we were just talking about on that other industry analyst reported that I was speaking to yesterday, is just better collaboration. You know, there, there has been so many silos of where does collaboration and communication have? The call center in payments is dealing with, you know, a Genesis solution that doesn't talk to your short held corporate PBX, where everyone calls, which doesn't talk to your team's video conferencing, which doesn't talk to your slack and your team's messaging, and all these silos where there was no way to triangulate that data and have quick searches. So it's like, oh, I remember I spoke with Allen six months ago about our security project. Where did we talk? On was this in email? Was this in messaging, persistent messaging and slack? So or was it a phone call, or was it a Zoom meeting? Don't really know, but now having that platform allows you that granularity, that searchability and discoverability for those communications, and then, candidly, I think we like to see moving to the cloud in the sheet task project might not be a cost savings exercise for everyone. The good part today and why, you know, we're, we don't want to be the early adopters of these new technologies, a lot of times, is it's a it's a knife fight out there between these UCAS providers. We're seeing the lowest C cost that we have ever seen. I hate to say it's 10. Table stakes are a Race to Zero in the unified communication space, but it really is where it's a good time to make these transitions, especially with what we're seeing with ATT decommissioning POTS lines increasing. Pris, we just fray it up against the customer in San Francisco. He's paid $700 a month, or Yeah, $700 a month for a single POTS line for an elevator. Gosh. Mind blowing. Right like and so once you start adding up these other costs, and you look at a true toll Cost of Ownership of here's what it costs to upgrade, to keep maintain our current solution, with support contracts, with trunking, with moves, ads and changes, break fixes versus what is a UCAS solution? It is really typically a cost savings exercise, especially if we can get bought in to using all the other tools that come with the UCAS solution. So get rid of your multiple video conferencing, your Calendly scheduler, your your you're sorry about that your outbound dialers that you used on your call recording solution, all of those are now,
41:11
yeah, no, you bring up a very good point, and that is, you know, a lot of those things you talk about are sort of death by 1000 cuts. They don't seem like a lot when they stand on their own, on their own, but when you add it up, it makes a big difference. And the other thing that we don't do a great job. We, we, we typically show our direct costs and not our indirect costs. And so a lot of those, lot of those savings aren't they don't show up on a spreadsheet. And there will be a lot, you know, AI. I know this episode is not about AI, but that's a great example of that is that the investment in the use of that, in in the value add that you get in terms of having an, you know, as I like to say, The Best Intern ever, you know, those are cost savings that don't show up on a balance sheet. So I do have a little, have a little less heartburn over it, because I do know, you know, like that example you gave of the unified messaging and communication, it just doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter where I physically am. You know, I'll have a single reach number that, no matter if I'm at home or if I'm in the car or from at home or at work, it doesn't matter. And, you know, it's the savings of bouncing back and forth on calls, trying to catch up. It's just, it'll just be in one bucket, and it'll just be so much easier to facilitate.
42:33
So, so, yeah, I think it's, it's a this modernization mindset, and almost helping it reframe itself as as we've all been known as it as a cost center for the last 30 years, but really into a strategic mobilizer or enabler for the organization, as how do we continue to cut costs, empower employees, keep our employees happy and deliver services to our constituents in the way that they want, and this UCAS platform is really at the core of all of
43:08
them. Okay, this question is a little redundant, because you, you, you hit on it at the very start of the episode on and I liked it, and it was one that I hadn't considered. So I learned new stuff every day, and that is, you're just beginning to explore this transition. And outside of, you know, the good information you gave on procurement, what is another piece of advice you would give, you know, to get people started, like now, outside of the procurement, nothing moves
43:41
the needle like energy and playing and touching the product and seeing what they are to the possible jump on some webinars, engage your local partner, ask them to bring in a solution provider. This technology is moving so fast that if you saw a Ring Central, an eight by eight, a zoom, a team solution. Six months ago, all of that is already old news. It involved see what the art of the possible, and when you have the bandwidth, take those extra minutes to go and educate yourself, that is really you said it there, Allen, you learn something new every day. We're very firm believers at pack infusion. If you're not evolving, you're withering away, or if you're not evolving, you're dying. And so we're not fans of that. We're going to continue to evolve and educate and educate ourselves. But I would say there's nothing that moves the needle. Then bringing your team in, do a quick lunch and learn have a you know, we're all sitting here on zoom at home, at least one day a week. I don't know many companies that are back in office five days a week now, but bring the team in, bring in a vendor and let them hey, this isn't about a product. This isn't a set. This is purely education. Every one of your vendors would love to do that. So I think that's a great place to start.
44:57
Well, that's great, Alex, I you know I lobbed. Up there for you. And I thought you would say, pick up the your pun intended, Legacy phone and call packet fusion and and you didn't, you didn't hit that one out. So
45:10
I love shameless plugs, Allen, but I do got to be a little respectful. You know, I
45:15
appreciate that. You know, any final thoughts you'd like to leave the Mesac community with,
45:21
yeah, you know, obviously, come join. Come stop by the pack of fusion booth and me sack. If this episode is released before, then also don't do it alone. There's many partners out there. We do this day in and day out. I harpen this back to a financial advisor. A lot of people think their financial advisors invest their own money, but the ones who are able to retire, and the ones who are smart with their own their money partnered with somebody, they look to an advisor to let them know, because you do your you have a day job, day in and day out, to deliver services to your employees, to your constituents. Our job is to understand where the market's headed, what's going on and going in now, in the market, it's not really about technology, partly us, probably about a third, but really it's about the people, the processes and the technology coming together. And that's where this holy grail of a digital transformation project lives. And you know, most kind of organizations do this, 123, times throughout their careers. We're doing it day in and day out. We know where the best people are, what problems they have, where the bodies are buried, and what solutions might just be blowing your mind and taking the world by storm. So my one thing is, don't go at it alone. We're very firm believers at packet fusion. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together. So engage with the partner.
46:47
All right, we got t shirt, t shirt stuff now, so great segue. Tell us a little bit about packet fusion. You know, what do you guys do? Because I know you work in areas, even outside of these lanes of UCAS. So share a little bit about packet fusion. Yeah,
47:02
absolutely, I appreciate that. Allen, so packet fusion is a value added partner. We've got our start about 25 years ago in the unified communication space and in the voice space, delivering mortal and then short, all solutions, very large, short, tell var and you know, when the world changes, we continue to evolve and reinvent ourselves. And so we saw a great opportunity to continue to double down and invest in our organization and help our clients, not tell them and sell them why they would have to buy a single product, but help with the evaluation, understand, sit on the same side of the table as our clients and help them make sense of all the noise that's out there. There's only more and more noise. It's never going to get we're never going to see a reduction in that noise anymore. It's only going to accelerate faster. And so how do we help our clients make data driven decision processes so that they ensure that their decision around unified communications, contact center for good solutions are going to be delivering value to the organizations. And then what we've done at package using is really expand that. So now we're partnering with 500 of the top cloud service providers, some of the largest names in the country, in the world, the at and T's, the Comcast, the lumens, and then all the way down to very niche cybersecurity and AI providers that you've probably never heard of, but Do One Thing extremely well, and so it's our job to keep our finger on the pulse. And when a client comes to us that, hey, we're going to evaluate a new MSSP, perfect. Here are five mssps that we work with. Let's start talking about your requirements. In your discovery, build out a statement of requirements go to market so that we make this decision faster and ensure that it was done correctly. So really our practice areas that we have expertise in, and subject matter experts, unified communications, Contact Center, AI, networking, cyber security, infrastructure as a service, cloud, overall, hyper scalers, private cloud, multi cloud, and then overall data centers, which is blowing up for us right now. Okay, AI, and the think, boom.
49:16
So yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off there. No,
49:20
no, that's that was about it. So we're, we're doing a lot of fun projects, and it's not just the voice the good old pack of fusion
49:29
of yesterday. I will. I'll give you a little extra plug. If I haven't given you two or three already, you can buy me a hamburger later. But it was packet fusion that introduced us to Cloudflare. And it was a great introduction. It was something that I would have never thought, you know, well, not never thought it was something that I'm not used to work with packet fusion on, you know, it's usually just about our damn phones. But that introduction led us to something that we're super. Proud of. And one of our, one of our better procurements this past year was bringing Cloudflare into the shop. So so a little plug there. I have two, two remaining questions, just to show you or the listeners, that not only are we both nerds, but we're sports fans. So the first one is, how are your sacramental kings looking this year? Oh my gosh,
50:25
I would take the under on. I think it's at 38 or 35 Vegas. Put it out. They are so painful. They just assembled the what the 2007 Chicago Bulls on the west coast this time?
50:42
Well, there's our there's our sports geek question. And the final one of which I've been asking folks, this is our more nerdy one, when, when you're standing in line at your favorite coffee shop and you pull your phone app, you got a couple seconds to kill. What is your go to app? What's your favorite app right now on your phone,
51:02
fevered up on my phone right now. Outlook is not my favorite, but it's probably one go to but as far as favorite, I'm gonna have to say Spotify. I am a I'm a major listener of podcasts, industry podcasts. I listen to a lot of technology podcasts and investment podcasts as well. So Spotify has probably got the most amount of screen time or play time on my mobile device,
51:32
Understood, understood. And I hope you've now subscribed to or follow me sat connect audio where we're dropping weekly episodes, and this one, we're hoping there'll be a bonus episode that will drop before the conference, and so we're going to feverishly try to get this thing edited and drop for for our Mesac community. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. It's it's one of the things that we wanted to do in the vision of this podcast was not only bring the issues that faced many of us up and down the state, in the great Mesac community, but also talk to our strategic partners, you know, to get value of these partners that, quite frankly, are giving us a couple of bucks, but they're very valuable, and they provide a great resource, and this has been one today that I'm sure many of the people in the community will enjoy. So thanks again. Absolutely.
52:32
Allen, no, we appreciate it, and we'll continue to sponsor me. SAC, it's a great community that you've built over there.
52:38
Great. Thank you. Thanks. You.
52:41
You you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai