HORIZON HOSTED TELEPHONY - Replacing an ISDN Phone System ✆

welcome to chromecast picking out i'm sam major commercial director of chrome technologies i'm joined once again today by john lennon telecoms pre-sales consultant to discuss when looking to upgrade your phone system the key considerations to factor in john welcome back good to be back so last time on podcast we talked about uh microsoft direct rooting for teams and obviously some very interesting i actually learned a lot personally about that um but there's kind of specific use cases where that is an appropriate technology yeah i think today it'd be good if we can go into our audience the the various different options that are available for telephony and i guess the applicable use cases because as you know every business is different and as we've seen over the past 18 months or so you know communication technical communication is still very much key and having the right platform in place is incredibly important so i guess if you can kind of kick in initially with just a brief overview i know brief is difficult between you and i a brief overview of the different options that are available and then let's just dig into i guess the use cases and type of businesses that would select them and where they're appropriate yeah so uh last time we had a chat we had a chat about the whole team's thing and yeah the events in the last 18 months have impacted everyone in various ways but especially telephony so organizations that were on teams for example it's great for those guys because they've been very very it's been very easy for them to dash off home and work remotely but then you've got these other organizations where they're very much old-fashioned phones on desks and those are the types of organizations that haven't been so fortunate so for example there are many many businesses out there at the moment that are still using what we classed as a traditional phone system and what i mean by that there are phones on the desks uh those phones follow a wire down to the server room or the cup is under the stairs or whatever and there's a box bolted to the wall and then that box then plugs into the bt phone line that's a traditional kind of avaya mitel exactly and those and it's very much it's been working for 10 15 years leave it alone the various issues with that um primarily about 2016 i think it was openreach announced that they are looking to switch off the isdn network isds to isdn30 and that they're they're still aiming for 2025 and there are an estimated still an estimated two million circuits out there in use two million organizations still using them so you've got these old-fashioned phone systems plugged into these old-fashioned phone lines ticking time bomb they're going to switch it that's off no more business done no more business if you don't do something we're just going to flip the switch so there's that and then along comes the pandemic where that causes another problem because as we're saying about the team's people well they just grabbed their laptops and ran home and plugged them in but you can't do that with your traditional phone system where it goes to the box under the stairs or in the server room yeah so those are the limitations of those types of systems so with regards to the whole isdn switch-off thing so what some organizations have done is they've got that old-fashioned phone system and they have sort of cheated the system a bit what they've done is they have enabled the old-fashioned phone system to root calls over the internet okay because there is an alternative to isdn you may have heard this terminology before yeah so what they've done is they've basically this is the one in the phone system tweaked a few bits and plugged it into the internet for one of the benefits this is this is basically a sticky plaster but that won't get you past 2025 well it will it will get you that will get you past 2025 because that gets past the icm problem but it doesn't get you around the problems of first of all the phone system is day by day getting older and older and older the technology is coming out of date there are loads of functions that your competitors are using that you're not yeah because you're using this whole system and then there's the whole pandemic argument where you can't put the phone up and take it home and work from home remote you know touch touch wood we don't see that again but i think that this kind of hybrid way of working is now certainly here to stay so yeah people looking to advertise new staff and some people are expecting to see this split model work from home working just to work from anywhere so there is a better way of doing it so if you are one of those phones on desks kind of businesses and you might see that with a more traditional type business you might see it in like a large school academy or something like that where they need phones on desks any type of organization where you have to have phones on desks there is a way of having phones on desks but not being reliant on that old technology and this is called hosted telephony so jeremy's saying to you phones box go plugs into the into the isdn lines well what you've got now is you've got your phone and to the end user it just looks like a normal telephone pick it up and say hello but what it actually is is it's an internet based phone and you plug it into an internet connection be it straight into the back of a router or into your local area network on your office and it goes off and registered itself to a phone system in the cloud that is an always-up always-running phone system that you don't have to maintain yourself you don't have to employ an engineer to come out and look after it legacy equipment aging etc no problem all of that sort of stuff so you don't have to worry about any of that the only thing that you need to look after is the physical phone on the desk and in the event of a disaster pick it up take it home so we resolved that let's call it the pandemic problem but we had that ultra mobile way of working and can we have the hybrid so you know we leave phones on desk but i can still connect to that phone's internet connection remotely brilliant question yes you can so you remember we were talking the other week about the whole team's thing and headset on make a phone call through the pc tap the number in or mobile app you've still got all that functionality with a cloud-based phone system because those cloud phone systems offer that functionality where you can have the soft phone the phone on the pc or the mobile app so you can quite literally be out in the car and it synchronizes with hands freaky on the car and you can answer your ddi or you know work as a part of a call center from home from anywhere with the software so yeah it will it gives you that freedom so you if if needs be leave the phone on the desk at work and go and work remotely there's a lot to consider there and you've obviously got businesses of uh as you've described there that will have the old pbx in the cupboard uh to the people that have want to be bleeding edge or potentially you already are but if you focus on customers that i guess are staring at that the steep drop off come to 2025 at the end of ice gen and what not uh they'll be planning you know how do we get there maybe not really knowing how a bit worried about how to do that so how do we as a business yeah what do we do our process processes you personally follow to interact with our clients and ensure that you know we understand kind of where they are i guess where they want to go and the overused phrase of the news is but the journey that we take them on yeah and how do we ensure that we get them to want to be great question sam so the most important thing first of all is as you say the conversation with the client there sitting down talking to them what they're doing walking around their business looking at how they're doing it to try and make sure we identify the correct parts physically actually understanding how the business operates yeah the best thing you can do walk around go up to you know that person why are you doing that with that phone while you're doing it and all of that but with we've got at that point that's the point where you're looking at the conversation we had last time about teams or this time about physical phones on desks and what we would look at is look at the way that they are operating their business so for example this would be if you are multiple sites dealing with each other's phone calls transferring calls between sites and stuff like that then this type of system is something that you're going to really want to look at okay and as i was saying earlier universities or large offices this is the sort of system you're going to want to be looking at and there's also other things that you need to look at about reporting and looking at measuring calls coming in and and all of the whole reporting side of things and and we would have a detailed conversation with them on that side of it then what we would look at is when it comes down to the physical switching over we would then do a full analysis of let's say for example hypothetically you're the customer you've got an isdn phone line you've got an isdn30 you've got 300 ddi's that's the first thing we do we get four details off that circuit and find out and we've say right okay what are all these ddi's who are they associated to find out what they're using all the ddi's for and find out how all the calls are rooted through the whole business get that old phone system and to use the term i use earlier lift the bonnet up and have a look yeah how is it wired up what's going on how are you rooting all your coursework because the primary thing here is to make things better than they were yeah look at how you've done it in the past make sure that when we put the new system in there is as little disruption as possible but also make sure that we train the customer on all the new benefits and all the new features so yeah to leverage that investment to get more out of it right because it will do so much more than pick it up and say hello so that's what we would that that's the key thing we'd be then doing and then we would work closely with our carriers and open reach to make sure that we see a seamless port yeah of the phone numbers usually out of the house to be honest you have to save time to do it everyone comes to the office on a monday morning and what you want them to see is oh i've got a different phone yeah but nothing else changes yeah and obviously we do that as i know we do the floor walking hand holding and so on to make sure that knowledge transfers there and it is as seamless as it can be there's always going to be something no lights changed yeah but i think when people see the benefits and certainly we've seen businesses when they see the benefits of the new functionality people really get behind that yeah and that's because it's cloud-based you've got all this great stuff like you don't have to worry about an engineer coming out every six months and tweaking this and tweaking that and the latest software update you don't have to worry about any of that all that's done and also you know that additional functionality if you think about it you've no longer got a physical restraint of a box that can't do it anymore okay just i'm gonna dive in a bit there but we talk about kind of enhanced functionality but can we can we list some of those out since people will watch this and go on this enhanced functionality what can i have but if we can call out a few of those things the kind of paradigm shift if you like between the box on the wall to the new world top five things what do you think of the real standouts real standouts um obviously the big one dr pick the hands out take it somewhere else so for example let's say for example you've got um two businesses one in london one in manchester and manchester goes offline you can just get everyone take them to london plug them in and they'll go nobody will know and going again off of the two site thing calls come to manchester you want to transfer someone from manchester to london just transfer them across yeah and it's as if you're transferring a person to the next desk and those two systems are the same system as if they're under the same roof other great functionality is reporting that's a great one yeah and reporting can be anything from how many calls are we missing how long does it take us to answer the phone who's answering the phone most sales guys it's the report i like yeah is he making that hello he's not in okay i'll bring back hello or is he actually making i'm having meaningful conversations and other great stuff like capacity 10 of our calls are engaged coming in well we haven't got the capacity because we need this we need that we need more staff we need more users we need to look at how the ring groups are being managed anything you could possibly think of you can run a report on it yeah and measure it and manage it yeah absolutely absolutely and obviously a big one i think we need to check in there it is it's about money right but the commercials good point actually that's a good point very good point sam and with a hosted solution it's it's really really simple it's per user per month with an inclusive amount of minutes that pulled across the whole group so it's very very there's no surprises you know you've got that many users that's going to be your bill but what's also really simple there is flex if you've got more users joining you you just order more handsets and plug them in and so if you you know add five more users you just know your bill is going to go up with five more users and you you haven't got any horrors waiting around the corner with a phone system bolted to the wall that as soon as you bolt it to the wall it starts aging doesn't it it's like they buy new cars and as soon as you drive it off four core well that's the same with that old traditional phone system you haven't got this problem so it's per user per month inclusive minutes no no surprises no bill shock and if you just need to add some users you can very easily work out what's going to say so we can burst up and down so it's like you your infrastructure a service and your cloud consumption or you burst up and down exactly for those businesses that have seasonal work whatever it might be and for x amount of weeks per month what it might be they'll need more staff they can add those people add those lines etc add the minutes they require but then easily turn that down again when they need to be quiet so it's that subscription on demand basis which let's be honest the whole industry is moving that way and what you can also do which is really clever and the client can do this themselves they can decommission the user get the phone put it back in the box put it on the shelf and then the next year they can recommission the user and then just go into your stock list and reassign a handset there you go there's your handset off you go that's simple so simple and the client can do all that themselves log into a web-based portal and they can control the users fred decides to leave fred leaves sarah comes along recycle that piece of hardware do it yourself none of this phone up an engineer i've got to put in a change request two days none of that you just manage the whole thing yourself obviously if there's complicated stuff ring groups and stuff like that then that's what we're here for of course we will help with that but that day-to-day you know where you don't want to have to ring up to off something really really basic do it all yourself so very very simple to manage on the money side of things and very very simple to manage in administration exactly that yeah and we should probably cover off um as i'm sure we'll put it somewhere in the title of the podcast but you know there's lots of different options out there and people that provide the type of services we're talking about as a business personally and we're very much about this as you know but we use the technologies that we promote and we use uh you know the horizon platform from gamma for our own telephony yes we do so obviously i know you've got a vast amount of experience in that area so i'm going to kind of lean on you on this one but to give our audience our joint opinion of why as a business chrome have gone down that road and the benefits that we've receiving from it so gamma is probably one of the leading wholesalers of telephony services in the uk and we we work closely with gamma for not only ourselves for our own telephony every phone call our people make they're making it over gamma but we yeah we are offering their services through not only sip trunk direct routine but this product as well the hosted telephony which they call horizon now i um i first started my first venture into hosted telephony was in 2008 you're gonna ate yourself and the first bit of kit that was put in front of me was horizon and yes i've worked with other products and but for us and anyone else in the industry everyone knows that the horizon product is a solid very well tested we tried to test that as you know we did a bake off of a few providers before we went and i mentioned them but yeah we did our independent iron independent view on it yeah we landed on horizon has definitely been where we would put our money is obviously we did yes yes it is it very much the the trusted supplier and that and that is why not only do we root our own calls through them but that is why we are recommending that product to our clients so one of the things that i remember that kind of swayed it for us was the resilience of that platform was about a because we're going to be using it but you know b we're going to be promoting it probably if you could tell me just a bit more again you've been the expert i mean not but the way to build that resilience gamma they're very big on resilience whatever products you look at with gamma they've got you know the way that they they root through the network that they literally run it on on two separate nodes one in the north and one in the south so for example you're on the phone and there was a mate and you're rooting through the north and there's a major outage and the whole north of the country goes off yeah the phone call you're on is gone but you just what happened there make another phone call and it will just automatically root you through the south and that and and they work in that way with not only this product horizon but their direct routing platform and their sip trunking platform so as far as resilience is concerned yeah they are very very big on it and they're very open and honest and produce plenty of documentation for any tech guy to take apart and yeah i i will stand by it yeah yeah that's as we will as a business yeah well that's one week that's why we went for it that's why we made that choice and let's say the resilience the simplicity the cost savings let's be honest yeah again we use it so when we made the decision to move there we weighed in the cost factor absolutely as a business but again from the the ease of administration because we want our guys supporting our clients yeah not messing around with our photo system as much as possible so that simplicity and again yeah redundancy was the other one which was the real the kind of silver bullet if you like when compared to some of the the competitors out there once you put all that together as a fairly logical choice it is a logical choice it's very very simple it's very very simple to use it's very very simple to consume and it's very simple to modify and it and you don't get any great shocks so john it's gonna wrap up i'll do my usual podcast favorite but you know the the give me a top three uh takeaways for our audience watching this today if they take nothing else away from it three things they should remember all action off back the information we've gone through today number one icn switch off yeah he's coming 2025 if you're running the old system as we're saying box under the stairs connected to the bt network you need to be looking at something yeah that's your number one your number two functionality it as i was saying earlier every possible thing you could imagine you would want a phone system to do it can more than likely do everything you want it to do because there are no physical restrictions and third point simplicity it's the simple bill you you per user per month that amount of minutes and if you need to add something very very simple to add you just order a handset yourself and if you're happy to do so plug that handset in and off you go very very simple john really informative and again i thought i've learned something hopefully my audience has so thank you very much for uh you know spending time with today and going through this really appreciate it it's been good thank you thanks a lot and thank you for joining us once again on chromecast check it out if there's anything you'd like us to cover in future episodes then please do remember to leave in the comment section below and like subscribe and share and join us again next time [Music] chromecast

2021-07-10 01:14

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