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Transform your business with Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications

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Communications, coveredHosted Enterprise Communications – Communications

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As today’s workforce continues to evolve, a modern unified communications (UC) solution has become increasingly vital. Your employees need to be able to easily connect with their team from any device and any of your locations. You need to connect new team members quickly and easily during an acquisition or busy season, but flexibility is a must.

Thankfully, cloud has revolutionized the UC market, providing new levels of agility and mobility as well as increased reliability and efficiency. Recent surveys found that more than 60 percent of cloud users embraced the technology because of its ability to reduce costs as well as hardware/software maintenance, improve IT flexibility, and better support strategic business goals.1

Why companies are embracing cloud:Forbes recently highlighted the potential for UC to act as a “gateway cloud” for companies just beginning to embrace the power of the cloud.2 A cloud-based hosted enterprise UC solution can lay the foundation to support this critical day-to-day work and increase a company’s trust and comfort with cloud technology.

Since launching our Unified Communications as a Service solution more than 17 years ago, CBTS has become a proven, experienced provider. CBTS is a leading Cisco Gold Partner and the only domestic service provider to offer Cisco Meraki natively as a utility. With more than 700 experienced engineers, CBTS hosts, manages, or maintains more than 700,000 handsets for clients in government, retail, finance, healthcare sectors, and many more.

We’re proud to say CIO Review named CBTS as one of the “20 Most Promising Unified Communications Providers in 2017,” thanks in large part to our Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution.3

How a cloud-based hosted UC solution solves common IT challenges Traditionally, buying into a new UC solution meant investing in infrastructure, software licenses, equipment, and more—and that means a large expense that may be a problem for companies with tight budgets. This investment, while it may put you at the top with today’s latest-and-greatest technology, also starts the clock ticking on the countdown to your next upgrade.

Alternatively, a cloud-based UC solution offers a OpEx model, which allows companies to pay only for what they use with a predictable monthly fee. This model offers valuable agility that means your company can easily scale based on needs and budget. Your UC solution can be one less thing to worry about during a busy season—adding new users is just a quick phone call away.

85%

33%

of IT decision-makers believe a cloud strategy is “essential to

remaining competitive in our industry.”

say the cloud is “now an essential part of our business.”

69%

65%

64%

62%

62%

Reduce costs

Manage data growth

Reduce hardware/software maintenance

Better support strategic business goals

Improve IT flexibility

By Craig Kathman

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When you choose the CapEx route and make the investment in the best technology available, you’re also making the commitment to maintain that technology in sickness and in health. Even the best systems will show their age eventually, struggling to keep up with software updates and eating up your IT team’s valuable time and resources. And finding the IT talent with the experience to maintain these aging systems is a challenge with which all CIOs are familiar.

Cloud-based hosted enterprise UC solutions mean your company will always have access to the latest in technology. While mergers and acquisitions can leave a company with a hodgepodge of platforms, vendors, support contracts, and more across multiple locations, cloud technology can streamline your scale up and get everyone on the same technology as painlessly as possible.

Meanwhile, instead of spending time and energy on an outdated system, your IT team is freed up to focus on the key business initiatives that help your business grow. Your whole company has access to the best available technology and, in turn, it can operate at its best level.

CBTS Hosted Enterprise Unified CommunicationsThe CBTS Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution is cloud-based and fully hosted, powered by Cisco’s industry-leading hosted collaboration solution. Hosted Enterprise UC provides our clients with the full UC suite of applications, including key components such as telephony (local long distance and toll free), collaboration tools, mobility features, and Cisco IP handsets.

The Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution is powered by Cisco HCS, HCS-CC, Webex CCA-SP Audio on Cisco’s Unified Communications platform, and Webex Teams.

Mobility

Your organization may be spread throughout locations across the country and around the globe. If it’s not yet—it probably will be soon: International Data Corporation says three out of four U.S. workers will be mobile by 2020. They’re taking advantage of remote working opportunities and need to connect from their desktop, laptop, smartphone, and tablet without missing a beat. Today’s workforce demands mobility, and CBTS can be the partner that can make it all possible.

Unified messaging

Our Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution offers unified messaging, integrating everything from instant messaging and presence to voicemail and email into a single interface.

Peer-to-peer video

From across the office or the other side of the world, your team can connect with sophisticated peer-to-peer video technology. No matter your industry, collaboration is more important than ever, and a clear, reliable video solution makes that possible.

Instant messaging and presence

Cisco Jabber offers instant messaging, voice and video calls, video messaging, desktop sharing, conferencing, and presence, all allowing for improved productivity. You can see the availability of contacts both within and outside of your organization and use real-time presence information and instant messaging to reduce delays.

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Key differentiators CBTS strives to set its Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications offering apart. But it’s more than just a service that provides the latest in voice, video, and collaborative technology—it’s a solution designed by our expert engineers to meet your organization’s unique challenges and business needs.

Our experts recently demonstrated their problem-solving skills when a financial institution came to CBTS after criminals attempted to target their organization over the phone. The company said the criminals would call its branches and ask a few questions with the purpose of identifying whether it was a good target for opening a fraudulent account. These criminals would call several of the company’s branches in quick succession.

CBTS expert engineers devised a solution that would flag a caller if they called several of the company’s branches within a set timespan. Upon calling the third branch, the call would be routed to the company’s call center and flagged for potential fraud.

CBTS is a proven, experienced partner with broad expertise across communications, cloud, infrastructure, and consultation services. We provide 24x7x365 support with our famous white glove service, making CBTS a partner you can trust.

CBTS expertise in delivery

CBTS is a leading Cisco Gold Partner, Master Unified Communications Partner, Master Service Provider, Master Cloud Builder, and Master Security Partner. Our world-class professional services engineers provide design, deployment, and implementation consultation with a client-centered model from end-to-end.

As your organization grows and evolves, you can depend on CBTS to grow with you. Our expert engineers will be there every step of the way to provide support and solutions to new challenges as they arise.

Dedicated account manager

CBTS employees experienced IT professional with long tenure that approaches every customer with as a partnership that does not end after the sale.

Dedicated deployment teams

CBTS experts will handle the deployment of the Hosted Enterprise UC solution quickly and efficiently to meet your business needs.

Data center redundancy

The experienced engineers at CBTS are working 24x7x365 to keep your data secure. Our high-availability data center ensures your unified communications solution is up and running when it counts.

Multiple delivery models

Our Hosted Enterprise UC solution is available across a wide variety of delivery models, including MPLS, CBTS SD-WAN, and Network as a Service. Whether you bring your network to us or we bring our network to you, CBTS experts can help find the model that works best for your organization.

This solution also offers SD survivability, which allows us to use the CBTS SD-WAN technology as a tertiary failover option for sites that need it and add additional resiliency to the network. Even in a WAN outage, the SD survivability solution would bypass the WAN into the internet at your location and into the CBTS data centers. Traditional survivability can be expensive, and our expert engineers see this as the future of survivability solutions.

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This option can be especially valuable for locations that need to stay up at all times, like the life-and-death situations often faced in healthcare environments.

Local and long distance

Your employees, partners, and clients are rarely in the same place, so local and long distance is always included.

Informacast mass notifications

In the event of an emergency, you need to communicate with your whole team quickly and easily. Mass notifications allow you to keep everyone up to date with the latest instructions. Keep everyone safe and informed with the click of a button. CBTS is the only Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications provider worldwide that includes the advanced InformaCast Fusion with every user profile. “CBTS has demonstrated bold industry leadership with this partnership, declaring that safety is standard functionality for their customers,” said Pat Scheckel, Executive Vice President of Product Management and Marketing.

Call detail reporting

Access important data about calls—including the time and date of the call, who made the call, reason why the call ended, and more—anytime you need to.

