EP 54: Move Your PBX to the Cloud

Transcript for this Episode:

INTRODUCTION VOICEOVER: Dive into the world of innovation with us as we unravel the challenges, breakthroughs, and latest trends that are shaping our digital landscape. This is Tech UNMUTED, your guide to the tech revolution.

SANTI: Welcome to another episode of Tech UNMUTED. Terry, I have got a question for you.

TERRY: All right. What's up?

SANTI: How long have you been in this industry?

TERRY: Oh, I've been in IT since the early '90s, so over 30 years now.

SANTI: Yes, over 30 years. I started in what we used to call the dot-com era. Remember that?

TERRY: Oh, yes. I was in a dot-com. We ran an internet company. Oh, yes.

SANTI: Yes. The reason I ask that is, in that 30-plus number of years that you and I have been doing this, for how long have you heard of people moving to the Cloud?

TERRY: In general, moving to the Cloud, probably the whole 30. That was the whole push of the dotcom was, "What can we put in the Cloud for you?"

SANTI: Technically.

TERRY: "What can we do so that it's not on your site, and you're not relying on your one location?" Since the dotcom back in the early '90s, people have been moving to the Cloud. The phone systems themselves have been moving to the Cloud for at least 20 years of that.

SANTI: I'm going to say about 20 years.

TERRY: Yes.

SANTI: Yes. It's probably when the term 'Cloud' became popularized because prior to that, only the engineers knew what the heck the Cloud was. They would literally draw the Cloud. I think it became popularized with the movement of the phone system, and you're right, it's about 20 years. Here's the thing. I bring this up because we are now in the year 2024, and we're still moving to the Cloud, aren't we?

TERRY: Oh, yes. There are a lot of customers and companies out there that just-- they're not in the Cloud. They're still using a phone system on-site. Some of them are still using phones that literally are the old-school copper line plugged into a two-line phone, and that's what they use for their business.

SANTI: EDM based systems.

TERRY: They don't have that redundancy of their business like they used to, or like they should. They thought it was, "Oh, the copper lines are more reliable, more redundant” things like that. We're going to keep our phone system here and plug right into them, and then they'd have somebody outside working on the sidewalks or the street, maybe putting in a new water pipe out front under the ground, and what do they do? Bulldozer comes through, a backhoe digs up the ground, and gone are your copper lines for days.

SANTI: Literally. Maybe weeks, honestly.

TERRY: Maybe weeks.

SANTI: Yes, you never know. Then, of course, we're talking voice, but we all know that this Cloud conversation has been happening even with data. You and I started, I think, in Colos to some degree.

TERRY: Yes. We had all those-- putting your servers in the Cloud, putting your databases in the Cloud, putting everything in the Cloud, which today is second nature. You run Cloud-based software.

SANTI: It's normal. That's right.

TERRY: It's the whole as-a-service reality of it. There's the software as-a-service, the database as-a-service, disaster recovery as-a-service, and I think today we're probably going to talk a little bit about unified communication as-a-service or phones as-a-service.

SANTI: Anyway, I did some research just recently, and I asked two questions of our AI (Artificial Intelligence) platforms to see what responses I get. They gave me slightly different numbers, but they both said something that was the same. They said that the US is further along with its Cloud migrations or moving platforms and services to the Cloud than the rest of the world. Actually, in other countries, the number of people who have not moved is significantly greater than the ones here in the US, and I did find that interesting.

While in the US, we tend to lean on a lot of things, a lot of times with technology, it's not really the US that leads. It's like there's a lot of other countries out there, but they are actually behind the eight ball when it comes to that stuff. Anyway, just cool stuff, man. Let's talk about that. For some people, it may be a recap of things they've heard for years. For other people, maybe it's the first time they actually think about this. There's something that drove the movement to the Cloud, and it was all about challenges with legacy on-premises solutions, the type of challenges that the server huggers refuse to give up. [chuckles]

TERRY: It is. You run into everything from, you get snowed in, which has happened everywhere, all the way down to Texas now, -

SANTI: Yes, it has.

TERRY: -they get ice storms on the regular, to hurricanes, to different things like that, and you can't get into the office to do something about rerouting your--

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: "Hey, the phones are there, but I can't do anything with them. It's just going to ring." Companies lost business and lost money during times when everybody was worried about their lives. They were also worried about their livelihood and what they could come back to once life got back to normal. That's been going on for the 20 years that people have been talking about going to the Cloud.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: That's really one of the keys-- being able to manage your devices without leaving your house in a secure way has been-

SANTI: In a secure way.

TERRY: -a real leader in that industry. It wasn't available when people kept phones in a closet. We all remember the phone closet, and they kept them there, and you had to punch them down and use wire.

SANTI: Still there. Copper's still there.

TERRY: It is. I've got the tools to do it. We talked about it a minute ago.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: That's how long I've been doing this, is I've got the old tools. I've got a butt set. I've got a punch-down tool. I've got all the things to do that because I've done it that long, but really, those aren't necessary anymore. Everything is Ethernet.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: Everything is over the network.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: It's software-defined. It is truly the world of software-defined networks and being able to do any software, telephony, database, everything, over the network.

SANTI: One of the things it made possible, honestly, is it made everything scalable because when you were on-premises, you were limited to the capacity and the technology that you had in that phone closet or whatever that--

TERRY: Absolutely.

SANTI: Maybe even a small data center, but you were still limited to that infrastructure. When you move it into the Cloud, you're moving it into a Cloud provider who has built-in-- first of all, virtualization changed the game because with virtualization, we can spin up stuff instantly for additional capacity. It's all sudden scalability, just the issues of scaling. People think about, "Yes, but scale, that only happens when you buy a company or something."

No. I know for a fact, living in Florida, when we have a hurricane hit, other companies are impacted because their phone calls increase significantly depending on what industry they're in or what they're dealing with. Guess what? How do you plan out for capacity to add another 100 agents within minutes? How do you do that unless you have this scalability with something like the Cloud? I think that's a big one. That was a huge motivator, I think, for companies to be able to do that.

TERRY: Oh, yes. Scalability is everything, really.

SANTI: It is.

TERRY: With Legacy T1s, that's 23 concurrent calls.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: With analog lines, it's however many you can run in there coming off of an Amphenol cable or a 66 block. I know I'm getting technical, I'm sorry, but really, everything is limited and to scale it up, it could take you literally multiple months to get a new line or set of lines in there. Whereas in the Cloud, we all run connectivity that is as big as the network connections that we provide.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: Cloud providers like Fusion Connect, like ourselves, we provide huge Clouds. We have an on-net capability to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent calls.

SANTI: Yes, literally. Man. Then you mentioned that and what came to mind is the IP backbone that we have nationwide, but on that backbone, how we have three, I think even four, let's call them points of presence or data centers, where all these calls are there for redundancy, all this infrastructure is there for redundancy. Again, that's what the Cloud providers gave you too. They gave scalability, and redundancy.

TERRY: It's actually more than that. You'd be surprised at what we've got built into the network.

SANTI: I know our network is crazy impressive. It is, and it has to be. Also, maintenance and obviously just the legacy maintenance of on-prem and maintenance contracts and out-of-date hardware. All that stuff goes away and that just made sense. It just made sense to go to the Cloud. Since we did talk about the fact that all these things went away with the Cloud, and how it allows you to scale and gets rid of all this maintenance stuff, we did touch on Fusion Connect, but we didn't really do a deep dive.

I think it's good-- We're on the subject. We might as well. It's not a shameless plug. It's like, "Come on." People don't realize what a good service provider looks like. I was just trying to figure out, "How many points of presence do we have?" "Oh, we have more now." Yes, you're probably right. We do have a lot-- That's the point, is that service providers have come a long way. Fusion Connect as-a-service provider has come a long way. Choosing a good Cloud provider is an important decision now.

TERRY: You have to look at the options that work best for your business.

SANTI: Exactly.

TERRY: So many service providers will say, "I focus on this product, or I focus on that product." It really needs to be, "I focus on your problems. What issues do you run into? Now, let's find the system that works best for you." Here at Fusion Connect, we run our own BroadSoft stack, which is our Cisco Webex deployment. That gives you the ability to use Cisco Webex, whether that be hosted Webex with BroadSoft through us, or even CCP, which a lot of people don't know about, which is also connecting to legacy Webex.

