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Single Throat to Choke
18 May, 2018
Does having multiple IT and communications vendors make sense for a modern, mobile workforce? Is putting all your eggs in one basket better or worse than hedging your bets?
Every IT Person’s Dilemma End User: I can’t send an email. IT Support: Our network is down. Call the carrier, after forty-five minutes pressing “1” for English, waiting on hold, and getting passed back and forth by the carrier’s wonderfully named “customer service” team, the carrier says their network is fine. What’s next – my router! Looking at the router, it’s fine but no traffic is being passed through the firewall. Firewall appears to be working fine. Call the carrier again, same answer, but they tell me to call the firewall and router people. Two hours later you find that a software update was made on the router that changed some settings. Five hours later, with unruly users at your throat, management wondering whether they have the “right” technical staff and why they are paying for these expensive technologies, you finally roll-back the updates and everything comes back up and resumes normal operations. You’re the goat because some auto update feature on the router was enabled. How much business did you miss during that time?
VoIP Joins the Fray In the past, business phone systems were segmented off on different networks and you typically didn’t encounter the types of problems that surfaced on the data / IT side. With the advent of VoIP telephony for business and cloud based unified communications as a service (UCaaS), all of this has changed: voice is now in the fray as well. End User: I’ve got choppy call quality. IT Support: We just deployed a new VoIP system from a leading national brand. You call your VoIP provider and talk to someone offshore named “Bob” he is telling you it’s your WAN provider. You ping test your WAN and you’re receiving appropriate bandwidth. The problem continues for days and you wished you had your trusted on-site PBX system, which never had these problems, back in place. But then you find out that company next door has the same service from the same brand VoIP provider using the same WAN provider and realize they are not having any problems with call quality. Management is once more wondering whether the IT staff knows what they’re doing and why the latest and greatest communications technology isn’t so great, and only the packets and sound seem to be late. A quick call to another trusted company to come in a look at your network. They find the company you’ve contracted for business continuity has scheduled full back-up of your ERP to the cloud every hour on the hour. You ask your management team if there is a business purpose to perform back-ups in the middle of day and find the answer is “no”. You reconfigure the backup system to run in the evenings and your cherished hosted VoIP is working properly again. Wouldn’t it have been nice for your VoIP provider to look at your LAN in real time and immediately realized the issue and made this recommendation for you versus dealing with the frustration for days and weeks?
No More Finger Pointing? Well you’re not alone. At Altus, we come across these types of scenarios every day, and the scenarios described above occurred with companies who are now our customers, including
Tennessee Steel Haulers and
Conserv Business Services. (Links to the case studies.) With organizations dealing with compliance, workflow communications, LAN, WLAN, WAN, SD-WAN, MPLS, CRM, ERP, Data Center, storage, backup and recovery, business continuity, billing platforms, help desk, desktop applications, contact centers, PBX, Hosted PBX, among untold numbers of other applications – a single throat to choke is clearly something that is difficult at best and more likely impossible to find. Many organizations are looking to consolidate vendors in the quest to eliminate finger pointing between performance of integrated applications. Although this is the panacea that many pursue, achieving this comes with serious business implications. Organizations want best of bread solutions AND want it to work seamlessly. Give Altus a ring or visit our website at getaltus.com. We do not have all the solutions in this wide spectrum of technology needs, however, we do have best of breed, fully managed and monitored VoIP, fully managed and monitored LAN, WAN, and WLAN solutions to keep you up and running at all times, allowing you to focus on your mission critical operations. One of our core principals is that we own the customer outcome, even if the issue is related to an ERP back-up and has nothing to do with our VoIP system or network components. We put the people and tools in place to help our customers succeed, and that is why more and more businesses are choosing to work with us. We hope you give us a call.
About Altus Altus is the premier choice for cloud-based business communications, providing companies with flexible and secure technologies that help employees and customers stay connected more easily. Whether looking for basic voice service, comprehensive unified communications, contact center, or network services, business executives trust Altus to deliver the latest features and functionality at affordable prices. Start communicating better with Altus. For more information, visit www.altustechnology.com or call toll free 866.922.4001.
