 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar, is it time to upgrade your phone system? My name is Kami Griffiths and I'm happy to have Matt Bauer here presenting from Better World Telecom. And we like to thank ReadyTalk for donating the use of their service. Here at TechSoup we are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology, resources, and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. Here's a quick grab of our homepage, and I want to point this out for those of you who might be new to TechSoup and don't quite realize all the different things that we have going on in our learning center, you'll find articles and our recorded webinars. These are all information related to technology for nonprofits and libraries. We do have donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, and Better World. And you can find those for a discount at our website here. You can do a search and also hit the Get Products tab right here. We have a blog and we have a special program for libraries. We also have a couple of newsletters that it would be great for you to sign up and hear about what we're doing on a regular basis. Without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Matt Bauer. Matt, if you would mind taking a second to tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay, thanks, Kami. Thanks everyone for being on the call in the webinar. I'm president and co-founder of Better World Telecom and have been in the telecom industry for almost 25 years now and through the ups and downs over that time. So we as a team at Better World have some more backgrounds and hope to bring some of our expertise into this webinar and also are available ongoing as well for questions or help that we can provide. Great. Thank you, Matt. I also want to recognize a few people on the back end here helping to answer questions. We have Becky Wiegand, Barb Shaughnessy from TechSoup. We also have Salem Kimball from Better World who will be answering questions. So again, at any time if you have a question or comment submit those via the chat. We'll have someone answer them immediately or we'll hold them for Q&A at the very end. Here's a run-through of our agenda for the next 55 minutes. We will be quickly talking about the history of telecom and we'll be talking about the lay of the land and some terminology to get used to these acronyms. Why organizations choose to change or not to change? We have a couple of case studies that Matt's worked with. So we'll be talking about different organizations and what solutions they've chosen. And then talking about the environmental benefits of changing your phone systems and talking about evaluating and total cost of ownership. And the last part, hopefully it's 13 minutes or more for Q&A and then some more resources, a long list of resources that you can follow to learn more. We have a quick poll to find out where you are at. So please take a minute to read this and submit your answer. What best describes your current phone system? If you have a traditional or older technology, are you transitioning into something new or have piecemeal? Are you an enterprise digital system which TechSoup just changed over to other or you don't know? So please skip to results. I haven't closed the poll yet so please submit. Don't be shy. We don't know what you're going to say. If you don't know, it's okay. Okay, I'm going to close the poll. There you go. So most everyone looks like they've got the older technology, the traditional phone system, a little bit of other options as well. So it's nice to know who we have in the audience. So Matt, let's get started. Can you give us a quick history of telecom? Sure, Cammie. What we're trying to do here is instead of just jumping into where things are, we felt it would be good to sort of look at where things came from and take the opportunity to throw a few tidbits out there that most folks don't know. I mean this phone and internet system is now pervasive especially with the advent of Steliore. And how did the whole thing come about? It helps us understand what options are available out and why the transition is occurring to newer technologies. So I won't spend a lot of time on this but just sort of a few tidbits that when we look at phone systems, phone service, I'm sort of going to use those interchangeably here throughout the webinar. And we're kind of talking about both because they are intrinsically connected. So starting with the basics of the history, telecom is one of the oldest industries in the modern age at least as far as dating back to the 1850s and 60s when we started with the telegraph and then started shifting into telephony in the 60s, 70s, and 80s in the 1800s. And in fact the ITU which is the International Telecom Union is one of the oldest, it's not the oldest branch of the sort of start of the UN way back when. And so it's been evolved first as sort of a monopoly type of business. In most countries it was government controlled. Here we had a private company but in cooperation with the government it's sort of a monopoly hold. And what that did was created a lot of reliability in the network and a lot of predictability but it also stifled innovation and things that come about through competition and other introduction of new technology. So in 1984 when AT&T moved from the old bell sign there that you see to the new logo, a lot of things happened fairly quickly. There was a lot of confusion. There were a lot of players all of a sudden. People didn't really know how to do what they needed to do. They were just learning the kind of rules of the road. So it was moving from the sort of controlled environment to a much more open environment where the Internet and cellular telephone, mobile telephony were introduced into the market. And so with that the devices around the edge were able to become a whole myriad of options whereas as we started shifting more towards the Internet and Internet telephony it's a more open architecture based on packets as opposed to circuits which are basically think about it, the old technology is one phone line for every conversation that's going on in the country. So the important thing here is to realize that the evolution of the technologies has happened very quickly since the mid-80s. And so now we're at sort of a tipping point where technologies are really starting to mature and the opportunities for organizations are much more free and open. And yeah, Cami, back to you. Can I just roll into the next slide? Well what I wanted to let folks know is in the reminder message that I sent out this morning at 9 a.m. I included a link to a copay report. It's like less than two minutes long. I'm sending a link out to everybody right now. I don't want you to watch it right now but if you haven't yet watched it, it's certainly worth the one minute and 31 seconds. So it just quickly talks about the mergers, the breaking apart and the re-merger again of AT&T is kind of funny. So with that I want to talk about some of the lay of the telecom landscape and the terminology used. Okay, so in setting up the discussion just to make sure we're all on the same page and I'm assuming we have people with different levels of understanding in terms of both hardware and services that are out there looking back towards traditional telephony and out towards newer options that are out there in the market. So I'll just try and level set and put things in buckets here, get some definitions and industry terms out and kind of the role they play. So we'll take a second, kind of step back here, get on the same page and then examine the lay of the land. So there's really three what I'll call buckets of service and where the equipment that is necessary to make all this work fall into. And the first is access. Simply put, this is how you connect to the network. This is how an organization connects to the network. In the old days and still as we've seen in the poll a lot of folks still use what I'll term, we'll term circuit switch technology. It might be converted at the core on the networks into VoIP or what have you, but at the end it's still probably 20, 30 year old technology, probably even more in terms of the feature functionality, how it works. And that's not a good or bad thing, it's just a fact. And then you have VoIP is put out as a term. People confuse it as a service, it's an option, it's all these different things. Well these two circuit switch and voice, those go over those options that you see above. So lower end speeds that don't have as much quality of service or quality of control like DSL and cable, they might have higher speeds, but they're configured differently. And then you have a little bit higher end services, T1s, Ethernet over Copper. So these are options to connect your organization in a location to the main network and then below is how those two. Then you have the controller which basically is the brain of the system and that is handling the calls. So in traditional way you typically organizations have what's called a private branch exchange or a PBX that sits on their premise that handles the call, it distributes it to a desk, it distributes it to a location. It also handles voicemail and other features and things like that. And typically in most organizations these are older devices that are kind of cycling out. You might have bought a new one, any new one will be probably digital or internet ready. But the newer services that are being offered that's taken out of the organization and it's hosted much like you'd access Salesforce.com instead of installing Siebel for your Salesforce automation and so on on your own computers you access Salesforce.com in the cloud. So a virtual or hosted PBX is a cloud based system so you don't have to have that device inside your own for the walls. And then at the bottom you see all the services that this brings you and you can access through these mechanisms. So services everybody knows, local long distance, 800 in unified communications, voice fax and email. So that said as sort of a foundational element as we did in the poll most organizations fall into these three groups, one of the three. So as most of you noted still in more of a traditional mode with what we call traditional or POTS, plain old telephone service, very fancy hacking in there. That's an industry term. More circuit switch, the likelihood is you have a PBX on site with phones connected to it and the pros of that, it's reliable, it works, it's like a refrigerator you plug it in and it works. The cons are it's inflexible, it's typically has hidden costs. You have to make changes, moves as the leads. It's not very feature rich typically in a lot of the new ways of work that are out there. So then in transition we have newer technologies coming on board. You might have a traditional phone system mixed with some use of Skype and or Google Voice or other types of tools like that. So the pros of that is introducing new features and typically it's cost effective but it's hard to control the quality of that, hard to manage as a con and there's some confusion, what do I use to call for this, that, and the other thing. And then the move to an enterprise digital system which I'm just calling it that, it could be business grade telecom but enterprise meaning that you've got a solution in place that really takes care of the whole organization and its needs. And the pros on this are really you're taking advantage of all the features, productivity and management of the system is much easier. There is a transition cost to that, a time or physical cost, quality of service typically with newer systems. They tend to need a little bit more setup up front to make sure that they have the appropriate bandwidth or the appropriate setup in place because you're really kind of crossing the IT and traditional telephony boundaries. So those are some ideas and concerns there. So it's when evaluating this it's important to look at the operating sort of line item which is you have a cost for communications that you have in your income statement or in your books but you're looking at other costs to the organization that could be impacted by these types of services. And the types of feature benefits that you get as you move from one to two to three are taking advantage of unified communications. Now you have multiple devices and fax and voicemail and email. You can start integrating those for a much basically changing how the organization works which is a real interesting opportunity. Disaster recovery, there's tons of snow coming down all across the country. Well if you have the right systems in place and the right voice services and equipment then people can work more easily remotely when they can't get in the office or if they have illness etc. So the productivity and flexibility goes up. You have an opportunity to really design the system around how you want to work and not have to conform to what's out there in place already. Well let's talk about what the reasons are for organizations to change and why are they changing and then why are some people not changing their phone systems? Well it is as I noted moving from there was some comfort with AT&T being the only provider and I don't know how many people on this call can actually remember that. I still remember it fairly well. When competition occurred and everything started changing and now where we have this literally myriad of options, there's a difficulty in being aware of all those options and being intimidated by that. Who do you call? Who do you go to to consider changing and why and exploring that? I'd like to say if the other reaction is if it ain't broke don't fix it. Which really goes to the does it work? Yeah it works. Is it really working for the organization? Is it really incurring other kinds of costs or opportunity costs that it's not helping to take advantage of? And then contracts typically on equipment or on service that sort of hands the organizations in to not changing. So those are what we see and we are out working with organizations all over the country and many, many nonprofits on this. So we sort of see those as the top options. And then there's also everybody's really busy these days. Everybody's asked to do more with less. So it's hard to, there's a perception of it taking, it's going to take a lot of time and effort and there could be problems. So I'll do it next year. I'll do it next year. Put it off and put it off. Whereas I think many times those types of dynamics can be mitigated. As far as things that are happening that cause change and why organizations want to or will make changes, definitely we're seeing a lot of older obsolete equipment that's starting to cycle out that maybe it's not supported anymore by its manufacturer. So if you have a PBX in the phone closet or if you have old phone systems or if you have whatever it may be, routers, everything, every office is different. So I'm hesitating to sort of paint one picture. But all of that equipment, especially the PBX equipment, the brains of the phone system inside the organization, the phones themselves are cycling out. The stuff was built to last and it did a very simple good job of what it was doing and lasted a long time. But it is, we're starting to see the tidal wave of that equipment cycling out and not being supported anymore. A lot of times manufacturers just say we're not going to support it anymore. So organizations make a move. And then when they're physically moving and that's a great time to change because everything is in upheaval. And let's consider putting new systems into place, putting new equipment, putting new services that are going to help the organization really move ahead and make it more flexible. A lot of organizations we talk to are looking for and hear about and see these enhanced features that are available that I'm talking about through unified communications. So they'll want to change their equipment and services to start taking advantage of that. And work is starting to shift. There's some policy changes that are happening. Work is starting to become the definition of everybody driving to four walls and sitting in an office all day. There's a lot more mobility. There's a lot of devices out there and sort of keeping control of all that. And then also some things like the federal telework legislation which was just passed which is going to impact the government directly or indirectly impacts a huge amount of the economy 30 to 40% potentially. And so now with the government saying all right we're putting in policies to create more flexible work and to create more flexible work environments, well that's going to have a big swing, a big shift in how people are working especially in places like Washington, DC and where there's large concentrations of workers. So these are all kind of bundled together to make an interesting moment in time for looking at communications for the organization. Now can you give us some examples of organizations you've worked with and the solutions that you guys came up with? Sure. I've picked out four here and I will try and keep them as succinct as possible but they're really great stories and examples of the different uses of shifting or utilizing what we'll call different newer technologies. I want to say newer, it's not like this stuff came out this year but it's in the last 10, 15 years of real shift has been occurring towards different types of methods of communicating and starting to integrate all the devices. So the first one was a project that we really loved and that's around the Oregon 211 Info. Most states have a 211 Info and they handle community questions, non-emergency questions around healthcare and other issues that people are having. And in Oregon when the 211 SCARE was coming about in late 2009 they decided to handle through a hotline for the whole state and 211 would do that. So we came in, we only had a few weeks of time and said, well we can't back load a bunch of equipment in here. So let's set it all up and pay for all of that. They had a limited budget. And they already had a call center so we said, hey, let's clip on a virtual call center which means we put in Polycom phones that are voice over internet phones that connect to the cloud. So again remember and think back to my Salesforce example. So while the call handling, call switching they don't have to put any other fancy equipment on site and they staffed up 20 people and handled 40,000 phone calls in about three months on H1N1 and related to that. And so we were able to set it up quickly and also it had a shelf life of about six, seven months so we needed to bring it down at the end too. And so it was easy, the things about it it was easy to manage. They literally had to change things every day, how calls came in, the call tree, all this stuff. And all they had on site were their computers and the phones and everything else was managed via the web. So they were one of only two on ones to get this up and running in time for that fall season which was really tough. Greenpeace, everybody knows Greenpeace and we have probably about 25 Greenpeace locations in the US and a couple of them are larger and then most of them are fairly small operations. So they have a real varied need. So in the larger places, larger locations, they have more equipment, premise-based type solutions. As we go back to the PBX they have one in each of their main locations and they are able to take advantage of the efficiencies of that because they have a lot of people in those two but then all their field offices and smaller offices with 20 or less people they just installed the hosted solution and phones and they are able to manage it much easier. So that gives them sort of and then connect those into their main locations too. So they have a varied need based on each location so they are able to kind of look at that and say, well how can we make this? We have some older technology. Let's get more use out of that before we switch out in our main location. And then how do we equip the field offices easily and simply as possible without having to have a lot of resources to maintain that and go into a virtual PBX solution with a Polycom phone? They were able to do that at a DSL line in most locations. So that was a simple and then they had one entity to call. So that has worked out real well for them and having a mix of solutions. One of our favorite projects we've ever worked on, the Obama-Biden campaign called us about a month before the election a few years ago and said, hey, we've got all traditional telephony set up in our seven battleground states and we're not going to be able to handle the call volume and we only have a month. We can't ramp up, drop ship all this equipment and increase our call capacity and install these lines. So what can you do for us? And it started with one state and then it ended up being all seven of the battleground states. So we just set up a virtual PBX in the cloud which has a lot more capacity, able to handle a lot more calls. And then we would sort of buffer their infrastructure where they had just plain old telephone service, regular phone lines, regular phones, and maybe a PBX or something at the location but clearly nothing that could handle dynamic calling from voters and from volunteers. And so we were able to set that up and route those calls down to those locations when they were free and ready and able to handle the call. So in about two to three weeks and my colleague JP is on the phone listening to the webinar here, he worked day and night as did most of our team to get this all set up so that in time for election day there were no reports to drop calls, no reports. So it really tested this technology to the max to say, how quickly can we set it up and what can it do? So something a little bit more down close to home, my last example is the hub here in South of Market or Hubsoma. Some of you might be familiar with Hubs. They're co-working, very dynamic workspaces where literally hundreds of people come through this space every day and it has sort of a shared or co-working area. And it didn't give a moment, it could have 80 to 100 people sitting at desks and then you have offices around the edge. You have conference rooms, then you have these kiosks where people can go make private phone calls and have conference calls. So we looked at that and we said, well gee, if you do it the old way we have to set up a bunch of equipment on site and you'll be limited in your ability to change it and do different things. So we set up literally one fairly large access pipe which I mentioned earlier, one of the options, ethernet over copper. And then we drive all their voice and data. So everybody in there is using a lot of web and a lot of phone service but we're able to do that all over one internet pipe that comes in and handle all the different needs of the people. So you have people on conference calls, you have offices that have their own iteration of a call tree where you'll call in and say hello, this is ABC org, can I help you? So we're able to set up individual organizations, have a pool for the masses I guess, and then the hub themselves, they have their own ability to answer the phone. So this is the kind of dynamic and flexibility that you can get out of a service like this. And that's all of the one iteration of a virtual PBX that we set up for them. And over a concentrated set of equipment and pipes you literally just have polycom phones again and router switches and so on at the customer prem. So these four, they're just four snapshots in time really, but they really show that integrating, utilizing these newer technologies which are based on packet switching and not circuit switching. You don't need a, packets can be sent over a distributed environment and that's voice over internet protocol which is really the underlying transmission methodology and it frees you up to do all these different things at the customer or end user site. So I think that's really all I have on that, Kimmy. Sure, so there was one question and I know we can address it a little bit later when we talk about specifically the Better World donation through TechSoup but if you wouldn't mind spending a minute talking about smaller orgs that have less than 10 people. I notice a lot of these are larger office spaces but is there a group that you're working with that's on the smaller end that you could share with us? Yeah, absolutely. In retrospect I probably should have painted one in here that just is a smaller 10, 20 person because we have a lot of those that we work with and that's where the typical organization actually falls when you look at the numbers of them out there. I think even for the smaller organization that has that number of people down to even five people, we have customers with one and we have customers with 5,000 employees who can all take advantage of a technology like this. So the smaller organizations typically don't have technical resource on hand. Somebody does it as a part-time job because they know more than everybody else does or the office manager and what have you. So when you have a traditional system it can be problematic and potentially time-consuming to manage that. And with a smaller organization going to an integrated system like I was just mentioning with the hub but on a smaller basis so that you can have 8 to 10 people on one system that's managed via the web. You have a consolidated infrastructure and you have really one entity to call and help support you in setting that up and then those people can be freed to work in the office, at home, on the road because that system then can connect to them so people calling in can get to anybody anywhere if you wish as an organization. So it gives that 10 person organization the feature set of a $100,000 PBX that a Fortune 500 company would buy to handle their corporate headquarters. Well all of those features, all of that functionality is baked into the virtual PBX solution. So the advantages to a small organization are huge. Great, thank you for that. Now let's talk about if we decide to make a change. How do we assess and evaluate our needs? Okay, well there's a – I'll sort of front end that with three main categories that we see as sort of benefits, productivity, cost. And then looking at the environment as well because that's part of what we're talking about here. And then we'll kind of summarize it at outlining a little bit of a process. So there are soft costs to an organization. There are hard costs. There's the bill you pay to your hardware vendor or to your service provider each month and that's the easy sort of there's that line item. But then there are a lot of other benefits that you can measure that include productivity when we've seen that where we put your phone system and your phone service to work for the organization and look at it creatively that really can enhance productivity like unified communications where just even simple things like getting your voicemail in your email, getting faxes sent to – that get created to a PDF and then email to you. Features like find me, follow me wherever I am in the country whether I'm on my cell phone or my home office or in the office, one of our offices around the country. The caller whoever is calling in can get to me and I can accept that call or not. Online change management which is a real huge difference from the newer systems versus the traditional technology whereas you log into an Internet you don't need a degree from MIP to manage this thing. It's meant to – and all these systems have this in common from a unified communications or virtual PBX type standpoint that online change management is really simple. Changing individual visual features, changing how your call tree works, changing how routing of calls, setting up different call tree options and items all that becomes really simple and easy. Changing your recording and your call tree so enabling remote work that's definitely a change on the horizon we'll talk a little bit more about and putting the phone system and services to work for you there. And then integrating all these devices so typical person now has a cell phone, has their office phone, they might have a home office too, they have other devices that are connecting and you can really put an umbrella over all of those and say well okay I'm going to only have one voicemail box now and I can get those voicemails emailed to me so I don't even need to go in and check my voicemail anymore. I just load it up on my computer and listen to it. Cost benefit, upfront, a cloud-based system usually and most often requires quite a bit less on-site equipment purchase so that upfront purchase cost is typically lower with the more productive workforce and unified system you get lower operational cost and what price do you put on when the office can't come to work because of weather, illness related work impacts and so on. That is another mitigation that you get if you have a system that can enable more remote work, change management and then downstream looking at the whole organization's operational and capital cost can really increase the value of the system from the environmental standpoint and I'm not here to advertise to everybody, go home and start working at home or telecommuting is everything but the one main environmental benefit that we can get from having systems that work for our organizations as opposed to just whatever happens to be in the phone closet is around commuting, air travel, building space and so on and this is a huge opportunity that's worth highlighting and when you see the numbers and we look at each of our organizations and say hey, what if even a percentage of our time we weren't coming into the office as much or what have you and we had a phone system and a phone service that really supported that, here are the numbers that happen and this takes it across the whole country so it's very macro but we've done analysis on each individual organization and when you reduce these things that are better here on the slide oil, cars off the road, healthcare costs, productivity and so on so this is just half the people who can, working away from the office half the time and not driving around and all that, we have this huge impact on the economy so that's an environmental benefit to sort of hang on to and look at your organization and how you can contribute to that because work is slowly but surely starting to take a turn toward that way the other great opportunity is phone equipment recycling and we have resources for that so as you do cycle into new technology what to do with those devices and where to go and we have better resources so then pulling it all together, really assessing and evaluating change and we thought a lot about this presentation and how to explain to people what to do out there and I think that part of the problem is and I was reflecting with my team earlier about this is that it's not like there's a source where you can go and pull a book off the shelf and say here's what you do, here's a number to call how do you assess, how do you evaluate, so it's still more of an art form than a science in terms of okay I'm in point A and I want to move to point B what is the right technology, who do I trust, who do I go to, what kind of devices do I get, what kind of service do I get to back that up and one great thing from this, in case I forget to say it is that TechSoup has done an amazing job of pulling together a lot of information on this and I don't know of another sort of independent source that I've seen or my team has seen that pulls that together as well there's a lot of resources that again will highlight at the end that help with this but the first thing to do is look at the organization so instead of looking at the phone system or the equipment or the services starting point look at the organization and step back and breathe and say how are we working, how is work done, how many locations do we have, how many people do we want to work the way we are, do we want to, over time is that going to change, are we growing, are we shrinking, are we, what's going on and kind of look out over that time horizon and then make decisions after that is in the context or it's in the context of that picture because then you can evaluate what you have so inventory evaluate what's there, physically what's there and then what are the communications needs and requirements based on number one so number one drives what number two, the output of number two and then you look at the total cost, what are the costs of ownership over a period of years buying a lot of equipment, buying a lot of infrastructure, I have to manage that we have to manage moves as changes to leads if you have all that equipment on your site or if you have the brain of the system on site well then you have to have somebody to maintain that and when you have changes so moving to a newer cloud based technology you offload some of that responsibility and again this is not a good or bad thing it's just different styles but moving into the cloud creates a more flexible mobile type of work environment and opens that up at a price point that is less than if you had a lot less if you had to go out and buy all that you know buy the equipment or the brains to install on your on your own premise and frankly you know if you are a 10,000 person organization and I'm assuming that's not who I'm speaking to here the dynamics are different and you do have to you know sort of look at things differently but for most organizations 10, 20, 30, 50 you know 80% of the organizations in the US are under 100 people well if we look at that and say alright well what direction do I go? Do I go towards free, open, not having to bear down on my location I think that that is the you know definitely from where we stand the way of the future and something that we support helping people to think through that so we end with a million dollar question how can your communication system help to lower your overall operational costs, healthy environment and productivity, employee satisfaction so I think you know we can really put everything to work and sum it up in this one statement and if the choice is being made helps on those fronts then it's probably the right choice. So I'll hand it back to you Cammy I think we're going to take some Q&A here. Excellent. Well thank you for that. I think we have great information it's leaving people with lots of questions so I'm going to just get started grouping a few together one question that several people had has to do with what if the Internet goes down? If all of this communication is happening via the Internet and we don't have access to the Internet what then? Right. Well that's a great question and one of the first that's asked by a lot of the folks that we engage with and the great thing about the cloud-based systems you know when your Internet goes down Salesforce doesn't you know again I'll kind of go back to Salesforce because I think most people kind of understand that and that's an example of when you're using a service on the web that's web-based whether it's an application, you know Gmail if your Internet circuit goes down Gmail doesn't go down. So you're able to access it via another computer or on your iPhone or on a phone or on your BlackBerry you're able to get to it that way right? So the same thing with this it actually is if your circuit goes down to your location the phone is still ringing the phone is still answering. Hello, welcome to The Nature Conservancy. How may I help you? Press 1, press 2, press C. All that's happening and then if the phones aren't ringing through because your location you then spread that out and most of all of our customers what they'll do is then have you know the phones can ring to their cell phone or to other phones in other locations. So whether it's in a disaster mode or the circuit just goes down for a period of time you kind of do the end around and it can go to other devices and it spreads the opportunity for people to get a hold of you. In worst case they leave a voicemail and it comes to you and you're able to return that call. So same thing if you have a premise-based solution and a PBX goes down or you're having difficulty with your lines. The problem with that is that you're centering all the pressure on the location itself. So the onus is on the people who are in that location to make sure that's functioning and functioning well where the cloud-based system is serving tens of thousands of employees and people around the country. There's a lot more people making sure that's working and it's in redundant, hardened facilities not in a cabinet in the back of the office. Another question somewhat similar but is talking about the infrastructure within your office to facilitate having a virtual PBX or in some way having your phone system be in the cloud. So first what kind of infrastructure needs to be at your location and then what kind of internet connection do you need to have in order to make this possible? Okay, well the first question typically is you need a wired infrastructure. Voice doesn't, in the office environment, doesn't travel over Wi-Fi very well. It's a little too problematic and interference is an issue. So depending on the size of the organization, if it's a small, small organization, five people, six, seven people, you can maybe do it over one common wired infrastructure but we recommend the ideal solution is to have a wired infrastructure for the voice and one for the data, and then going out through an internet connection that's appropriate for the number of people and the dynamic of the organization. So you have 10 people and you don't do a lot of stuff on the web, just typical email, web surfing and so on. A T1 probably is more than enough or even up to 15 people but if it's a web development organization like Ground Wire in Seattle, they're going to have huge needs in the work they're doing for the nonprofits so they're going to need multiple T1s, one for data, one for voice, and so on. So it varies by those different factors but typically you need sort of a minimum of some sort of wired infrastructure in the office which is not, which is very typical these days, most offices have those installed. And then you need a router and depending on how many people, potentially a switch and then phones and the piece that is missing that's not there anymore is that the brain, the PBX or the computer that handles all the calls that's on site, that's been removed and put up into a hardened data facility. Another question slightly related has to do with the quality. Phillip wants to move to VoIP but colleagues are worried about the previous experiences of dropped calls and echoes. So can you tell us more about the quality control? Right. Well, if the sort of certain process is followed in implementing this then an enterprise-grade solution is put in place which means it has a company behind it that has quality of service and commitments and guarantees and also you have enough bandwidth and that the infrastructure on site has been set up correctly and that all sounds like really a lot more than what it is but you just have to have the right equipment, the right bandwidth and the right provider behind it and the quality is, you know, starts to get up there to the plain old telephone service which is 5-9's what they call 99.999% reliability. Well, we're not going to argue that VoIP-based systems or IP-based systems have that level of reliability. That means it basically never goes down unless somebody physically cuts the wire. It's lower than that but we have customers that have implemented these types of solutions and once it's set up properly they've had very, very close to POTS experience in the quality. So, you know, if you're using Google Voice or Skype or a service that doesn't have the quality of service behind it and it's not integrated into sort of an enterprise solution then making that one step up to a virtual PBX that has quality of service behind it and while there's a cost associated with it it does free the organization up in many other ways. So quality and I think there's also quality issues from the past. Every year that goes by this gets better. The providers themselves just as a side note, you know, every call that's made now is it gets converted into voice over IP by the carriers, by the major providers, AT&T, Verizon Quest, Global Crossing, XO. These are the companies that run the networks that all of our calls and a lot of the data that we're talking and producing right now and this call rides over. And as soon as it gets out of your neighborhood, as soon as that packet, that call, gets out of your neighborhood, it's converted into voice over IP and delivered to the far end that way from a voice standpoint. So most of the network transmission is done that way. Why? Because it's more efficient and less costly for them. So the last component of this is the edges because a lot of people on the edges are still using traditional systems. What we've seen is the trade-off in a slightly less than five-nines type environment is worth it because, you know, one dropped call a month versus all the flexibility and features you get, you know, kind of comparing that to cell phones. You know, would you give up your cell phone because it drops a call once in a while? Well, cell phones are much less reliable than this. But, you know, there's trade-offs down the road. So one question back when we were talking about what your office needs and you were talking about T1, Cheryl's question is, isn't that expensive? How about cable? That works. That was one of the options that I listed was DSL, cable, T1, and there are other access options. T1s are more expensive, but they are very reliable and might not – they might not say they have the same bandwidth as cable or DSL. DSL is an amazing invention. It actually rides over the traditional telephony network and allowed a lot of people to get online and expand Internet and broadband very quickly across the country. In the world, there's now 500 million subscribers to broadband in the world, which is astounding in the short amount of time that the Internet and broadband has been out there. But, you know, a T1 might be a few hundred dollars more, but the quality and throughput you can get through it. You know, sometimes are worth the extra amount. I'm going to interrupt real quick, only because we've got two more questions that I'd like to have answered, and I'd like to let folks know about some potential ways to save money on their telecom costs depending on the state that you live in. I know that California has something called the California Teleconnect Fund. We get taxed here in California on our phone bills, and that money gets put towards getting discounts to nonprofits and schools and libraries. So I'll be sending out a link to that to everyone from California who registered and other information that I can find related to getting discounts. So the two things I'd like you to cover in the next three minutes have to do with the general costs, what type of costs are we looking at for these kinds of systems, and then what equipment is available. One specific question had to do with having a cordless phone. What are the options for equipment? So cost and equipment. Actually, I was reading one. The first part of your question, there was a really good question that came up, but the first wireless options and then the cost related to which part? So someone had a question about what are the costs of getting into a cloud system, and then another question related to equipment. So if they could get like a cordless phone, what kind of equipment is available? Cost-wise, it's usually a bundled type service where you get a local, I guess, since all you're calling except for international, and all the features and functionality are included. So we'll talk about our donation program with TechSoup, but that's $31.95 per seat or per person. You get all your voicemail, all your features and functionality through that. So it's typically in that range of price, and then you need a connection to the office as well. Like we're talking about DSL cable, T1 and higher, and those costs are, we'll just say $100 up to $300-400 per connection, somewhere in that range. And per month? That is per month, yes. And then for wireless options and so on, there are some wireless IP phones, and they do work well. You can also get a wireless headset, which is probably an easier, cheaper way to do that. Just do a USB. In some respects, you can use your computer. You can use the phone and connect to all these devices, and that's a great thing. But with the phones, you can use a wireless headset, or a USB headset to take calls wirelessly, or Bluetooth. Okay, so I want to, if we have time, we can answer another question, but I want to make sure that we have some time to talk about all of these resources that you're providing. So you could tell us about, go through some of these resources. Okay, and just quickly, you can go on the web and find all this stuff very easily, but I thought some compelling items here just to kind of think about thinking about how to put phone systems and phone service to work for the organization, what are some of the trends. So the Cisco and Citrix, which are also partners of TechSoup, have put out some great reports and data around the nature of work and how are things shifting, the cost benefits, work shifting benefits is a great report. So those are interesting to consider in the context of the changing nature of work. Idealware did a great report that's on the TechSoup system that sort of steps you through a lot of these, a lot of the things I was talking about in my slides and how to make decisions around phone systems and service. And then the general telecom and information industry. One of the hottest books out right now is called The Master Switch, which really touches on all information industries and provides a great historical perspective and the Internet where it is right now and where it's going and why things like net neutrality are important. Some other additional resources on recycling are here, recycling the phones, telegreening, again back to this, how do you put your phone systems to work for the organization to make lower the environmental footprint, lower the cost structure. Here's some links to those items. And this will all be up on the site. And then I alluded to our donation program that we have with TechSoup where you can get the one nice price I had mentioned, $31.95 a month, and for the voice service, and the phone is a Cisco phone that's donated to the organization. So it really lowers the cost of making the switch. And we've had a great response from the TechSoup community on this. I was going to talk to this next slide. Yeah, but there's another donation program called GIP Global IP Solutions. And this is the VoIP handset, the actual hardware that connects to your computer that can then allow you to talk. So it's on a limited request, but we do have limited quantities. And it connects directly to your computer, allows you to talk via Skype and other voice over IP, and is available to 501C3s and public libraries only in the U.S. And there's no budget restrictions. So if you're familiar with TechSoup and our donation program, not all organizations are eligible for all of our donations. So that's something to keep in mind when placing a request. So we have a couple minutes left. If there's anything else, Matt, that you wanted to add or expand on? Sure, sure. I saw from Jeff a question that came about that I think is really important around the access options, cable, DSL, T1, et cetera. And cable, the stated speeds on the service, cable, a lot of times you'll see a 10 meg or 20 meg. And I think that that is partially accurate. They don't guarantee that. So you can have some pretty significant fluctuations. Whereas the T1 is a committed speed. Again, it's more kind of like I alluded to the refrigerator model. You know, it's more of a, you get that it's high quality, it's clean capacity, it's a real workhorse. Cable, DSL can max up to these higher speeds and usually do that performance. We have a, you know, we deploy a lot of those around the country. So it's not a better or worse thing. It's that you don't get that rate that is stated does not have a service level agreement attached to it. It says it's always going to be 10 megs, 20 megs. So that's why they're able to offer that at a lower price. Part of the reason is just not the same sort of infrastructure. So it's a great option, especially for smaller organizations on a budget. It works in many cases, but can be problematic from time to time. It's been our experience. Great. Thank you Matt. And sorry for those of you whose questions didn't get answered. You can post those to our community forums. And I believe Matt, would you be able to answer some of those questions on the community forum? Absolutely, yes. Please bring your questions and we definitely offer it to help anybody that was on this call or webinar think through this and at least give our opinions on what you could do to help change what you've got and no strings attached. And I'll include Matt's contact information in the follow-up email. Here's a listing of two upcoming webinars we have. Designing and developing or delivering technology workshops is next Wednesday. And then the following week is registering your organization. So if you haven't yet registered with TechSoup, this is the good webinar to get you started. We'd like to thank ReadyTalk for this webinar that was made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So thanks again everyone for attending. Happy to have you here. And watch for a message from me this afternoon. Please take a minute to fill out our post-event survey. And thanks to Matt for such a great presentation and for folks helping out on the back end with the chat. Have a great day everyone. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.