Cloud Therapy: EP 026 – What is Office 365 E5?

Learn whether or not Office 365’s E5 offering is going to make your company’s employees shout out of joy or frustration.

CallTower’s CRO, William Rubio, joins Mike to discuss the intricate details of what E5 is and what it is NOT.

Which 3 VoIP phone systems do we recommend for your company? Click below.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Mike: Cloud Therapy Episode 26.

Hey, IT Nation, welcome to Cloud Therapy with AeroComInc.com where you learn about the latest cloud and telecom technology that is going to take your career to the next level. I’m your host Mike Smith. Let’s do it.

Welcome, IT Nation! Welcome to another great episode of Cloud Therapy. Thank you for joining us today. We’ve got a fantastic show for you. And I can tell you, if you are thinking about Office 365 for your company, or maybe you already have Office 365 for your company, and you’re thinking about E5, that E5 package, should you use that for voice? Is that going to make everyone in your company pleased? Is it going to be a big hit? Is everybody going to say, hey, that’s really easy to use, and it’s so integrated with everything now with our phone system? Or, is it going to be a big pain in the neck and cause a lot of problems and not going to be really what you thought it was? If that’s a situation you’re in, this is a fantastic episode. I’ve got William Rubio, Chief Revenue Officer for CallTower, on the show today, and he’s going to tell us all about the E5 offering from Office 365, what it is and what it is not and how it can fit into your company’s voice infrastructure in a way that will make everyone really happy or ways that, if you try to squeeze it in there, will make everyone in your company unhappy. So if that’s the situation you’re in, if you’re looking at Office 365’s E5 package or you’re just interested in it, in the very least, this is a fantastic episode for you.

Okay, but before we get into the show, a couple of quick reminders. Number one, make sure you go to our website and check out the transcripts of the show. So if you’re driving or you’re at the gym or on a walk or doing some yard work and you’re listening right now, don’t worry about taking notes, just go to our website afterward and read the transcripts. So that’s AeroComInc.com, go to the Blog section, and then search for this episode and you’ll find a replay of the episode as well as the full transcript. So make sure you check that out.

Also, I’ve got a really cool free gift for everyone today.

All right. So, CallTower stepped it up and is giving away a Microsoft Surface tablet to a lucky winner at the end of the year, and all you have to do to enter to win this Microsoft Surface tablet is text the word “CALLTOWER” to the number 44-222. So if you text the word “CALLTOWER” to the number 44-222, you will get entered to win a Microsoft tablet that we’ll be giving away on December 31st. So we’re going to announce the winner in January but a fantastic free giveaway that could end up being a really cool giveaway for someone, so make sure you enter in that contest. Just text the word “CALLTOWER” to the number 44-222.

All right. With that being said, let’s jump into William Rubio talking about Office 365’s E5 offering.

All right. Thanks for joining us, William.

William: Great. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

Mike: Yeah, it’s great to have you. So tell us a little about yourself, personally, professionally.

William: Sure. So my name is William Rubio. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for CallTower. I’ve been with CallTower for about four years now. I’ve been in the IT telecommunications industry going on about twenty years plus right now. And I have a bachelor’s from the University of Miami and also a master’s from Kennesaw State up in Georgia in business. I’ve been in the industry for a pretty long time.

Mike: Oh, Miami. When I was in college, I played football, and we played against you guys. That was the rowdiest stadium I’ve ever been in. Like, the Orange Bowl? Did you ever go to any football games while you attended Miami?

William: Oh, absolutely. I am still and I was a season ticket holder for a long time and at the Orange Bowl, a lot of memorable games.

Mike: Yeah, so I played for Washington, and we came in there and you guys had a home win streak and we broke that home win streak.

William: I was at the game. I was at that game.

Mike: Oh, were you really?

William: Yes, I was.

Mike: Oh, man! That was a heck of a game, and it was like when we rolled in there, it was like from the second that bus pulled up everybody, all the fans were talking trash on us, and then we got in the stadium. I’ve never had so much heckling in my life. I was like a third string, fourth string quarterback on the team, and the fans were like watching me warm up and like reading the media guide and calling out, you know, my number and just like following me around the whole game, just heckling. Like, I mean, that was the level of heckling they had, it was all the way down to the fourth string quarterback, even. I mean, it was the first string, too, but they went deep and wide when it came to heckling. And you’re just ignoring them, but you’re like, man! These are the rowdiest, craziest fans I’ve ever seen. And then at halftime, when Miami was up on us, I think they’d just scored a touchdown right before the half, and I think they went up like maybe a couple of touchdowns on us, and then sound system kicked in and the whole stadium was, I think, doing the Tootsie Roll or something. And the players were dancing on the field. That was the craziest thing I’d ever seen.

William: Yeah, we do have some rowdy fans down here, so sometimes we don’t put our best foot forward, but for the most part, at least, it is enjoyable.

Mike: Yeah, no, like in a fun way, it was like everybody was really into it and rowdy. And to me it was like one of the most memorable moments of my college football career was just being there. You know, that’s the stuff that’s fun, is when the fans are really into it and it’s the stadium’s super loud and it’s just it’s an intense environment that you’re in. I mean, I think it charges everybody up. So whenever I think of Miami, that’s what I think of. And then a good friend of mine that I grew up with down here and trained with played for Miami. His name is Scott Covington. He played there for a while.

William: Sure. I remember him.

Mike: But yeah. Yeah.

William: Yeah, he was quarterback.

Mike: Yep. Yeah, so good football memories there. Sorry, all you IT people who don’t like football. That was a moment I had to share. But yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself personally.

William: Well, I’ve been in Miami for roughly about twenty-five or so years and grew up in Northern New Jersey. So I grew up there, literally right across Manhattan, across the Hudson River, so I was pretty close to downtown New York, probably closer than some of the folks that live actually in the boroughs of New York. That’s how close I was.

Mike: Oh, wow.

William: To Manhattan, yeah. I was about four and a half miles, if you drew a straight line from my house to Times Square, even though I was in New Jersey and not in New York.

Mike: Oh, wow.

William: But I grew up there, yeah, and then moved to Miami. And I have a wonderful two four-and-a-half-year-old twins, and they keep me busy, so we’re very happy with them, and they’re just a ball of fun right now. They’re at a perfect age.

Mike: Oh, that’s cool. That’s awesome. Well, all right, so today William’s going to talk to us about Office 365’s E5 offering and kind of, you know, help us all understand that offering a little bit. When he and I first spoke about what he could come on the show and talk about, he mentioned that in a lot of customer meetings that he had noticed that there’s a lot of IT professionals out there who didn’t really understand the E5 offering very well. And it’s something that he thought he could shed some light on for us. So with that, I’ll just kind of turn it over to you, William, and let you run with it. And then, if you don’t mind having me chime in once in a while for questions.

William: No, Mike, I think that’s great, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience and hopefully provide some education around the E5 product offering and some of the dos and don’ts that we’ve seen as far as best practices over the last several years.

Mike: Awesome. So if you could give us some background in terms of, kind of, how you came, you know, to this knowledge about E5 and kind of how you realized a lot of people aren’t very aware of it and, you know, what the issue is that, you know, why they’re not really aware of it.

William: Sure. Well, actually, in my current organization with CallTower, we’re actually one of the providers of Microsoft Office 365. So we have a lot of customers that come to us to help solve a lot of their day-to-day issues and looking for the right solution that’s actually going to fit their organization. And we are a best-of-breed organization, and when they come to us, what we try to do is, we try to basically provide them a solution that fits for them. We’re not trying to put a square peg in a round hole but actually trying to make sure that for each unique offering or for each unique office that they have, there’s probably going to be some type of design that’s going to be a little bit different than the one before, so it’s not really cookie cutter. And with that comes the knowledge that you must strive for understanding the different products out there and also making sure that you’re educating your customers. The more education we get, the more that we can pass along to our customers to make sure that we’re actually putting them into the right solution package that they want, not just to meet their needs today, but also as they continue to grow and drive business for their organization.

Mike: Sure. That makes sense. And then you noticed just on customer meetings that you guys were bringing up E5 and there’s a lack of knowledge there, huh?

William: There absolutely is. You know, there’s been this big, what I like to call kind of the drive to UC, to unified communications, and the minute you start mentioning UC or unified communications people kind of open up their eyes a little bit because they’re basically trying to figure out what that even means, you know, in a lot of cases. And it’s really not that difficult. I mean, unified communications, it really comes down to putting together and bundling all the different types of communications that we have out there. Right? I mean, before it was just your basic telephony. It was just people making or receiving phone calls and that was really kind of just the main part of it. Then it started to get a little bit more sophisticated because we started to add the network component of it, right? Now, all of a sudden, you had things like PRIs and internet circuits and then we started to move into the SIP world, right? I mean, SIP basically became a big thing and then we started to look at the total cost of ownership and the savings because now you could bundle everything together, run it over one circuit or over a couple of circuits and bundle them together. And then you started to move more into this, what I like to kind of call the communications modality, right? Then you started to look at things like instant messaging and presence, some multimedia applications, some conferencing type of applications, video, audio conferencing, web conferencing as well.

And then start to throw into that the different devices that a lot of users want to use, right? Nowadays you have a lot of employees that actually come with their own device into an organization. They just basically want to add the business productivity apps that you have to run your day-to-day business and pretty much just use their devices and just go from there. And then when you probably add the last part it which is what I like to kind of call more of the social business, that’s really where the business impact comes in. That’s when things are user-initiated. You want to make sure that the entire suite of offering that you have to the customer and to your employees is very simplistic and it is effective. And then you want to make sure that it’s also what I like to call event initiated. Whether it is that you have to send an instant message or whether it is you have to pick up the call and make a phone call or you have to express in video or share your desktop, it really starts to transform the business overall, and that’s when you kind of start to see that drive to UC. And Office 365, and even the E1 package, the E3 package, the Business Essentials, and the E5 are all part of that driving towards the UC.

Mike: Got it. Got it. Great. Sorry to kind of throw you off track there a little bit, but go ahead and tell us a little bit about E5.

William: Sure. So, you know, E5 is a recently new product SKU that was actually developed by Microsoft, so it was something that just recently was added to their portfolio. And the E5, what it basically was, it was basically an add-on or let’s say a leapfrog to what was initially the E4. Now the E3, the E4, and the E5 plan were all pretty similar. I mean, that’s basically where you get all the same applications as far as unified messaging, you get voicemail, you get all the Office applications that are all part of it. It’s not really limited to the amount of users you can have. When you start to look at things like the Office 365, like, Business Premium and Business Essentials, that’s kind of more limited to about three hundred users max, but when you start to get into the Enterprise E1 and E3 and E5, that’s pretty much unlimited. So it actually starts to move a little bit away from the small and medium-sized business, the kind of more of the small enterprise business and above because it does give you some of that feature functionality that you didn’t have before. It does come also with Microsoft Exchange and your email and your Outlook and your calendar, and you have the personal archive. You do also get the full mailbox size, usually it’s basically like a 50 gig that you get. You also get the auto sync with the mobile device that’s all part of it. The compliance part, the envelope, the journaling, the data loss prevention. I mean, it just has a host of different things that come with it.

And then what the E5 actually added to the entire portfolio is it really started to add what we like to call PSTN conferencing. And I’ll give you a prime example of what that means. It’s if I was an E3 user with Microsoft and all of a sudden I wanted to send out a Skype invite from my Skype application because that was part of the E3, when I would send that invite out, usually what would happen is, is that my participants on that call would only basically have the option to use their audio through their computer or we would have to use another audio bridge. So we would have to still have a ten-digit number or an 800 number for them to actually call. And what the E5 actually did is it started to add in what we call PSTN conferencing which basically gives the customers or the companies the opportunity to have a local number. So let’s say it’s a company that’s based in Texas or in Dallas, let’s say in Dallas, Texas, and they actually want to have a local Dallas number, they could actually have that as well as an 800 number. So they could have their participants, whether they’re domestic in the US or even internationally that they have the ability to actually call through that number so that they could actually access the meeting and then basically still see the desktop sharing and the video, but the audio would be just through a regular basic telephony interface. So that was really one of the main driving force behind the E5 that it actually did bring to the table.

Now what happens is – and this is kind of where that confusion actually starts – is that some customers actually think that that includes what we like to call the telephony aspect or the PBX functionality of the Skype for Business world. And it actually doesn’t. And what I mean by that is E5 basically just gives you that invitation for the meeting invite so you could actually dial into the meeting, and then if all of a sudden you want to start to get some telephony features, for example, if you want to make and receive calls to any user in the world, it doesn’t have to be a Skype user, it could be me calling Mike on a cell phone, and then I also want to get my voicemail and my voicemail-to-email and I also want to have let’s say things like call recording and some features like that, that’s when you start to have to move into the E5 with PSTN calling just to actually start to look at getting some of those features that are actually out there. And we’re kind of seeing a big shift in that because customers are saying why am I going to have an Office 365 environment; let’s say with an E5 or E3, etc., anything that’s an Office 365 product that I’m running my email, I’m running my calendar, I’m also running my unified communications, but I have a phone sitting on my desk that’s from another provider, and those two really don’t talk to each other. And when you start to look at what the E5 could actually do and that PSTN or that telephony feature license that you could add to it, that’s when you really start to actually integrate everything together, to actually basically make it all into one platform.

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think that makes a lot of sense. I’ve always thought that the functionality part of, you know, Skype for Business, you know, the old Lync platform just made so much sense that a lot of people were looking at it like, hey, we want to do this, but at the same time, you know, from the hosted perspective, from hosted VoIP, they were like, well, it’s not really, you know, trying to make that into a hosted VoIP provider is where they kind of were having a problem, so that kind of leading into what you’re talking about makes a lot of sense. It’s trying to mesh those two together where you have the ability to really integrate your functionality of, you know, Skype for Business with your phone system and do it well.

William: That’s exactly right, Mike. And just some statistics, I actually like to read them. I always try to read some industry publications that are out there. I mean, the Boston Consulting Group, you know, recently had some great statistics out there, I mean, with the people that they actually interviewed. It was about 43% of employees work out of more than one location, which is, I think, a pretty good statistic, and then 70% of the small to medium-sized businesses out there are looking for some collaboration in the cloud. They basically don’t want to have it sit in their office anymore. They have workers that are remote. They have a lot of road warriors that are out there that are basically all over the place. They want to make sure that whether it’s their laptop or whether it’s their tablet or their Surface or their iPad or even just their regular mobile device, that they have all the tools that they need to make them successful, and that really gives them that competitive advantage over their competitors. And that’s one of the reasons why you see this drive to Office 365 and this drive into that UC world as well.

Mike: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And, you know, I think all of us businesses are out there, I mean, just trying to figure out how to make all these different disparate systems talk to each other. I mean, there’s so much cool technology out there, but I think we’ve all experienced that, where you start to consume it and then you realize, gosh, now we have all these different logins and all these different systems and, you know, all these different cool little software applications to help us collaborate and do different things, but you’re like, man, it’s all just, you know, piecemealed and it’s not working together very well. Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that is something that still is just a huge need out there for small, medium businesses.

William: Absolutely. And when we start to look at, you know, one thing is the integration, right? So now it brings peace of mind to a lot of IT managers and directors and CIOs that are out there basically trying to say how could I integrate all this with also keeping my expense or my cost down? Because obviously, I don’t want to have a whole group of individuals having to try to integrate all this because the more integration and the more plug-ins I have, the more of a challenge I have or the more of a risk I have to actually have something go wrong, you know, within my network and within my day-to-day operations. And when you start to look at Office 365 and Microsoft and the E3 and the E5 and etc., since it all is under one platform, and now you start to look at adding some of the telephony aspect to it, that’s really when you get everything integrated onto that one platform. That just makes a lot of sense.

And there’s a lot of what I like to call opportunity costs when you’re actually measuring something, especially in a total cost of ownership, you know, when you’re looking at your TCO models. I mean, easily, right off the bat, it reduces your travel expenses, probably anywhere from what, 5 to about 30%. It reduces your audio conferencing because now you don’t even have to have a separate audio conferencing bridge. Everything can be done within the Office 365 environment, and that usually saves you about 30 to 95%. There’s a lot of expensive conferencing charges out there that now you have it all bundled into that one platform. And then even just from a simple telephony standpoint because of the fact that you’re able to do instant messaging and conferencing and a lot of collaboration all in the one platform, that saves you about another 50 to 70% on your telephony charges. So it’s not just a matter of the integration, which actually brings peace of mind to individuals but also at the same time, when you start to look at your costs, it does substantially decrease a lot of those costs.

Mike: Yeah, I can definitely see that, you know, and it’s surprising how many things you can start to get rid of, but you go, oh, yeah, oh, we don’t need that anymore, and oh, yeah, we don’t need that anymore. You know, I’ve definitely seen that time and time again.

William: Oh, yeah. And that’s kind of just on the cost standpoint, right? That’s a little bit easier to grasp and see, especially when you’re sitting there and you’re looking at budgets and you’re looking at expenses and, you know, whether you’re looking at it on a quarterly basis or on a yearly basis. And one of the other things that we do with clients is we also try to explain to them how working with the Office 365 environment and those unified communications altogether, how it actually improves even some of your business outcomes. You know, for example, there are some statistics out there that say that because of the fact that you have everything bundled together, you’re going to save up to about thirty minutes per day on end user productivity. That means that when they’re trying to search for somebody and kind of going back and forth, whether it’s by voicemail or email and waiting for somebody to respond and I called you and now we’re playing the phone tag, it actually saves about thirty minutes per day. Then now it gives that thirty minutes back to the employee to actually be more productive in what their core competency is to actually drive the business or drive the actual business to better productivity overall. It also even helps resolve customer issues faster because of the collaboration. And even from a sales standpoint, imagine when you could actually walk into an organization and now you’re collaborating with marketing and finance and all the other departments to actually drive that sale for your company. It even shortens that sales cycle, probably up to about 20%. So it’s not just what you can actually save, which is kind of inherent to look at, but also how it improves the efficiencies and the communications within an organization.

Mike: That’s fantastic.

William: Thanks. Yeah, no, I think it’s really revolutionary what’s coming out there, and that’s again, going back to the actual feature set of the E5. You know, the E5 kind of just gives you that one aspect of it, and then when you want to start to add in the telephony and the voice aspect of it, there is more to it. And obviously there’s a cost to it, and then you have to actually get into the costs and see what it’s going to do. And that’s when organizations like myself with CallTower, what we do is we basically act as that consultative approach to the customer to make sure that we’re actually driving the right opportunity or the right solution set for that customer, depending on what their needs are.

Mike: Great.

William: So let’s kind of break down a little bit on, you know, what that E5 would actually look at. So there’s a couple things that the E5 would bring to the table that’s just kind of inherent overall when you’re looking at Office 365 because obviously Microsoft does a very good job of trying to make sure, from a secure standpoint, you know, security is obviously a big thing, so you want to make sure that you have that. And what the E5 does, it just really kind of makes sure that that’s kind of inherent, whether it’s the E3 or the E5, it’s going to make sure to give you things like exchange advanced threat protection. It’s going to give you some Power BI Pro which basically is going to give you some of that integration with SharePoint and with OneDrive to actually make sure everything is working together. It’s going to give you the opportunity to look at that Skype for Business online to give you that telephony aspect of it, which is obviously one of the big aspects of it overall, and then even just like what we call Advanced eDiscovery which is more about archiving and some retention and also just the eDiscovery overall.

So when you start to look at what you could actually do with the E5 overall, it does bring some good things to the table, but again, when you’re starting to look at it from a Cloud PBX standpoint, it is an add-on and that’s really where the confusion comes in with the customers, because I think that when they go with the E5 they’re automatically getting that and again, that’s a farce because from there you do have to add what is called the Cloud PBX. And then, in some cases, you also even have to add the international PBX piece of it if you actually want to make sure that you have the global presence to actually make and receive calls, not just domestically in the US but also international.

So that’s when you start to get the confusion because customers think, well, great, I should just go to the E5. Microsoft sells that E5 somewhere around the $35 range. And then they say, great, for $35 I’m getting conferencing, I’m getting my Cloud PBX. And then it’s like, no, guys, hold on, back up. You’re just actually getting the E5 with the conferencing, that PSTN conferencing. But now if you want to start to add the Cloud PBX, you got to tack on another $12. And then if you also want to make sure that you can make and receive calls internationally, so if you happen to have an international office or just do business internationally which nowadays who doesn’t, right, we have a global economy, that’s going to add another $12.

So when you’re looking at a total package, you’re looking at a total package of about $59 a month to actually get the full E5 with the Cloud PBX going. And when you start to look at some of the packages that we’ve put together, we’re easily going to be somewhere around the mid forties and at the same, give you that wide expertise and that solution-based consultative approach to make sure that we’re putting you into the right package based on your user experience and your user requirements.

Mike: Very cool.

William: We’re, you know, pretty exciting overall because of where it’s going and I think nowadays you’re starting to see that buzz and when people start to ask me how much of an impact do you see Office 365 and even the E3 and the E5 being, I always kind of use the analogy of dial-up and high-speed internet with DSL and cable, right?

Mike: Yeah.

William: I mean, if you remember back in the day when you had that dial-up and that modem was dialing back and forth and it was going and then, all of a sudden, you went to DSL or cable. It was revolutionary as far as what it was connecting. No one ever want back, and that’s what you’re kind of starting to see within the Office 365 environment and those different types of licensing plans that you can have because now you have everything under one shop. And I don’t have to worry about having a disc on the side sitting in my IT office that I could basically give to a new employee to upload all the Office products like Word and Excel and so forth. All that goes away. Everything is in the cloud. It’s a subscription-based type of license. You pay per month. If that user happens to leave the organization or you terminate that employee, then pretty much at that point you just pretty much just turn down that license.

Mike: Yeah, that’s fantastic compared to the old model.

William: It is. Yeah, I know. It’s a big difference. And that’s where the drive is really going to be because everything now is going more to that subscription-based; everything is going more into the cloud. I mean, everybody has something in the cloud. Whether they want to accept it or not, I mean, that’s where everyone is driving to, and some customers only understand they do still want to have some things on-premise and there are some advantages of having that. So we understand that. But at the end of the day, any organization today that does not have one of their core competencies in the cloud, they’re just basically doing a disservice to their organization and hopefully, they’ll never get to the point that they’ll have to activate some redundancy or some business continuity because it can drive down their business.

And there’s another statistic, Mike, too, that I’d like to share with you, and when you start to look at some of the catastrophic events out there, whether it’s an earthquake or a tornado or a hurricane, you know, something like that – we’ve been having some of those around the East Coast and over in the Pacific Coast here lately – small to medium-sized businesses – and what we mean by that is businesses usually at about a hundred users or less – if they are out of their services for more than week, I think it’s about 40% of those businesses never come back. And that’s a big statistic, that basically that business closes shop for a week, they can’t be sustained anymore, so that means that those employees have to go look for other jobs. And that business venture just closes down and never actually comes back.

So it’s that important actually look at going to things into the cloud and then also going to plans like an E3 or an E5 and hopefully, CallTower could be one of the organizations to bring that to the table for your customers.

Mike: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, you know, I think I’ve heard something similar to that before. You know, it’s always hard to believe, like, gosh, man, one week and then you’re toast. But it’s like, I think it’s one week of downtime and you just die a slow death when you’re trying to come back.

William: It is. It really is. And you know what, what you have to look at to is you have to try to partner out there with organizations and, you know, customers nowadays they realize that it’s no longer a vendor-customer relationship. It’s now really a partnership. So you want to make sure that you’re actually looking at what the best practices are out there and who has the best experience because there’s a thousand organizations out there that are some value-added resellers, some ISPs and so forth that all understand what are the value-adds that they bring to the table.

And from every organization you got to basically see what those best practices are, right? You got to look from what’s the feature gaps that E5 currently have and how could I find an organization that could actually pretty much fill in those feature gaps, from a device management who’s going to be supporting my devices, my physical phones that are sitting at the desk, and also what are the benefits that that organization brings to the table that could basically help alleviate the day-to-day operations that I have to run just to maintain and support whether it’s E5 or E3 or just my unified communications experience so that my entire IT organization, whether it’s ten people, fifty, or three could actually focus on the core competency of our business and continue to drive the revenue to our company so that we continue to be successful.

Mike: That makes a lot of sense to me.

William: So it is. And as far as, you know, what type of companies work or basically, what type of companies that E5 plan does work, you’re kind of looking at a little bit more of the small to midsized businesses. That’s kind of a best bet for the E5. Somebody that’s probably maybe looking or that’s currently without a current PBX or conferencing system in place or they’re kind of basically looking to try and amend that altogether, and then somebody who is looking basically to get some advanced technology, right, they really don’t have the manpower to actually do implementation and training and support. So you’re actually looking for somebody that could actually bring all these to the table and at the same time, making sure that you could partner with organizations that could bring you that E5 experience or that E3 experience and basically fill in all these different gaps that are out there.

Mike: Yeah, and that even is changing, you know, just all the time it seems like, you know, who’s ready for Office 365 fully integrated with voice. Just, you know, five years ago everybody was still kind of scared of it and now it’s just all of a sudden kind of taken off like wildfire. It’s like that veil’s been lifted and everybody is like, all right, you know, I think we’re ready to try this.

William: Oh, absolutely. I just recently came back, in July I was over in Toronto at the Microsoft World Partner Conference that they have every year. And the latest statistic I heard was that globally Microsoft currently has, right now, about two hundred and fifty million users or subscribers on one of their Office 365 plans. Now, that’s not the E5; that’s just overall. But that’s a substantial amount. That’s a lot larger than most countries out there as far as the amount of users that they actually have. And here’s where, you know, kind of that demystifying the E5 or where the challenge comes in.

So you look at the E3 or you look at the E5 plan and you say, great, I think that that works for my organization, now where do I go get it? And that’s really where an organization like CallTower and the expertise that, say myself and my team has, that we could bring that to the table. We could bring a dedicated project manager, show you that track record of managing, not just the implementation from the IT side but also the managing voice part of it, who’s going to be managing my devices, who’s going to help me troubleshoot, right? When I do have an issue, I want to be able to pick up the phone or I want to be able to email an organization and make sure that I’m going to get a response back so that I actually see what’s going on with my business because obviously it’s detrimental for me to have any type of interruptions on my day-to-day business.

And then post implementation, you want to make sure that you could work with an organization that’s going to provide you training, not just to the IT staff but also to the end users, right? You want to make sure that your end users have that post implementation training and then even ongoing training because you might have new employees when you have some turnover or employees that never used the specific feature set that, maybe six months down the road, now they have to start using because maybe their job roles and responsibility wound up changing. You want to make sure that you have an organization that’s there for you 24/7. So you want to make sure that that’s important.

And then, also just that ongoing account management, that account review of somebody whether it’s quarterly or whether it’s semi-annually or whether it’s just annually, just to kind of sit down with the key decision-makers and say, okay, where is your business going and how could we partner up together to make sure that we’re providing the best solutions for you to continue to make sure that you are optimizing and being efficient within your company to drive your revenue? Cost savings is always very important, but I always kind of look at it as a two-pronged approach. It’s not just what could I save you, but also how could I help enable you to actually drive more revenue for your organization.

Mike: Yeah, I think some of those things you’re bringing up are huge because, you know, that that’s kind of what I’ve seen in the marketplace, is the people who are going to, you know, they’re trying to use Skype for Business as their main phone system, a lot of times you’ll see these people they’re almost like cowboys out there. They’re trying to do it all themselves. And they’re trying to just, kind of, throw it together, you know, with the pure offering of, you know, Skype for Business and they’re not really partnering with a company like yours where it’s like, okay, you guys are helping them make sure that the voice is high quality and it works. They’re just kind of throwing some phones out there and saying, no, you know, we’re using Skype for Business. And they almost just, like go buy, you know, their IP phones and install them or have, you know, an outside vendor come in and install IP phones and kind of set the whole thing up for them, maybe help them a little bit, but they’re not kind of partnering with an ongoing voice company to really, you know, wrap their arms around that application and make sure that it works.

And I think that’s a huge differentiator that I want everybody on the line to understand, is that that’s really where a company like CallTower can come in, you know. And obviously, there’s other companies out there as well, it’s not just CallTower, but speaking to you specifically just mentioning CallTower, that’s where you guys come into play and really kind of help that situation because you’ll hear people say, well, I don’t know about Skype for Business. That’s just kind of risky. And I think they’re right. It’s like, yep, that’s absolutely risky if you’re just kind of trying to do that on your own and have somebody, you know, maybe help you install it but then just, you know, keep your fingers crossed and hope that it works. And doing that for a company with, you know, a couple of hundred employees, that is kind of nuts, you know. But there are other options out there. And I think that’s where I see a lot of IT departments don’t really understand. There are other options out there like a CallTower where you guys can come in and kind of really help them with that and make sure that it works, and do it in a way that’s a high-quality way to deliver Skype for Business, you know, not just throw it in there and get phone service through Office 365 and keep your fingers crossed.

William: No, absolutely, Mike. I mean, there’s simple things that we do, like best practices. I mean, we have documents that we provide to our customers, on best documents from a firewall configuration, from a bandwidth allocation, right? Because this is not just voice, right? And that’s one misconception right there when you start to look overall and just say, well, you know, I currently have a couple T1s running my voice right now, so can you give me the equivalent? It’s like, guys, hold on, we’re no longer just doing voice, right? Now we’re doing video. We’re doing desktop sharing. We’re doing instant messaging. We’re doing presence. We’re doing, in some cases, high-definition video. We’re also doing some white boarding. Because those are of different unified communication features that actually come with the product.

And then when you start to look at that E5 with Microsoft and you start to look at an organization like CallTower, you know, what’s that value-add that would bring to the table. And this integration that CallTower provides is not a plug-in into the Microsoft environment; it’s actually native to the Microsoft environment. And that’s really where kind of that big difference comes in. And I’ll probably give you the best example. When you’re looking at a softphone, nowadays a lot of organizations are looking at a softphone, with our solution the Microsoft Desktop Client that you used for instant messaging and presence, and it’s your address book and so forth, actually becomes your softphone. So now you don’t have to have a separate softphone app running on your computer, the Desktop Client for Microsoft running on your computer, have your email open, all that is integrated into the one portal. That’s pretty much what you’re looking at on a daily basis.

And then when you start to look at things of who’s going to manage my equipment, who’s going to provide me the training, who’s going to actually do that white glove implementation that I’m looking at, where could I call for support, who could I call for support? And then additional features. My organization is a little bit more robust or unique, I need things like call recording, I need things like contact center. I need things like integration with different CRM tools like Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce.com, those types of things. That’s when you started to look at the Microsoft solution and say, hey, it’s great. It gets me about 60% of the way there, but I need somebody to go ahead and put me over that finish line and I need all these different things done by a host of organizations or at least one, and that’s really where CallTower comes in and brings that value-add to our customers.

Mike: Yeah. And I think another thing that’s neat that you guys can do, you know, you guys can bring a circuit in as well, which kind of controls that voice quality and so that a voice is never hitting the public internet, if the client wants that. It’s not always necessary, but if needs be, that’s something you guys can do as well. I think it’s just kind of like, you know, really wrapping your arms around the whole solution and saying like, hey, we can deliver it any way you want it and make sure that it works. It’s just a matter of what you need, depending on, you know, the applications that you’re running with voice, like you said, are you doing a call center, how mission critical, you know, how many users do you have at that single site or if you have multiple sites, kind of putting the whole thing together. It’s like, like you said, like that’s where a company goes, oh, Office 365 and adding phone service or basically to add a phone system to it, that’s great, but there’s all these holes that they’re thinking of, and that’s what I think worries them. And a lot of them don’t understand there’s companies out there, like you guys, that can kind of complete that puzzle and say like, okay, well, here it is, it’s a great service and we’ll let you use it exactly as it is, meaning, like, all the functionality. It’s not going to be kind of quasi, you know, Skype for Business or any of that stuff. It’s actually you’re doing it but it’s, you know, you guys come in and make sure that it works the way they want it to work.

William: That’s exactly right. And we’ve had some organizations that are domestic-only in nature. We’ve also had some organizations that are international. We do actually provide the service not just here in the U.S. but also in about seventy countries on a global level. And we can also include that circuit, Mike, like you mentioned, so it does become more of that full turnkey solution. And depending on the customers’ needs, some location could be ramped up rather quickly or we can look at doing things in a phase implementation and go at the pace of the customer to make sure that we’re not overwhelming them, either going too fast or going too slow. We pretty much can go at the pace of the customer.

Mike: Yeah, very cool. Awesome! And just in closing, what would you say, just to kind of wrap up, that you’d like everybody to kind of take away from this?

William: You know, the biggest thing with this is, I think when you start to do your homework and you start to do your research, you want to make sure that you’re working with an organization that has the years of experience and can provide good references on their customer experience as far as how the onboarding is going, how the implementation, and then also the support end. Cost is obviously a big driving factor, but you have to look at all those different aspects of provisioning onboarding and support, and making sure that you’re getting the right expertise/help, to actually bring the right solution to you. It’s a big process to go through, but if you do your homework and you do it right, at the end of the road, you’re going to make sure that your employees, which is the biggest thing you’re looking for, are happier and you’re making your organization more effective.

Mike: Very good. Very good. I agree. And so, what we’re going to do now is, is take a little bit of a happy break from the serious conversation. And I do want to talk about CallTower a little bit and have you tell us, you know, what you guys do really well and, kind of, what are your highlights are, tell us a little bit about CallTower in general. But before we do that, again, I just like to take a quick little break and as we always do, just have you tell us a funny story about something you’ve witnessed in the workplace, whether it’s the most funny thing or interesting thing. Tell us a story that will make us smile a little bit.

William: Sure. There’s a lot of those stories to tell, but I’ll just tell a quick one on that. So we had a customer, it was a large customer, this was probably going back about fourteen years or so, and the customer actually called us in a panic. And it was actually the receptionist that called us. And the receptionist, when they called in they were just flipping out just because they were saying that the phone’s not working, they’re not able to answer the calls coming in. And it was a small business. There was only about eighty users in the business itself. But basically, it was one of those a little bit more old-fashioned companies that they answer every call. They want to have that human factor. And the receptionist was kind of going crazy, right, because they have X amount of employees having all those calls come in.

So the receptionist actually calls us into our support center and, you know, kind of freaking out. I mean, almost in tears. It was a young lady, and she was almost in tears, and she’s saying how she doesn’t know what’s going on, the phone’s not working, the phone’s not working, calls are coming in, I’m hearing the calls come in and they’re going to other people and I’m going to get fired from my job, I don’t know what’s going on. And so we sit there and we did troubleshooting for them for about twenty minutes. And we just don’t know what’s going on. I mean, it’s just not working. And then come finally to fruition at the end of those twenty minutes, one of the guys actually that’s on a call, we had basically our Tier 3 and Tier 4 guys on the call, says, “Could you do me a favor? Can you see if underneath your desk if the power’s actually plugged in?” And the girl took a step back and looked and said, “Oh, my God, I kicked it with my foot when I got here.” So all that troubleshooting and everything and it was that she literally just had her entire communication system was just not plugged in and that’s why she had no power and it was not working.

Mike: I hate to judge because we’ve all made those decisions. No matter how technical we are we’ve all done that where we’re going like, there’s a solution right in front of our nose and it’s just something stupid, but it’s still funny for all of us to sit back and laugh at, right? There’s nothing wrong with that, you know, laughing at someone else’s expense once in a while just because they tripped and fall. It’s still kind of funny.

William: It was. And we all did have a chuckle afterwards, even with her, but for about twenty minutes the poor woman was in tears.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, you know, oh, man. You know, I’m adding that to the list of great stories I’ve heard that are very similar. You know, I think that there’s definitely a growing trend on this podcast that, if there’s something wrong, the first thing you want to do is make sure it’s plugged in. Or, and plugged into the wall. I had one person come on and say that, like the power strip was plugged into itself. Like, okay, just make sure the device is plugged into the power strip, the power strip is plugged into the wall. That is the first rule of troubleshooting. I’m sure all the IT professionals listening can attest to that one. They probably see that on a daily basis.

William: Absolutely. They probably all do. They probably all have at least one or two good war stories to share.

Mike: Yeah, awesome. Well, cool. All right. So tell us a little bit about CallTower. You know, tell us a little bit about the company in general and what CallTower is really good at in particular, and maybe something new that’s going on that you’re excited about.

William: Sure. Sure. So the organization, CallTower itself, we’ve been around since 2002, so we’ve been around for about fourteen-plus years. We currently have about seventy thousand users on a global level that are currently running on our platforms. So there’s a lot of organizations out there that depend on us on a daily basis to make sure that that we’re providing a good, reliable, stable service. And in the industry we are considered to be a best-in-breed solution provider and primarily, the reason for that is because what we run in our datacenters is 100% end-to-end Microsoft or 100% end-to-end Cisco. So we actually are one of the few organizations out there that don’t have a third party VoIP switch, that you can basically put a Cisco phone or a Polycom phone on your desktop and say, oh, this is Microsoft, or oh, this is Cisco. We actually make sure to run end-to-end Microsoft and Cisco.

And, you know, going back to the E5, Mike, that you had mentioned, we are one of the few organizations out there that are actually native within the Microsoft Office 365 environment. And what I mean by that is, there’s other VoIP systems out there that actually say, yeah, we could provide some type of integration, but it’s usually a little clunky or requires you to have, like, an extra toolbar on your computer screen that you have to kind of integrate with. And with us, what we do is, since we run the Skype platforms within our datacenters, what happens is, is that we get to actually provide dial tone and give you that full telephony feature functionality, the contact center, the DID, the voicemail to email, things like call recording and so forth, that are all part of it, all running within the Office 365 environment.