SANTI: Correct.

TERRY: A lot of people don't know we offer that.

SANTI: Basically, connecting to the Cisco Cloud, for lack of a better term, and providing PSTN connectivity to that. A lot of folks don't know that, and we can do that. Absolutely. That's a good point.

TERRY: Then we've got, of course, our Microsoft Teams offering. Microsoft is just leading the way across the board.

SANTI: 100%.

TERRY: We all know that. Cisco knows that. Everybody knows that.

SANTI: Yes, they do.

TERRY: Microsoft is truly, and they have been for decades. They've been that leader in the industry, and now they're leading in telephony. We're an Operator Connect provider with Microsoft, so we are able to provide Operator Connect. We're able to provide direct routing, which gives you a little more flexibility, but it doesn't have the same quality of service agreements.

Then we're also able to provide a-- we call it customer-provided dial tone, SBC as-a-service. It allows you to take your connectivity to a site and hook it up into Microsoft Teams. That's three ways, and then the fourth way that we connect you into Teams is something that there are very few providers, especially providing both OC and this other service. It's called Operator Connect Conferencing, or OCC, we call it.

SANTI: OCC, yes.

TERRY: What that does is it lets you connect in any country in the world-- Now, Microsoft has what they call Zone A. Zone A countries are really-- it's the US, it's Western Europe. It's all the countries that people do business in most of the online business today. Then there's other countries, and the cost to call into a conference bridge. Everybody remembers the old conference bridges. A lot of companies or countries still do that.

We talked about how some countries are a little behind the US. Maybe their internet infrastructure isn't as good as it is here. They still dial into conference bridges regularly. Doing that, there's a substantial cost. We've been able to work with Microsoft, and we were one of the early adopters to be able to provide Operator Connect Conferencing. What that does is it lets those customers take advantage of a more aggressive rate and pay per minute instead of using communication credits, things like that.

That's even above and beyond. I've talked about Webex and BroadSoft, which is our basic hosted platform without anything. I've talked about Teams calling with Operator Connect, direct routing.

SANTI: All its flavors, yes.

TERRY: All its flavors, SBC as-a-service, OCC. Then we still have a hugely robust SIP platform.

SANTI: That's right, we do for SIP trunking.

TERRY: Yes. Our SIP trunking. If you're a company that says it is doing Cloud-hosted contact center, we offer that too. If you've got it with somebody else already, but their rates are high for their inbound and outbound calling, then we can provide SIP trunking channels to those vendors. We actually have standing multi-tenant trunks. We have connections to many of the top providers of contact centers that we have connections to and allow you to order SIP trunks.

We can provide all that in and outbound calling with them and really give you--

SANTI: Into those platforms.

TERRY: Yes and give you [crosstalk] a total solution coming through Fusion Connect. We can do all of this and all of our other services. We talked about all our hosting services. We do the network, we do the SD-WAN, we do licensing for Microsoft. We can provide everything, the full stack, but really today we're focusing on the UC Cloud, the as-a-service of hosted phone. We can do a lot. Most companies, providers, don't do all of what we do.

SANTI: Yes. If they do, they may not have their own IP backbone. They may not be able to offer on-net services. They may not be able to connect with hyperscalers into other platform providers.

TERRY: They didn't go through the certification with Microsoft and with Webex.

SANTI: There you go. Sure.

TERRY: They just are providing direct routing. Quite honestly, that's okay for some customers, but truly, if you are running a business and you want top-of-class business services, you want Operator Connect if you're doing Microsoft. That's what we provide.

SANTI: I agree. You mentioned something that I found interesting, that my light bulb went off, because typically when you think of SIP trunking, you're thinking, "Yes, I'm going to terminate this into some on-prem PBX that a customer has." No, some folks are connected to a platform provider.

TERRY: Right. Their platform provider just is a little bit higher and they can do, "Bring your own SIP, bring your own connection."

SANTI: Here we come.

TERRY: Now, there are some that still have their on-prem. Yes, I understand. We're talking about getting you off-prem right now, but there are large, large companies that are doing on-prem contact centers, the legacy on-prem contact. [crosstalk] They still need that connectivity because they might have physical facilities around the world. That's one of the other things about our Fusion SIP product, we actually have the ability to do time-of-day routing. We can follow the sun with you. We can help you set up and program, "Hey, I want all these phone numbers to ring East Coast at 8:00 AM-

SANTI: Around this time.

