Ring Central on the Move

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Ring Central on the Move

Ring Central is a cloud phone system company that has seen steady growth over the past several years as they make inroads into the traditional PBX market.

Stock Price:   Currently it is in the low $80’s which is up from its 1 year low of $40.35.    Not a bad return given the S&P 500 is up less than 10% this year. 

Market Cap:  $6 Billion.   How can a company that doesn’t report a profit have a market cap so high?   Answer is growth.    Check out these sales figure for the past 4 years.

Revenue:

2017 – $501 M

2016 – $379 M

2015 – $296 M

2014 – $219 M

Ring Central is still not profitable but that growth curve is unmistakable and is driving a high Market Cap

RingCentral’s flagship product is RingCentral Office. The company also offers RingCentral Professional, and RingCentral Fax.

RingCentral provides a cloud business phone system. It offers standard PBX features such as multiple extensions and web conferencing; fax; auto-receptionist; call logs; and rule-based call routing and answering as well. Generally Customers do not require capital investment or maintenance contracts, which has the potential to lowers overall customer costs and provide a solid ROI.

RingCentral Office

RingCentral Office is a cloud-based PBX system for businesses.  RingCentral Office features include call auto-attendant, company directory, call forwarding and handling, multiple extensions, a mobile app for iPhone and Android, Business SMS, and video conferencing.

RingCentral Professional

RingCentral Professional is a suite that provides a universal telephone number, voice mail, dial-by-name directory, call-forwarding, and other features through a smartphone app on iPhone and Android devices.

RingCentral Fax

RingCentral Fax allows users to send and receive faxes through the Internet without a fax machine.

RingCentral Meetings, Webinar and Rooms

  • RingCentral Meetings is a web conferencing product
  • RingCentral Webinar allows companies to host HD-ready virtual events with up to 3000 attendees.
  • RingCentral Rooms is to manage web conferences.

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First American Business – A Family of Companies

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A Family of Companies
Company Bulletin Notice:

Significant changes are in the works at First American Business and we wanted to share the exciting highlights with you in this Company Bulletin Notice:

New Name:   We have simplified our name to First American Business.   Because of our rapid growth in both the government sector and the commercial market, we had aligned our staff and processes to support both lines of business under First American Business Solutions (First ABS) and First American Business Enterprise (First ABE).   While we do still have that focus to drive performance and results based on the needs of both markets we realized that it has caused some confusion with our customers and we want to make doing business with us easier!   Hence the new, simplified name “First American Business”.

Single Web Landing Page:  Effective August 1, we have a new single web site landing page:   www.firstamericanbusinss.com

Users of this site can access the First ABS and ABE specific information but only need to bookmark a single site to get all the news and updates regarding First American Business.

Single Collaboration System:  Effective August 8th, the First American Business team is migrating to our new collaboration platform on Office 365. As we have continued to grow in the project line of business, it was determined that more functionality and consistency was needed. Office 365 gives us the ability to use Outlook calendars, share calendars, have access to Skype for Business, back up our work on OneDrive Storage, and much more!

We are moving forward with our email migration to MS 365 Exchange.

Following the migration all of our employees’ companywide will have a single email address utilizing “@firstamericanbusiness.com”

Our new email addresses will look like: Lauren.Thompson@firstamericanbusiness.com.

Other key company email addresses will be:

New Ticketing System:  Starting in October, First American Business will officially be on our new Intelligent Service Management (Ticketing) System.    This new system will allow us to serve our customers better through a single portal for Problem Management, Incident management and reporting.

Supporting Features for our new system include:

  • Manage Invoices, Orders and Quotes
  • Support Tickets entry
  • SMS Messaging (Text Messages) (Single, Automatic, Multiple)
  • Suppliers tracking
  • Knowledgebase for customers as well as internal employees
  • Purchase Orders (all aspects of assigning a PO # and tracking o Transaction readouts for customers’ accounts as well as administrative transaction logs
  • Advanced reporting for company administrators to use
  • HMS (Human Resources Management System) for tracking employees and payroll
  • Customer online payment and account crediting. Invoices can be created from Quotes by 1 button push.
  • Quotes can be approved online by the customer via 1 button push.
  • Orders can be done by the built in Point of Sale (POS) system or done online orders. Customers can shop for products, services and parts. Orders have inventory management
  • Support tickets created in any status (Open, Closed, Awaiting Part, On Hold, Etc.)
  • The entire system is responsive meaning that it will display correctly on any device! (Tablet, Smartphones, Laptop, Desktop)

At First American Business we are excited about all these new changes and the enhanced value they will provide to our end customers.   Everything we do is built around customers and customer satisfaction and we believe these changes are an example of our commitment to provide quality support.

As always, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Thank you – First American Business

The Cloud: Everyone is saying you need to move to the cloud. But should you?

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Think of the Cloud like a Restaurant. You can buy the ingredients, prepare the food and eat at home. Or you can outsource all those tasks and go to a restaurant. So what is better…, running your own IT department (i.e. eating at home) or letting someone else do everything for you and move to the cloud (i.e. a restaurant).

Let’s evaluate the 10 reason why you should move to the cloud…. Or should you?

Every business is under pressure to perform, grow and maximize the return on investment to sustain and survive the ever-increasing competition. IT departments in today’s businesses are no different and have been looking for ways to improve the bottom line while not sacrificing quality. As a result, they are looking at Cloud computing to achieve their goals.

Cloud computing offers several advantages but it has disadvantages too. In this two-part post, let’s first look at the “top 10 advantages” offered by the Cloud:

So as we can see there are pros and cons to moving to the cloud. Cloud clearly offers some advantages such as Data Recovery and Sharing but on the downside it is almost always more expensive and less secure.

The Cloud: Everyone is saying you need to move to the cloud. But should you?

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Think of the Cloud like a Restaurant. You can buy the ingredients, prepare the food and eat at home. Or you can outsource all those tasks and go to a restaurant. So what is better…, running your own IT department (i.e. eating at home) or letting someone else do everything for you and move to the cloud (i.e. a restaurant).

Let’s evaluate the 10 reason why you should move to the cloud…. Or should you? Every business is under pressure to perform, grow and maximize the return on investment to sustain and survive the ever-increasing competition. IT departments in today’s businesses are no different and have been looking for ways to improve the bottom line while not sacrificing quality. As a result, they are looking at Cloud computing to achieve their goals.

Cloud computing offers several advantages but it has disadvantages too. In this two-part post, let’s first look at the “top 10 advantages” offered by the Cloud:

So as we can see there are pros and cons to moving to the cloud. Cloud clearly offers some advantages such as Data Recovery and Sharing but on the downside it is almost always more expensive and less secure.

Alexa for Business

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Amazon launches Alexa for Business platform – voice services to the office

At the most recent AWS re:Invent conference Amazon announced the launched Alexa for Business.   This is a fully managed service targeted at companies by allowing them to deploy Echo devices at scale throughout the workplace. The service will provided improved meeting experiences with a focus on communication and collaboration.

Alexa for Business has (and will have) a strong ecosystem with:  Cisco, Zoom and Polycom (with their in-room conferencing systems), RingCentral (for its cloud-based voice services), Microsoft (for Office 365 and on-premises Exchange servers), and Google.

For example, the RingCentral Meetings for Alexa for Business integration is an example of how voice control will play in the conference room. Users will be able to ask Alexa to launch scheduled meetings. The Amazon for Business management service will map Echo devices to RingCentral Rooms systems for the assignment of Alexa Skills.

The AWS system can respond when you say “Alexa, join my meeting.” The platform will also include Salesforce to answer questions about business performance, Concur to share business travel information, RingCentral for voicemail readings, SAP SuccessFactors for HR, and other third-party voice services for the enterprise.

For voice-based commands outside the meeting room, RingCentral is integrating Alexa Skills with its communications app so that users will be able to ask Alexa to do things like play back and respond to voicemails; send and check SMS messages; and place outbound calls.

Besides being able to configure conference room settings, a company’s technical department will be able to use the Alexa for Business service to do things like provision and manage shared Alexa devices, enable Alexa skills on an individual user and user group basis, and build custom skills through Amazon for Business APIs.

AWS will likely present more at Enterprise Connect 2018 in Orlando this March.    Stay tuned, things are starting to get interesting in the Voice space…

New Customer

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Nationwide Health care company signs 5 year multimillion $ agreement with First American Business Solutions.

February 2018.

Exciting News – A Large, new account in our Government LOB has signed with First ABS.

2018 has started off with a bang for First American Business Solutions.   We have signed a new 5 year agreement with a leading nationwide health care company!

First American Business Solutions, Inc. (First ABS) signed in Q1 of this year a multi-year product and services agreement with a nationwide health care company.   Our nationwide footprint matched extremely well with the customer’s multi-state business model and was a key driver in them selecting us.  Also our company moto of Reliable and Responsive IT Services was exactly what they were looking for in a vendor.   Our long history in high Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) proved to be a winning factor.

The agreement is for a broad range of IT product resell agreements as well as an array of services including options for First ABS services:

Services under the Master Agreement include:

  • Dispatch
  • Staff Augmentation
  • Installation
  • Training, Consulting and Health Checks
  • Maintenance

Our nationwide footprint and our attention to customer satisfaction were key attributes that allowed us to secure a position in supporting this dynamic and growing health care company.

Our new customer is a leader in managed care services supporting millions of members.

First American looks forward to supporting the business and vision objectives of improved health care that our new customer strives for every day.

First American is In the Cloud

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As a leading provider of Telecom services, First ABS and First ABE must be must be able to support 20 year old analog voice systems as well as global UC in the cloud. In January of this year (2018) First American took its own internal operation “to the cloud”. All of our own employees are now running on a state of the art E-MetroTel Telephone Solution. First American is a proud channel partner of E-MetroTel telephony solutions and now we are also a user of their service. E-MetroTel, headquartered in Plano Texas, is a cost effective telephony and contact center solution targeted at the small and mid-enterprise market.

Here is where E-MetroTel excels:
• Perfect for companies with up to 5,000 users.
• Perfect for companies that have legacy systems like Nortel who what to save money by replacing the core but reuse the handsets.
• Perfect for companies who want a traditional Appliance solution delivered and installed at their site; or
• Perfect for companies who want a hosted “Cloud” solution where they pay for what they use on a subscription basis!

The E-MetroTel UCX is a cost-effective SIP Based Unified Communications solution that helps customers extend the life of their existing IP, Digital or Analog and add new open standard SIP devices. Employees become more productive and collaborative by using new UC capabilities – while leveraging the existing telephony investments and reducing ongoing maintenance cost.
UCx supports Analog, Digital and VoIP phones — in any combination.

With UCx Cloud First American team members can plug in Digital and IP phones into their internet router and use web browser for our PCs/smartphones. These end points communicate with our own First American UCx instance in the Cloud for voice, video, fax, conferencing. We get access to all of the features and applications for one price. It’s very simple—for all of our many remote U.S. office locations we can provide our team with a standard set of all-inclusive features.

UCX delivers the latest Unified Communication features such as integrated mobility, Home working, Call Recording, Meet-Me Conferencing including support for SIP compliant telephones and cost effective SIP trunks.

The feature rich, E-MetroTel solutions includes:

Mobility

Never miss another call. Ensure all calls find you based on rules you create, using features like scheduler, simultaneous ringing and privileged lists. Don’t want customers to know you’re working from home? Make and receive calls on your mobile device, with the appearance of using your office phone.

Conference Bridge

Host your own on-demand conference calls for both internal and external attendees, with all the features like conference recording and add or remove participants. It includes: Password-Protected Conference Bridges, Third-party dial-in through DID, Participant Management & Conference Recording.

IVR

Interactive Voice Response offers several options to help ensure that your callers don’t get confused and trapped. Within each IVR, you can choose whether or not to allow your callers to dial an extension at any time. This is useful for creating different kinds of IVR experiences. Play a sound to the caller, then continue to the next action. This is for greetings, prompts, instructions, etc. Use the Sound Manager to record whatever sounds you want.

