Tech Deep Dive

Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark.

And today, I'm talking with William Rubio, who is the chief revenue officer for Call Tower. William, thank you for joining.

Thanks, Max. Thank you very much for having us on. It's it's a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.

What does Call Tower do?

You know, that that's a great question. So Call Tower, we're actually 100% dedicated and focused on our business customers, and pretty much we have a wide range of customers, all from the small all the way to the enterprise side. And for the past 18 years, we've been a pioneer in unified communications. We're strategically positioned ourselves to really deliver a full end to end solution and not really a product with our core platforms. What we've done is we focused our core platforms, I should say, really focus on Microsoft, which we both have a a native platform with both Skype and and, Teams, also our Cisco voice offering and then our proprietary unified communication platforms, which is CP Cloud Voice.

And we're able to tie these unified communication platforms with different things like contact center, Office 365, SD WAN, SIP to really make sure that we're able to give that customer a full end to end solution. While a lot of other competitors out there, they're a little bit more single threaded. For us, it's about making sure that we could provide different products to really provide that solution to our customer. So we're pretty flexible with the offerings that we have. We're in about 70 different countries that we could provide the offering overall.

And, again, for us, it's really just about making sure that we have the right solution for the customer that we could provide the tool and service them.

Going back into the Microsoft, you started with a link which became Skype for Business. Mhmm. And that's, you know, transitioned into Teams, and now Microsoft has different announcements with Skype for Business versus Teams and what's going on. So, I mean, if if a company still is on Skype for Business, can you still support them there, or what does that roadmap look like?

Absolutely. So we actually have, we have thousands and thousands of users. I think the last time I checked, there was about 60,000 users on Skype for Business. And a lot of those customers that are on our version of Skype for Business, have been asking that question. Well, we're kinda ready to transition to Teams and do voice with Teams, or is it the right time to do that?

And the simple answer is yes. You know, Teams has definitely evolved into the new medium as far as what's kind of the new norm, I should say, with Microsoft and and voice replacement overall. So Call Tower has been doing that, since 2008 that we've been a a provider with Microsoft. So we have our expertise. We've taken our bumps and bruises, right, to know the do's and don'ts of trying to make sure that we could transition to customers.

So whether they are on Skype for Business, online with Microsoft, or with another provider, and they're looking at making that transition to Teams, or they're on another platform and they're ready to do voice with Microsoft Teams, we could do all that heavy lifting for them. We have the expertise that not just from making a migration, but also a successful shift that we could fill in the gaps with, some of the limitations that Teams has with our other platforms. So we fill in those gaps that the Teams offering has to make sure to give that customer the full UCaaS experience and the full turnkey experience that they're looking for.

CallTerra offers Microsoft Teams direct routing.

Yes.

And so the experience for the user is native to Teams. So how do how do you fit into that picture with Microsoft and with Teams, and what does the what does the end user actually experience as they're interacting with Teams?

Sure. You know, I actually had that question come up the other day with a, a customer that, actually, it was a potential customer. They did decide to move forward with us, and and it was actually probably the simplest analogy I've ever used or example I used, and it was probably the one that hit home the best. You know, we were on the on the call with the customer, and we were doing a demonstration within Microsoft Teams. And he said, well, these other competitors have the applications within Teams that we could download and and, you know, we could be part of it.

And I said, you're absolutely right. I said, let's go to 1. So we we show them the Microsoft Teams application, and we wound up putting, one of our competitors in there. And the app showed up, and the customer says, great. And then they said I said, alright.

Let's show you the call tower 1. And we put in the call tower name, and nothing showed up. And the customer kinda looked, you know, he kinda had a strange face, like a little dumbfounded. And we said the reason that we don't have an application is because we're not a third party. You're native with us, so you don't need to download the application with Call Tower.

You're automatically part of it. And the customer is like, all of a sudden, the light bulb went off, and they said, oh, now I get it. And I said same thing with your mobile app. I'm not gonna require you to download a third party mobile app that you have to work within Microsoft Teams. We use the Microsoft Teams completely both on the desktop and on the mobile app to make and receive calls, to transfer calls, to set up hunt groups, to have your auto attendant, to do all your your audio conferencing, your video conferencing.

It all resides within the same application without having to have any third party downloads to make it actually all work. So very, very effective and very simple for a customer to use because there really isn't any learning curve, with the fact that they're already using, in a lot of cases, Microsoft Teams.

And you're also a big Cisco partner. How are you helping companies with Cisco and their Cisco phone environments?

Yep. So we are actually what is called a, a Cisco premier partner, and we actually have what we call Cisco HCS, which is hosted collaboration services with Cisco. And for all the folks that are out there that are, understand Cisco call manager, what it basically is is this is Cisco's version of call manager in the cloud. So we have a lot of customers that come to us and say, hey. I'm I'm getting ready to to move away from a premise based Cisco solution.

