In this edition, we present cutting-edge solutions tailored to boost the productivity of your teams and enhance customer interactions. These innovations hold the promise of raising organizational efficiencies and team performance to new heights while delivering asset protection and cost savings.

Contact me today to discuss how TCI’s products and services can help your organization get more out of its technology investments – now and in the future.

Tom Cornbrooks, President (703) 321-3030 cornbrookst@tcicomm.com

As the nation’s cyber defense agency, CISA helps organizations prepare for, respond to, and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks.

CISA’s Shields Up campaign is a heads-up to every organization—large and small— to adopt a heightened posture when it comes to cybersecurity and protect your most critical assets against disruptive cyber incidents. Important recommended actions to protect your organization include:

By implementing this guidance, you can make near-term progress toward improving cybersecurity and resilience.

We also recommend a visit to www.StopRansomware.gov - a centralized CISA webpage providing ransomware resources and alerts.

If you're not confident about how secure or compliant your Voice communications are, TCI can help. Call us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

TCI’s cutting-edge Disaster Recovery solutions are tailored to help protect your entire IT environment - from data and applications to office computers, mobile devices, networks, and phone systems.

Here are just some of the ways TCI’s comprehensive approach helps you safeguard what counts:

Create a plan. Identify what should stay in-house and what should go to the cloud. Focus on what you'd need to operate if a major interruption or disaster occurred. Determine the connectivity your employees need to do their jobs remotely. Also, work toward consistent and seamless end-to-end communications. TCI can help you build a hybrid or full cloud solution that meets your business needs.

Schedule your Business Continuity planning session today. Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

There are plenty of companies that manage lots of customer interactions that could benefit from today’s contact center solutions, yet they're not looped in on what's available today. If you're one of them, your business could be missing out.

A call or contact center is any facility that receives or transmits a large volume of phone calls. Whether it’s inbound, outbound, or a virtual call center, the traditional definition of the contact center has expanded as UC technology continues to evolve.

Contact center operations can range from a few customer service representatives in a small business to enterprise-level corporations with hundreds of agents spread across multiple regional offices. 

The modern contact center has evolved. Today, a contact center can be a small team managing internal help-desk requests, a car dealership connecting prospects to salespeople, or an elementary school office handling an influx of calls from parents.

If your organization handles frequent calls, then you're a good fit for this affordable technology...

There’s a wide spectrum of call center solutions available to help your business operations. Today’s variety of call center solutions cover all the bases.

TCI’s contact center experts can step you through your options, and when you’re ready – design, deploy, and support your solution. Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

One of the most startling statistics to emerge from the pandemic had nothing to do with communicable illnesses but rather with communications between businesses.

In 2020, from March to June, the use of Microsoft Teams grew by 894%. And, between 2021 and 2022, the number of Teams users rose from 145 million to 270 million. Microsoft Teams has become the de facto communications platform for over one million organizations in just a few years.

This is, of course, good news for Microsoft. And it’s also good news for businesses already paying for Microsoft Office who essentially got a business-class collaboration platform for free, at least initially. But for companies who continued to rely on traditional telephony and vertical industries where video collaboration wasn’t the norm, Teams had some feeling left out.

Fast forward to today, and these customers face the prospect of evaluating Teams phones, taking on E3-E5 licensing and SIP-trunking costs, and they are finding that Microsoft Teams is not free anymore.

It’s a significant incremental uplift in expense for existing capability. Simply put, there isn’t an excellent way to tie legacy voice systems and Teams together without spending more money on additional phone licenses or introducing extra layers of complexity. Until now…

For clients who have previously decided to adopt Microsoft Teams, Mitel recently announced a series of tools and applications that seamlessly integrate Mitel’s enterprise-class telephony features with the MS Teams platform for a single, robust communications and collaboration solution.

For example, suppose Teams users choose to activate the phone licenses available on Teams. In that case, they can now enjoy direct routing that connects with Mitel endpoints through certified session border controllers (SBCs), providing a unified telephony framework (albeit with fewer features) that can be controlled from the Teams environment.

What if Teams users don’t want to purchase Microsoft phone licenses? In that case, they can still integrate their telephony system with Teams through Mitel’s Telephony-only client available in MiCollab and enjoy all the robust telephony features that Mitel offers.

This is part of Mitel’s MiCollab offering and can be turned on with a simple toggle switch. In addition, Mitel Assistant is available for free on the Microsoft app store and delivers Mitel softphone capabilities to Teams users’ desktops as a floating app. Mitel Assistant allows you to make and transfer calls, search directories, set speed dials, import contacts, activate three-way conferencing, and more – all from your Teams screen.

Mitel also offers presence integration between Teams and Mitel telephony users, allowing Teams users to see whether a colleague is on a PBX-based phone call – even if that colleague doesn’t have a Teams client. A user’s phone status is visible from their Outlook emails and can help determine direct routing of calls to the next available user.

With these Mitel tools co-existing with Microsoft Teams, a uniquely elegant hybrid solution evolves, taking advantage of premises or private cloud solutions from Mitel’s MiCollab with a cloud-based collaboration solution in Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is great for many things, from video meetings to sharing documents. But many businesses still need high-quality telephony applications to run their business.

Schools and universities, for example, rely on mass notification via mobile devices to notify students, staff, and parents of emergencies. Financial services companies must maintain inbound contact centers supporting call recording and other advanced telephony features. Retail businesses need to connect workers on the sales floor to customer service applications via telephone to help customers in real-time.

Let’s look at two more industries to see how Mitel plus Microsoft Teams can help businesses run better.

Phone calls, SMS notifications, and contact centers still play a vital role in many organizations, but most businesses don’t want to manage two separate communications and collaboration platforms.

With Mitel solutions, they don’t have to because the telephony functionality can be integrated with their overall communications experience, whether they’re collaborating in Teams and need to make a phone call from their laptop or desk phone or browsing the web and want the simplicity of click-to-dial automatically from any phone number.

Contact your local TCI experts to learn more about integrating your Mitel solutions with Teams: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.

The bottom line is always the focal point in any company. Where to spend money is a constant tug of war but it’s not the only battle being fought. How to spend the money can be just as contentious. CFOs have to consider multiple factors to determine expenditures, and every year might bring with it a host of changes and market conditions that impact those decisions.

Traditionally for technology investments, CFOs most often preferred capital expenditures over operating expenses because they could take advantage of amortization and depreciation of those investments over an extended period.

There’s a growing argument, however, that operating expenditures (OpEx) have distinct advantages over capital expenditures (CapEx) that have made it a favored investment approach by finance departments and CFOs.

There are plenty of hard costs that require large, upfront investments and should be a part of the approved budget (CapEx). They are costs that can be planned for in advance, but predicting future needs is risky. In light of the rapid advancement of technology, IT infrastructure needs are becoming less and less predictable.

What once required dedicated real estate, skilled employees, and loads of time can be fulfilled remotely via the cloud or by dedicated companies that charge a subscription fee for a service. Organizations have more options because they can afford the latest and greatest technology without having to find the funds to pay for it upfront. This frees up cash for investments and other projects that drive revenue and growth.

Operating expenses, on the other hand, are generally used for the day-to-day costs of running a business and can be more stable. While some CFOs are still reluctant to move much of their IT spending to the cloud and other providers, technology developments are occurring faster than many companies can digest. This is why many CFOs are shifting from reliance on capital expenditures to operational spending.

When companies decide to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud, there is no longer the need to dedicate the same resources, time, and space for the hardware and software. Many processes are automated and standardized, improving efficiencies. Services, features, and options can be purchased as needed and used on demand, so companies aren’t paying for underutilized components.

If capital expenditures are generally meant for static investments and operating expenses are intended for fluctuating costs, it only makes sense that rapidly changing technology should be considered for OpEx. IT procurement, therefore, is turned on its head: instead of purchasing technology based on long-term projections decided years ago, the company pays only for the IT services it needs, when it needs them, and can scale them as needed.

If you’re looking to reduce communications costs, the cloud can save you money:

The cloud offers a better path for growth. It not only saves you money through economy of scale, but also it scales cost‐effectively as you grow. You never have to worry about adding more servers and switches as you add more employees. You simply add another seat in the cloud at a fixed monthly cost and have the assurance that new employees are connected to all of your business communications from 'day one.'

Looking for flexible options to finance your communications technology? Contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.