Call Recording

Record Calls on Demand or all calls. Complete set of call records that are easy to access, browse and export. Set up recording of every call made or received on an extension-by-extension basis. Also you can create a rule that dialing a particular sequence in the course of a call (such as *1) will result in the call being recorded.

Contact Center

Easy to configure and use yet highly effective contact center solution with advanced reporting. Minimize customer hold time by sending the caller to the agent that is properly trained to handle their query. Transfer callers who require specific handling in a certain area, such as technical support or sales, directly to agents. Keep the callers in queue if all agents are busy and provide choices to go to another group, supervisor or even have the system call them back.

Integrated Messaging

Simple flexible voice messages users retrieve from their hard client, Softphone, portal or even via email. Leave you a Voicemail message that can be sent to you as a .wav file to your favorite email client.

Call Detail Reporting

Complete set of call records that are easy to access, browse and export. A log of all calls made including: source number; destination number; call duration, date and time. Full graphic reporting included as standard.

UCX WebRTC Client

WebRTC stands for Web Real-Time Communications, and the technology is focused on embedding real-time communications, such as voice, directly within web browsers. The WebRTC client that’s built into every UCX system allows you to use a simple web-interface on a laptop, desktop, tablet or smart phone.

First American is in the Cloud

At First American we were looking for a cloud based phone system that could keep up with our rapid growth. We have employees throughout the United States and wanted a consistent and reliable interface for everyone. We also need and easy and quick way to bring on new employees and our new Cloud solution is a great fit for our operations.

President’s Piece

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2018 is off to a great start for First American Business, working with our current customer base and expanding quickly to meet the requirements of our new ones (see article below!).  Our government sector is really picking up and seeing double digit growth rates.  Segmenting our business 18 months ago into Enterprise (First ABE) and Government (First ABS) has really allowed us to focus our attention to each vertical which is starting to pay dividends now.

Our marketing efforts have really started to pay off as well in terms of name recognition and new business leads.   So far in 2018 we have attended, or will soon be attending, the following amazing events:

President’s Piece

Cisco Partnership

It’s official.   First American Business is now a CISCO partner. More details will be coming but wanted to let you know as we are excited about the potential this will bring. We did this because of demand from several of our key partners and several large opportunities in our pipeline. So in addition to our broad range of service offerings (dispatch, installation, maintenance, managed services, etc.) we are now authorized to sell products for Cisco, Oracle, Ribbon (Genband) and E-Metrol Tel.  We are excited about adding Cisco to the mix and expect that part of our business to expand rapidly.

Lakeland Ledger

As with any services business sometime a valued customer decides to move a different direction in terms of telecom support.   One of our long term customers – Lakeland Ledger – has changed their telecom platform and so our support of their Nortel product has come to an end.   We are lucky to have supported such a great customer and helped to make their transition to the new platform as seamless as possible.

The Ledger is a daily newspaper serving Lakeland, Florida and the Polk County area. The paper was founded on August 22, 1924 as the Lakeland Evening Ledger. In 1927, it bought its main competitor, the morning Lakeland Star-Telegram

We certainly wish the Ledger team continued success.

New Ticketing System & Office 365

We have kicked off a new project this quarter to select a new ticketing system for our First American business.   The current system works well but we are out growing it so hope to select and migrate to a new platform in 2018.

In addition, First American Business will be migrating to Office 365 in 2018. Please note that this change will have an email address impact to our employees. Our customers and suppliers will be notified in advance of the rollout.

Ribbon/Genband Training

And finally, as we continue to expand our knowledge into multiple product lines we are moving forward in April with engineer certification training offered by Ribbon – Federal Application Server Solution Engineering & Commissioning and Federal Application Server Solution Integration

Oracle Training

Session Boarder Controller, Enterprise Operations Monitor, Enterprise Communications Broker and Oracles Interactive Session Recorder.

Employee Retreat

In April we will host our first ever Employee Retreat. Our business model is structured virtually and although very effective it’s difficult to meet colleagues face to face. This Employee Retreat will allow us to meet in one location for a couple of days getting to know each other and discuss the state of the business. We are very excited and will share results in the next newsletter.