TERRY: -and add in my West Coast at 8:00 AM their time, add in my Japanese Coast at 8:00 AM their time," and literally phase in and out all of your call centers and set that up so that you have around the clock, around the globe service. Really, it's a service that a lot of companies have because they haven't invested in that SIP platform-- we've invested and built and managed this platform and a version of it and enhanced it for over 20 years.

SANTI: When you really stop and think about it, it's pretty cool what we do.

TERRY: It is.

SANTI: The whole Cloud conversation just never gets boring. It really doesn't.

TERRY: Talk about it for hours.

SANTI: I know. Terry, tell you what, you've been doing this for a long time. You've seen a lot of different types of scenarios, a lot of customers trying to make the move to the Cloud. If there were a couple of key takeaways that-- if I'm a customer considering to make some kind of move to the Cloud, whether it's my phone system, it doesn't matter what it is, I'm going to the Cloud, what are some of the things that stand out for you that you've seen throughout your tenure that you want to share for folks to think about?

TERRY: First things first, and I will say this about any platform, any product, back up your data. Nothing is guaranteed.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: You always want to have a backup. I back up my laptop. It's portable, but I back it up because I don't want to lose that data. 90% of my data is in the Cloud anyway, but I back everything up. If you're doing a major migration like that, you want to back up what you have, you want to export the topology. We call it a schema if you're thinking databases. Phones truly are a database, but you can export a picture. A picture's worth a thousand words.

If you can export that picture and show how calls come into your environment or how you're using your database and then how it connects out on the backend, that will give your service provider, whomever that may be, hopefully, it's Fusion Connect, the best opportunity to provide you top-of-line service and not forget other things. Then last, when you cut over, run both at the same time, shut down your old platform, and wait. Wait a week, two weeks, with the other platform 100% running before you completely destroy your old platform.

I'm not saying keep it around forever because that doesn't do anybody any good.

SANTI: No.

TERRY: Keep it a couple of weeks, you will inevitably find something that you'll go, "Oh man, I forgot we do that. It's a holiday coming up and we forgot to program all of our holiday," which we have a holiday coming up here soon. If you have holidays coming up, if you have other things and you've missed those, it's always good to be able to fire that up, go look, "Oh okay, well this is how we set off all that. Here, can you build this for me?" "Yes, we can."

If you're a provider like Fusion Connect, you provide the customer with the integrations and the tools to be able to build it themselves. We give you all of those portals that you can build yourself or we'll be happy to help build it for you. Really, it's backup your data, export your flowcharts, your diagrams--

SANTI: Topology, your [crosstalk], your diagrams. Absolutely.

TERRY: Be collaborative. Work with your partner. It's not something you're just going to hand to them and walk away. It's, "How do you do business and how do we make you do business better so that you can make more money in the long run?"

SANTI: I love your last one about keeping both services up while you're migrating.

TERRY: Short term.

SANTI: Yes, short term. Brilliant. Terry, we could probably go on for another hour. I know because here's what happens when you and I start talking. You know how it is. This stuff goes into 20 different directions. As you make a turn, "Oh wait," there's an aha moment, "We could probably do this." It's never-ending. That's why I love what we do because it's always evolving.

Folks, this was just a conversation about moving stuff that's still on-premises somewhere into the Cloud and some of the best practices based on Terry's experience that you could adapt. I love everything you shared today. That's awesome. Folks, please don't forget to subscribe. Subscribe to Tech UNMUTED on your favorite podcast platform. That way you don't miss the upcoming episodes.

If you want to engage with Fusion Connect, that's easy. Go to FusionConnect.com and hit 'Let's Connect'. That's the best and quickest way to connect with Fusion Connect. Who knows, you might get TERRY on the phone.

TERRY: You might. I'll talk to anybody [crosstalk].

SANTI: You might. Folks, thank you. Until next time, join Terry and us for another episode. Stay curious and stay connected.

TERRY: Thanks everyone.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Thanks for diving into the tech world with us today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to never miss an episode of Tech UNMUTED. Stay curious, stay connected.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect