EP 59: Business Continuity Beyond the Basics

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. You know what I was thinking about, Terry?

TERRY: What's that?

SANTI: Things happen in this digital age, don't they? [laughs]

TERRY: That they do.

SANTI: Man, anyway, if you use any kind of technology and you are on the internet, you have experienced an outage at some point in your life. [laughs]

TERRY: Absolutely. I can't tell you how many. You try to avoid them as much as you can, but you know they're inevitable.

SANTI: They're inevitable.

TERRY: It's not how you avoid them, it's how you handle them when they occur.

SANTI: I believe, with my heart, that what we do as a company, as Fusion Connect, is really the bloodline or the blood life of a company. Think about it. We are responsible for making sure that our customers are able to connect with their customers, no matter what. That's a big responsibility. That's a huge deal. I honestly-- by the way, I'm proud to be able to say that we're such a vital part of our customers' business because we enable that connection so they can connect with their customers and they can close more deals, and they can make more money, they can support them, they can help them.

Not only that, let's be honest, some people use their corporate communications to call home and make sure everything's okay. We're connecting families, too. It's a big deal what we do.

TERRY: It's not just with one platform. We do it across everything that we do. We give our customers that continuity, that ability to have redundancy. It's not just, "Hey, I can do this on Teams." It's, "Hey, I can make it where your replacement line for your plain old telephone service, your POTS line is redundant."

SANTI: I've been doing this for a long time. You've been doing this for a long time. We know that when this subject comes up, we know how it's handled in the industry. We know because we've been doing this for a long time. How it's typically handled, I'm not saying everybody does it this way, but I can confidently say that most-- this is a common response, is, "Hey, we can simply forward that number." Yes or no? Isn't that what you hear?

TERRY: Yes, you do. You hear, "Hey, we'll forward it to a cell phone."

SANTI: There you go. We'll forward it to a cell phone. That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. Is that a Band-Aid to a problem, or is that a clean, solid approach to business continuity when it comes to your communications. That's where--

TERRY: Let me ask you this. If I do that, I've forwarded to a cell phone and I'm a salesperson. I work for a company, I'm a salesperson. I need that business. If I don't get a call, if I can't receive a call, I'm losing money and the company's losing money, so I've got a call and it's forwarded to my cell phone. That's great, but what happens when I need to call them back?

SANTI: Oh, that's a problem. You can't consult them.

TERRY: Then I'll call them on my cell phone.

SANTI: You're no longer using your corporate number. That's right.

TERRY: That's fine for some salespeople, but for the company, if that salesperson leaves, they just took that customer with them. Maybe unintentionally. They didn't do it in malice. They took that customer with them because that customer, when they go to call them from now on, "Oh, hey, I'm going to call Santi on his cell phone because I know that's where he always answers my call. If I call his work number, he'll answer most of the time. Sometimes he's on the phone and I get his voicemail. If I call his cell phone, I know I'm going to get him. Now I know what his cell phone number is."

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: As a business owner, I don't want that. Nothing personal, but I don't want you using your cell phone.

SANTI: That's why you have a business number. That's why you have a business number, because it's that business's customers that it's connecting to. I just thought that today's podcast would be good because a lot of times you hear that, "Oh, we can forward a number," or, "Yes, we have business continuity." Is it really? I really think that what Fusion Connect is able to do is unique in that sense. I don't know of anybody else who has cracked this code and I think we crack this code.

TERRY: I think so. I like the way we do it. We do it in a different fashion, and it's because we are a partner. I'm going to go through one here in a second with you, and it's how we handle it for Teams. We handle it across the board, and it's really, really interesting the way that we do it. If you want, I'll show you real quick.

SANTI: Let's do that. You know what? Let's just go through that. It's probably best. Visuals are always better when it comes to-- Because we can talk to it, but I know folks like to see it. For those of you who are listening to us on an audible platform, this is one you want to just flip on over to YouTube and just watch the screen as TERRY walks us through this.

TERRY: All right. Are you seeing the technical overview?

SANTI: I am.

TERRY: All right. In this technical overview, the thing that I want to talk about is I've got an off-network number. This is my customer. When my customer calls in PSTN. If anybody doesn't know what that is, that's the Public Switch Telephone Network. Then that comes into what we call our Class-4 switches, East and West. We've got redundancy. We're running those switches, and we run those to our voice clusters.

SANTI: Actually, I want to pause there for a second because a lot of folks may not understand what it is to have a Class-4 switch. What we're saying here is that Fusion Connect has their own telephony infrastructure.

TERRY: That's correct.

SANTI: In other words, we are a carrier. We carry that call and we bring that call all the way down to your customer and back from your customer. It's important to know that because a lot of times you deal with companies that are reselling somebody else's infrastructure. This is not somebody else's. This is our infrastructure. This is our telephony infrastructure that's redundant. Highly redundant. Because, yes, you're right. We have East and West, but we actually have multiple data centers-

TERRY: Multiple in East and West, yes.

SANTI: -that are in East and West.

TERRY: It's easier to demonstrate, though, just showing the two.

SANTI: Of course. This way they understand. That's what you're looking at here, is this is our infrastructure. I don't want to interrupt you, but I thought that was important to point out.

TERRY: No, it is. It's our infrastructure, and that's why we can do this this way.

SANTI: That's why we can do this. There you go.

TERRY: I've been building this out just to show those calls come in, they go to whichever switch. They go to our voice clusters and then they hit the internet and go to you on whatever platform you're on. Right now we're going to talk about Teams, but what happens when Teams goes down? My desk phone or my laptop, my smartphone, if Teams is down, I can't use the Teams application. I'm now stuck. "Hey, I'm not getting calls in." I can't make calls out in Teams because there's an issue. Do they happen? Not as often.

SANTI: No.

TERRY: Knock on wood.

SANTI: Knock on wood.

TERRY: They do happen.

SANTI: It's inevitable.

TERRY: It's inevitable. What happens when Teams goes down? Here at Fusion Connect, we actually have the ability, again, because we run our own switch network, that phone number is delivered to us before it's delivered to Microsoft. We're able to say, "Oh, I'm not getting a response from Teams," and we check. Every call that we send through, "Am I getting a response from Teams?" "No, I'm not." "Oh, let me deliver it to a different SIP connection that we've provided you as a customer." That could be a SIP softphone. It could be a physical phone. As an example, I have a bank that they actually are on Teams fully. Their tellers-- tellers have a more standardized, this is Teller 1, Teller 2, Teller 3. It's not the specific person sitting there.

SANTI: Got it.

TERRY: Then they've got a long table behind them and then a drive-thru. That's a standard bank setup. This bank said, "Hey, we want, if our main Teams Phone number goes down and it can't ring my tellers, we need it to ring an emergency phone." We don't want to put an app on each of their computers because they're not logging in, we want a bat phone a bat phone. "I want an emergency phone, that red phone. It's going to sit on that counter in between the tellers and the drive-thru, and it's going to ring." We said, "No problem. We can do that."

Not only can it ring, if one of them needs to place an outbound call, they can then click the button, pick it up, place an outbound call, and it's the phone number of the bank. It's not going to be a different phone number. It's not going to be a cell phone. That's the difference, is it's going to be the number of the bank. It's going to go back out to our switches, and then that's going to go the PSTN and it's going to go back to that off-network number. It's going to allow the bank to maintain its identity from end to end. Because if I'm calling from a bank and I have to call you back as a customer, "Hey, you've called me, I need to return the call."

If I'm calling you on a different phone number, then you're either not going to answer or you're going to think it's spam. Quite honestly, that's a true concern that a lot of people have, as they should. There have been too many people that get scammed because people aren't abiding by the rules that we here at Fusion Connect abide by. That's the start and shaking rules and the rules that require that you own that phone number and that you know where that number is originating from. We are allowing that bank to maintain their identity, and it allows their customers to have that sense of ease.

That knowledge that, "Hey, we're receiving a call from the bank. It's the number that I've got programmed into my phone that says when it calls, 'Oh, hey, this is my bank.' Hey, bank, what's up?" "Well, we need to do this," and they won't ever ask you for your account number, they're not going to ask you for your PIN, so don't ever give those things out. At least you have that understanding that, hey, it's the bank calling me or it's that car dealership that I'm trying to buy a car from, or it's this business. It's really all about ensuring that you're providing that continuity.

SANTI: That continuity of your collaboration and communications.

TERRY: Identity. It's your identity.

SANTI: It is, 100%. It's great because you gave an example of using a physical bat phone.

TERRY: It doesn't have to be that.

SANTI: It doesn't have to be that, right?

TERRY: No.

SANTI: We can get creative here, can't we?

TERRY: Oh yes. We actually have other customers that use a softphone, a separate client that runs-- it can run on your cell phone, it can run on your desk, and it runs in the background, you never know it's there. Guess what? We've done the failover, it goes to that number, they can place outbounds on that, maintain their identity, and it just makes it truly seamless to them.

SANTI: Could they do both at the same time?

TERRY: Both as in their desk and their cell--

SANTI: Have a third-party soft client and a physical phone?

TERRY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There are some of the Teams-enabled physical phones, and we're doing testing with several vendors-

SANTI: Dual registration.

TERRY: -that will do a dual registration.

SANTI: Very good. That is awesome. Yes, that's fantastic. This is why I think it was important to bring this up in the podcast, because forwarding a phone number is not unique to anybody.

TERRY: Right. Everybody can do it.

SANTI: Everybody can do it.

TERRY: Now take that back, everybody can do it that is routing the number.

SANTI: That's correct.

TERRY: If you aren't managing the number, if you're just reselling somebody else's service-

SANTI: You have no control.

TERRY: -unless that somebody else can do it, you can't do it.

SANTI: That's correct.

TERRY: As long as you're routing the number, yes, everybody can forward your number to another. We have some customers that say, "No, I don't want to do the second line, I just want to forward it to a cell phone." We're perfectly fine with that. We give them actually the control to go in to our portal and update it to whatever they want.

SANTI: Actually, they can do it on demand.