Sincerely,

Mark

Mark Morningstar
markm@firstabs.com
Owner, Managing Partner

What is PCI and why is it important to Telecom?

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Q1: What is PCI?

A: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that ALL companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) was launched in 2006 to manage the ongoing evolution of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards with a focus on improving payment account security throughout the transaction process. The PCI DSS is administered and managed by the PCI SSC (www.pcisecuritystandards.org), an independent body that was created by the major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB.). It is important to note that the payment brands and acquirers are responsible for enforcing compliance, not the PCI council.

Q2: To whom does the PCI DSS apply?

A: The PCI DSS applies to ANY organization, regardless of size or number of transactions, that accepts, transmits or stores any cardholder data.

Q3: Why is PCI important to Telecom?

A: For a company to be PCI compliant it needs to pass strict standards regarding its People, Processes and Technology.   For “People”, PCI standards look at such things as the background of the employee a company hires within their call center.   For “Processes”, PCI standards looks at how those people document and handle the credit card information they are given.  For “Technology” that is where telecom comes into play:   Many times credit card information is given out over the phone to a call center agent on the receiving end.   Even though the information is verbally spoken, a call center has the ability to record and store all conversations.   So where is that voice recording stored? Who has access to it? how many years is it stored?   All these questions need to be weighed carefully when evaluating PCI compliancy.

Other telecom related PCI compliance issues include things like patching the voice network frequently.  System Configurations and Network security are a factor – there needs to be safe firewalls to guard against hacks.   It is extremely important to update and monitor the anti-virus software on PCs and servers that are tied to the telecom equipment.

Any company, small or large, must be aware of PCI if they are handling credit card data in any way.   Hiring a telecom service provider that is aware of the issues and knowledgeable about the PCI compliancy rules is a critical first step to managing your telecom infrastructure. 

Jive Communications

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First ABE | February 11, 2018

LogMeIn buys Jive Communications

LogMeIn, Inc. (Nasdaq:LOGM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jive Communications, a leading provider of cloud-based phone systems and Unified Communications services and one of the fastest growing players in the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) space.  LogMeIn (“Log Me In”) the company that offers conferencing services like GoToMeeting and join.me as well other online services to businesses, announced that it would acquire Jive Communications for $342 million in cash.  The deal also includes up to $15 million based on reaching specific milestones.

This announcement underscores how the telecom market continues to see a lot of consolidation.  This is a solid offer for Jive Communications, a Utah-based startup that had raised only around $31 million since it was founded in 2006.

The deal will add a suite of unified communications services that will complement and expand on LogMeIn’s existing collaboration products. Jive has 20,000 customers globally, LogMeIn said. Its primary focus is on VoIP for enterprises, and specifically hosted VoIP.  In the enterprise market the big shift has been from legacy phone services to VoIP so players like Jive are making a lot of inroads as a result. Other competitors to Jive include services like UberConference, Zoom and WebEx.

“Jive’s success in UCaaS is a testament to its modern cloud-based platform, its deliberate focus on customer satisfaction, and its renowned culture of innovation. We believe the combination of Jive’s award-winning voice, video, contact center and mobile applications with our leading collaboration products, GoToMeeting and join.me, will give LogMeIn one of the best and most comprehensive UCC offerings in the market,” said Bill Wagner, President and CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “The result is a deal that will accelerate our overall growth, set a new standard in the UCC market, and provide us with a foundation upon which we’ll build the next generation of LogMeIn’s UCC portfolio.”

This deal will give Jive a lot more scale to grow its business. LogMeIn is significantly bigger in terms of market footprint with 25 million users, clocking seven million meetings, and over 900 million conferencing minutes each month.

The deal is expected to close in Q2 of this year.

LogMeIn has been looking for more ways to expand the types of services that it’s providing to its existing user base, as a way to expand its overall revenues. Last summer, the company acquired an Israeli startup called Nanorep, which makes chatbots and other AI-based tools, for about $50 million.