So that’s basically our core competencies. That’s what we’ve been able to do. We’ve been a partner with Cisco and run the Cisco platform since 2002, we introduced Microsoft to our customers right around the 2008 timeframe. So again, we’ve been a good Microsoft partner now for about six-plus years. And we’ve also expanded our services to provide services for users in roughly about seventy countries on a global level. But I think that that’s really one exciting thing to mention, is the fact that customers nowadays they are more global than they have been. You have, in a lot of cases, even a 50 or 100c customer down here that might just be kind of what we would consider more small than more medium or enterprise, but they do happen to have some users that are somewhere over in the EMEA or the APAC regions of the world, and they do also need to have some collaboration going back and forth.

So we’re pretty excited about where we are today as a company and where we’re going and the fact that we’re probably one of the only organizations out there that have native Skype for Business that we could provide to customers. It is pretty exciting for us. And we were one of the few organizations back in 2012 to actually introduce Voice Enabled Lync, which is obviously the predecessor of Skype and actually took basically the bumps and bruises and realized where the gaps were in providing that full telephony and that full turnkey solution to our customers, and really kind of put it on steroids, for the lack of a better words, to actually make sure that we could give that full functionality to our customers.

So it’s exciting times right now at CallTower. We have a lot of organizations whether it’s domestic or international. We have some universities and colleges, some manufacturing organizations, some retail organizations that are using our services and they’re really coming to us saying, hey, I love this E3, I love this E5 plan that Microsoft has, but I really want to try to see if I could do more with it. I want to make it now that full unified communications solution so I could give that full turnkey to my employees, but I really don’t know how to go about it. And that’s really where CallTower comes in and adds that value-add to the customers.

Mike: Yeah, that’s definitely the way I think of you guys. It’s just like you had mentioned, it’s, you know, the full integration of a hosted VoIP provider and Office 365 Skype for Business, someone who wants that, who kind of wants both of those. And like I said, most service provides, they do hosted VoIP and they can add on some Office 365 integration, but they’re not doing Skype for Business typically. You know, they’re not really running Skype for Business and fully integrating that with their hosted VoIP system, it’s a hosted VoIP system that’s integrating with some Outlook functionality or Skype for Business functionality, and it’s not the whole package. And really, to kind of marry those two together there’s very few providers that can do it. And off the top of my mind I don’t really know of any other than you guys that can do it, just off the top of my head, that’s whenever anybody brings that up it’s always like, oh, CallTower can do that. That’s more of an application for CallTower because like I said, it’s just very rare that people are running it like at that level.

William: Absolutely. There’s also even some customization, we do have some requests from some customers that come to us and they’re looking for some things. For example, we’re working right now with an organization that is a global organization. It’s about two thousand users. And they’re actually looking to do some integration with Skype for Business and HipChat which is, you know, one of the big programs that are out there. And we’re looking at doing that integration. There are some other ones that are asking us about Slack, as well as integration with Skype for Business. So we’re looking at those things. So we do have not just the fact that the Skype for Business as one of our core competencies, but also that customization request that also comes in where we wound up helping our customers.

And we have a lot of bars on the Microsoft side that are saying, hey, I know how to do all the IT stuff, but when it comes to voice, you know, kind of those little hairs on the back of my neck stand up because I’m not really an expert on it, and that’s where that expertise of CallTower comes in.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, cool. Thanks for sharing and thanks for being on the program today. I think, you know, I definitely learned a lot, so I know that everybody else online learned a lot as well. And, you know, I really appreciate you carving out the time to educate us a little bit on E5. And like I said, going into this, you know, when you and I talked before the podcast, I really didn’t know what E5 was. I was like, well, I know it has something to do with voice, but, you know, I really appreciate you, you know, educating us a little bit and teaching us and I think everybody’s better for it.

William: Well, great, Mike. Thank you very much for having me on. I appreciate the questions and good luck to everybody out there. Appreciate your time.

Mike: All right. Thank you very much. Have a great day.

William: You, too.

Mike: Okay. Well, that’s a wrap, Cloud Nation. Thank you for listening. And don’t forget a couple of quick things. Number one, if you want to revisit any of the information that we talked about, William and I, don’t forget we have the transcripts and a replay on our website. Just go to AeroComInc.com, go to the Blog section, and search for this episode and you will find the full transcripts as well as a replay of the episode that you can play at your leisure. So make sure you check that out; that’s a resource that we do just for you.

And then, also make sure you enter into win the Microsoft Surface tablet that CallTower and William and their marketing team are giving away. Hey, it’s free stuff, right? All you have to do is text the word “CALLTOWER” to the number 44-222 and you might win that Microsoft Surface that we’re going to be giving away at the end of this year, 2016. So if you’re listening, and it’s before the end of the year in 2016, text the word “CALLTOWER” to the number 44-222 and see if you might win that Microsoft Surface.

All right, thank you for listening again, Cloud Nation. Have a great day out there, and we will catch you next time.

IT Nation, thank you for joining us on Cloud Therapy with AeroComInc.com. Visit us at AeroComInc.com, that’s A-E-R-O-C-O-M-I-N-C dot com and head on over to the Blog section for notes on everything we talked about today as well as our blogs, provider reviews, and of course the best quotes for any technology.