TERRY: Absolutely. They can change where they go. We have some customers, they have an on-call and they log into the on-call Teams account. They have a delegation, so they may delegate to their individual user. They've created an on-call account, they've delegated to their user, and they switch who the delegate is week after week. That person sets up a forward, if unavailable, to their cell phones, so that it's a different cell phone every day. They can go in on-demand and change that delegate and change that forward anytime they come on-shift or off-shift.

SANTI: It's not a true seamless continuity plan.

TERRY: It's not continuity, it's just failover.

SANTI: It's just failover. Yes, I agree with that statement. Again, you gave a Teams example, but we could do it on WebEx.

TERRY: Sure.

SANTI: We can do it on our SIP platform, and we had to as well.

TERRY: Yes. We can do it on WebEx, we can do it on SIP. The other thing I was talking about earlier is when we think about continuity, another point of failover or level of continuity that we give when we're not talking about failover like this, I'm thinking about alarms and elevators. For those type of lines, people forever have used that Plano copper line-- POTS line, Plano Telephone Service, and the prices on those keep going up because none of the core vendors want to maintain those networks. Are they shutting them down? No. The way that they shut them down is by-- well, I take that back. They are shutting some down.

SANTI: They're shutting down. Yes. It's happening actually more and more now.

TERRY: Yes. The way that they shut it down through business is they just keep raising your prices.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: I've seen a single phone line upwards of $700, $800 for one phone line.

SANTI: What? Are you kidding me?

TERRY: No. People always think, "Oh, I've got my old copper line and that's what I need for my alarm." It's dedicated, it's committed, I'm not going to lose that service. If you think about it, if somebody is out front working on the sewer system outside of your business, and they cut that with a backhoe, you just lost that phone line. What we've done, we provide a service. It's a POTS replacement. There's a standard. It's the National Fire Protection Act, NFPA 72. It's actually Protection Association. Anyway, NFPA 72 has a set of standards. It says that you have to be able to provide power to that phone line for a period of time. I believe it's up to 24 hours now.

If that wire is cut though out there, "Hey, yes, we're at the CO, we're still providing you power. Sorry, your line got cut, but we're not doing anything." With ours, we've got that battery backup built into the solution, but we also have put in a cellular backup.

SANTI: That's right.

TERRY: Guess what? Your internet gets cut, we fail over to cellular for you.

SANTI: To 5G.

TERRY: We'll go 5G. We can provide that, and not just on one carrier, we can provide it across three different cellular carriers-

SANTI: Yes, it's fantastic.

TERRY: -at the same time.

SANTI: That's awesome.

TERRY: It's not like you have to say, "Oh, I want AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile." You say, "I want the blended plan," and we can give you one that lets you-- it has all three, whichever one has the best signal, that's who it's going to use.

SANTI: That's the one it's going to grab, yes.

TERRY: A single box will do eight lines, and I've stacked boxes. It's a great solution. It gives customers not just the power that's required, but the connection.

SANTI: Continuity.

TERRY: The continuity-

SANTI: [laughs] That's right.

TERRY: -of ensuring that, "Hey, if they're doing work outside or somebody cuts the phone line-"

SANTI: I still got connection.

TERRY: -I still have my alarm." We've all seen the action shows where they, hey, they cut the phone line and then they break in and the alarm doesn't have anywhere to call. It's going beep, beep, beep, but it doesn't have anywhere to call. If you've done this, it's got somewhere to call.

SANTI: Fun fact, like You, I have fiber coming to my house.

TERRY: Oh yes.

SANTI: Guess what I did? When AT&T came to install, I said, "Wait, wait, wait." I went and I got a PVC conduit, and I had them run it all the way down my wall and underground inside PVC, which they don't do.

TERRY: Right, they don't do that.

SANTI: Nobody's cutting my fiber, so my fiber is protected. [laughs]

TERRY: There you go. It's protected.

SANTI: All right. Well, this was awesome. I think this is great that we did this because folks need to understand the difference between, "Hey, I'm just going to afford a call." No, we can do more than that. We can do it because of who we are and because of our telephony infrastructure.

TERRY: We can do it on every platform.

SANTI: Every platform.

TERRY: We talk so much about our Teams platform that we lead with, but really, we are a cross-platform company, and we are a strong Cisco WebEx provider. We have a great SIP platform. We have this business continuity. We got a great hosted voice.

SANTI: Somebody just wants to have a physical phone, we have it.

TERRY: That's right. We've got this POTS replacement solution that really it drives business and it gives you that peace of mind. So many people-- I know we talk about it a lot, but really, it's all about getting that peace of mind.

SANTI: Yes. I agree. I agree. Folks, I hope this was informative. TERRY, I thought that presentation was awesome. I love the build-out of the slide. I really like that. If you want to learn more about what Fusion Connect can do for you from a communications collaboration perspective, that's easy, it's fusionconnect.com. Do not forget to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast platform. That includes YouTube. That way you don't miss a single episode because TERRY and I, we have an entire lineup-

TERRY: Yes, we do.

SANTI: -ready for you. Don't miss this. Don't miss this. Folks, until next time, stay curious, stay connected.

TERRY: Thanks, everybody.

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