President’s Piece

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:

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