I have this call manager sitting in my data center. I have to run, separate circuits to it. I gotta maintain multiple data centers just to make sure to have that redundancy. With Call Tower, we do all that heavy lifting for the customer. So we're actually able to remove that from the customer, put it into our private cloud environment, and make sure that they get all the benefits of being in the cloud, being redundant, give them all the same feature functionality that they're used to, and more.

But now their end users don't have to worry about learning a new system. The way that they did a 4 digitile today is the way that they're gonna do it with us. The way that they retrieve their voice mail is exactly the same way that they were doing it before. So there's really not much of a learning curve, and at the same time, we're gonna save money to the end user because of the simple fact that now you have you have the removal of a SmartNet. So SmartNet kinda goes away.

You have the redundancy in the cloud. So we have multiple data centers that will run these instances of of Cisco overall. So it's just been a really successful transition for those customers, and we've been providing Cisco since our inception in 20, in 2002, I should say. So about 18 years that we've been providing Cisco solutions to them.

So if I'm a company and I have 500 you know, 100 or thousands of Cisco phones deployed and I wanna move from an on premise call manager environment over to Call Tower, do I need to change my phones? Can I reuse my phones?

Great question. So the answer is no. You do not have to change your phones. You do not have to change your your switches. You do not have to change your routers.

The way that you're gonna access your Unity voice mail, right, for all the Cisco users that are out there is they're gonna go ahead and exactly the way they're doing it today is exactly the way that they're gonna do it tomorrow. The the major difference with us going into the more of that cloud environment is that we are gonna provide to them what is called a Call Tower Connect. And what Call Tower Connect is, it's a simple one single pane of glass that you're gonna have access to that you don't have to be an expert in Cisco to actually create an auto attendant, change a hunt group, add a user, remove a user, activate a DID, deactivate a DID. Call Tower Connect pretty much acts as that single pane of glass for Cisco for Microsoft so that the administrator could go in there and make that change without having to be an expert in all those different platforms.

And so it's more than just the phones, you know, because your partnership as as with HCS and Cisco goes deeper. I mean, you have access to Webex as well. Right?

We do. So in our offering, again, going back to the whole unified communications platform, we're doing everything from, Cisco HCS, which is the voice component of it, Webex Teams, Webex Teams meetings. So we're doing the entire solution on the on the Cisco side that we could provide to a customer.

Now a lot of companies are looking at this and trying to decide, do I stick with the Cisco environment or Cisco phones? Do I do I wanna use Microsoft Teams and switch to Microsoft Teams? You know, with Call Tower having both Microsoft Teams and Cisco HCS support and Webex, you know, what does that look like if I'm evaluating these different platforms? Can I start with 1 and switch to the other, or can I have both at the same time, or can they talk to each other? You know, what what happens there?

Great great question. So what we do, Max, is we have the ability to do both. So if a customer says, you know, I'm I'm still using Cisco, and I have the equipment. I'm not ready to make the that transition yet because I have some money already invested in the Cisco equipment, but I am looking at Microsoft Teams, or I'm starting to use it maybe just for instant messaging and presence and using it maybe for my conferencing, what we could do is we could set up that migration path for the customer that they could pretty much crawl before they walk to move into a Teams environment. So we give them the ability to actually do that.

The great thing with us is that if a customer starts with one platform or the other, doesn't really matter which one they start with, since we've already ported over the numbers to them, since we've already done the hunt group, since we've already done the auto attendants, All that information is already stored with us, so there's no rip and replace that has to be done again. It's a much easier transition to say, let me go to CallPower with the existing service that I have, let's say, on Cisco, and then I'm gonna 6 months down the road, a year down the road, I'm gonna go over to Microsoft Teams with voice. That transition is a lot simpler because, again, there's no reporting of numbers that has to be taken place. It's really just more of some training on the back end for the customer, and then we handle the rest for the customer on the back end.

So, there's I mean, as you mentioned earlier, there's a lot of companies getting into the Microsoft Teams app enabled space. You know, there's there's options in the Cisco space. And what makes Call Tower unique? Why are you better at this?

Well, so first and foremost, I think it really goes back to the years of experience. We've been a partner, a gold partner with Microsoft since 2008. We actually were the first ones to deploy Microsoft Lync with voice in the cloud back, right around 2012, 2013, and that was a big learning curve. And then we were also the first to actually deploy voice on Skype for Business as well, and we were the first to actually deploy voice with Microsoft Teams back in November of 2018. So we've been doing it already for about a year and a half, which for Microsoft Teams, that's definitely, we're kind of the grandfathers, you know, in in that space overall and as far as what we're providing.

The good thing is is that since we are a voice company first, we understand the limitations of any other platforms. And we know that customers different things like paging, CRM integration, SMS texting, receptionist console, door buzzers, faxing. I mean, all these different things that, seem to a lot of our competitors just seem to overlook. They're important, and they're very vital to a lot of our customers because they still work in that environment. And if we're able to give them a competitive advantage and give them what they have today and then also give them something that they don't have to give them that competitive advantage.

That's what it's all about for us. It's really making it as easy as it can for our customers to communicate regardless of what platform they have with Call Tower.

Could you give me an idea of who your customer base is in terms of size? I mean, you've are you targeting, you know, small, medium businesses, mid market enterprise, North America, your you know, international, like, specific industry verticals? How does how does that work with Call Tower? Sure.

I mean, we we have customers as little as 5 users, and we have customers north of 4 to 5000 users and plus. So it's it's pretty much a pretty wide spectrum. For us, it's not really so much of the size of the customer. It's just more of what the customer's looking for overall. If they're looking for just a a a basic phone that's just gonna do a call forwarding and a call transfer, we could do that.

But there's a million other companies that do that. For us, it's really the customers that are looking for the full collaboration that are saying, hey. I need contact center. I need video. I need to be able to share my desktop screen.

I wanna be able to do all that with security. So I would say overall, if I had to put kind of a number on a sweet spot, I would say our sweet spot is probably between 50 to about 3000 users, which again, it's a pretty big spectrum of customers, but it really kinda sticks to, I would say, the the smaller to medium enterprise customer, you know, overall. And you

guys are seeing really large deals on Microsoft Teams now as well. Right?

Yeah. We we are. You know, we, with Microsoft Teams, if you look at the latest statistics from them, especially with everything going on, right now with COVID 19, back in November of, 2019, Microsoft had about 20,000,000 users that were on Microsoft Teams. That number increased to about 45,000,000 right around the middle of March, and the latest numbers that came out right at the end of April was that there were over 75,000,000 users on Microsoft Teams. So they've more than tripled, the amount of users that are on Microsoft Teams overall.

And we've been at the forefront of that. Customers are going into a Microsoft Teams environment because of the security that it provides, the stability that it provides, and and reliability. Also, the fact that it it's really adaptable to the remote worker, working from home. And now the next phase of that with all those 75,000,000 users is, if I'm doing the video, if I'm doing the collaboration piece, the instant messaging, and so forth with my employees and with my customers and my vendors, Why can't I just add the voice component? Why can't I do the audio conferencing?

Why can't I do the PBX functionality of it? And that's really where Call Tower comes in and and really provides that gap for customers. Because nowadays, IT organizations are shrinking or staying the same. They do have now a seat at the table to grow their companies. Right?

I mean, that's changed over the past 20 years. So let us do that heavy lifting for you guys, and let the IT organizations really focus on growing the company and where they're pretty much support them and be an extension of their IT arm.

So we're we're recording this post COVID. You know, when we look at this, there's been a a pretty rapid change for businesses and remote and distributed workforces. You know, there was a necessity for people to not be in offices overnight. If you had a customer who is already with Call Tower, I mean, they were already cloud hosted. So the transition, I would imagine, would have been much easier.

For companies that were not already, you know, in a cloud hosted voice system that have been talking to you post COVID, you know, what are you seeing in terms of, yeah, let's say trends, but also, the experiences of onboarding new new customers who are doing this in a very short amount of time and under, you know, under a certain amount of duress as well?

Mhmm. Well, a lot of different things there, Max. You know, first and foremost, we we were prepared for this. Right? I mean, that's what we sell.

Right? We sell services in the cloud. So when this pandemic started to happen right away, we started to prepare for it. We actually took, our offices and went remote, right around the beginning of March when everybody else is kinda waiting because we were prepared for it. And this is just Call Tower internally at first.

But also from our customers, what we were able to do was really start to reach out to them proactively and say, hey. Are you prepared for this? We're here to help you. We're here to support you. Whatever we could do from a training standpoint, from a design standpoint, let us know, and our customers are really receptive of that.

The next thing that we did is we realized that we also have to be a good neighbor to our potential customers right into the guys that next door that might not be on our services. And we actually came out with a, a free promotional service on Cisco Webex team meetings and also on our CT Cloud meeting, which is powered by Zoom. So it's basically the Zoom platform, but in our environment. And what we were able to do is we tell everybody, you're not working from home. You could probably still use, let's say, your mobile device in the short term to make and receive calls, but you need to join meetings.

You need to be able to collaborate with your employees. And Call Tower said, go to our website, sign up directly online. We're gonna give you the services through June 30th for free. There's no contracts assigned. There's no billing information that we need.

Just give us your username and your name. Sign up online, and we'll get you turned up within 24 hours. So our potential customers and our neighbors that actually saw that response or saw that proactiveness from us to with open arms are just really excited with the fact that we're just saying, we're just here to help. Let's start to work through this together. Come June 30th, we'll see where we are with the, you know, overall with the services and so forth.

But now for the next 90 days, and again, we started this in March, you're gonna get free services from us. And then the response has been overwhelming with customers who say, you know what? Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you for helping transition my 50, my 100 users to a home environment so that we could continue trying to work at least what the new norm is gonna be going forward overall for, for my employees.

Can you give me an idea of your price range for direct routing with Teams as well as for HCS for people listening?

Sure. We'll start first with direct routing. For direct routing, it varies anywhere from as little as $4.95 per user up to about $12 per user. And in between, it just really kinda depends if you're looking for a what we call a metered plan, which is that you pay, per minute rate on the outbound or you just wanna look at unlimited. The nice thing with us is that we allow customers to mix and match those different plans, so you don't have to have everybody on one plan or the other.

It just kinda depends on the usage of of the user. So if you happen to have a sales team that does a lot more outbound calls, you might wanna put them on the unlimited, but you might have somebody sitting in, in a different administrative role that maybe just receives a couple of calls but really doesn't proactively make out a lot of calls to customers. You might wanna put them more in the metered plan. And we help our customers design that based on their usage and what we're seeing. On the Cisco side, it varies, anywhere from as little as about $12 up to about $24.

Now those are kind of a little bit hard to compare because on the Microsoft side, we're talking more about the call in plan, which means you already have the phone system and so forth already in place. So that's another, you know, $12 or so that you already have on the back end. So that's why with Cisco, it might seem on the surface it's a little bit more, but they're pretty much at par. And on the Cisco side, we do have an unlimited plan with them as well. It's gonna range right around the 20 to $25 range, but that includes everything from your mobile app to unlimited calling to everything from a PBX standpoint that you're gonna have to make, e 911 calls pretty much from beginning to end on the Cisco side.

And for companies with Cisco call managers now looking at a a cloud migration into an HCS and evaluating Webex teams or Webex collaboration, there's been a question of how many seats do I really need for video? How many peep how many licenses do I buy for Webex? And you have an option within that to make it a little bit easier for people transition. What is that?

We do. So what we actually have on the Cisco side is we have 2 different plans. We have a named user, and then we have what is called an active user. And we understand that customers need to have the flexibility. Right?

It's all about providing flexibility to our end user. So give you an easy example on that is let's just say you happen to have a company with 500 users, and you're gonna go into what is called an a named environment. That means that everyone's gonna have a license. Everyone's gonna have the same functionality. The active user basically means that you say, hey.

You know what? I have 500 users, but not all 500 users really needs to have meetings as an example. Right? I mean, only out of the 500, maybe only a 150 of them are pretty proactive would be in meetings. It could be a sales or a marketing organization or an IT staff that needs to collaborate with their teams.

So what we do is we put them on an active user, which means, yeah, I got 500, but, realistically, only a 150 are the ones that are gonna use it monthly. So you pay for the 150 instead of paying for the 500. So we do have that flexibility for both that we offer to our customers.

And in the active model, everybody gets access to it. It's just the assumption is that only a 150 at any given time are going to be using it. Is that right?

That's correct. Yep. So everybody, all 500, would have access to it. It just means that at any given point in time, only a 150 of them are gonna be using it at a at a at a time in a day.

Fantastic. William, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Sure, Max. You know, just one one other thing too if I could mention here, take one more minute of your time. We just actually recently, released what we called our COVID 19 response program, which was basically an additional program that we did outside of the conferencing. But what we're doing is both on Cisco and on Microsoft Teams, we are basically giving our customers 90 days of free service. And, we're also giving them the 1st 90 days to cancel the service, and we're also giving them a 180 days to do a business downturn.

So anybody that's signing up with us right now in the month of May, we're gonna give them the free service. They also have 90 days from activation to actually go ahead and cancel the service with no additional obligation. And even after those 90 days, if, let's say, they have a 100 users or a 1000 users or 5,000, If they wanna go down to 10 or 15 users because they're the economy's kinda changed or their economic position has changed, we're giving them that flexibility. So I'd love to go ahead and share that with you and your customers, and, it's a program we started the last week of April. We got such an over and over response.

We extended it through the end of May, and customers are really, really happy with that because we're just giving them a lot of flexibility as we all get through this pandemic and see what's gonna happen now in q3q4.

I mean, the the the trial period and without can't without penalty for cancellation is incredible, and the free offer is incredible, but the right to downgrade later without a penalty is awesome. I mean, that's fantastic.

Thank you. Yeah. No. We wanted to make sure again, we were here to help out our customers, and and it's all about flexibility. And, again, let's let's get everybody up and running.

Let's get America running it working again, and then, you know, we'll worry about it later on down down the pipeline.

That's that's awesome. Thank you, William.

Thank you, Max.

Thanks for joining the Tech in 20 Minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business. Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.