Enhanced e911

Enhanced 911 will send emergency 911 calls to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for the caller’s and allows the PSAP to better identify the caller’s location and return the call, if necessary. This technology allows emergency personnel to better respond to an incident by quickly and easily pinpointing the exact location of the caller, and notifying your critical personnel that 911 has been called. Our Enhanced 911 platform can automatically track and update equipment moves and changes.

99.999% uptime

The CBTS Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution has 99.999% uptime, backed by Service Level Agreements, making it as reliable as they come and giving our customers peace of mind.

24x7x365 ENOC support

Our world-class enterprise network operations center (ENOC) is staffed by industry-leading experts who provide 24x7x365 incident management and support.

Hunt groups and auto attendants

Make sure your incoming calls are routed efficiently with custom hunt groups and auto attendants.

MACD requests

Move, add, change, and disconnect requests are handled quickly and efficiently.

Third-party application integration

CBTS will work with you to tailor our solution to meet your unique business needs. We know that your organization has invested in applications that help your business run, and the CBTS Hosted Enterprise Communications solution offers the flexibility for a seamless integration.

For example, for our clients in the healthcare industry, we’ve integrated our solution into everything from their existing messaging tools to in-room nurse call systems to the electronic medical records platform.

Our solution can be integrated into call reporting apps, CRMs, email systems, voicemail platforms, paging systems, audio/video platforms, and many more.

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Applications

CBTS Hosted Enterprise Contact Center

CBTS Hosted Enterprise Contact Center is a cloud-based hosted solution that brings you real customer and business insights through a connected digital experience, all while offloading the expense of maintenance, upgrades, and hiring costly resources.

Hosted Enterprise Contact Center’s available features include:

• Omnichannel agent with email, chat, voice, and social

• Cisco Finesse desktop software

• Single sign-on

• Contact center analytics and reporting

• Call queuing

• IVR integration

• Speech recognition

• Workforce optimization

• Quality management

• Precision based routing

• Outbound dialer paths

• CRM integration

• Whisper

• Chat, email, and web callback

WebEx Teams

Webex Teams is an app-centric, cloud-based service that offers a complete collaboration suite for your team to create, meet, message, call, white board, and share, whether they’re in the office or working remotely and no matter what type of device they’re using. You may recognize many of the features from Webex Team’s predecessor, Cisco Spark. But this wasn’t just a rebrand, it was an upgrade with new features and capabilities including a shared platform and user interface with Webex.

Webex Teams’ three core capabilities are:

• Meetings: Webex Teams allows for your team to collaborate in one continuous workstream before, during, and after meetings. Start or join a meeting with a click or voice command—no downloads, dial-ins, or plug-ins. Webex Team’s crisp, clear video makes sure every team member is framed automatically and disruptive noises are detected and muted. Make meetings intuitive, not an interruption.

• Messaging: Your team can exchange messages and share files with another person or a group of people. They can message anyone by choosing someone from the company directory or simply entering an email address and start messaging customers, partners, or anyone they need to work with.

• Calling: Webex Teams includes Hybrid Call Services which combines the Cisco Webex Teams message and meeting capabilities into the Cisco Collaboration cloud. The Hybrid Call Services allow users to share their screen easily, make mobile calls on the company plan, use their office phone number and call history across all their devices, and more.

The Webex Teams app allows users to access, use, and control meetings, messaging, white board, and calling capabilities. Users can also share content when in a meeting, when messaging, or while on a call with anyone. The Webex Teams app allows users to access the service on their smartphones, via a browser, or via a dedicated app on their Mac or Windows PC. And you can rest assured that all of your information will be protected with enterprise-level security measures.

Webex Teams integrates seamlessly with a wide variety of third-party tools that your team depends on including Trello, Dropbox, Basecamp, Google Drive and Calendar, Salesforce, and more.

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Cisco Webex

Cisco Webex is a secure software-based platform for video and audio conferencing, business messaging, and webinars that helps your team be more productive. Meeting participants can join from any browser, device, or system simply by answering the phone. It is the leading enterprise solution for video and web conferencing. It’s no wonder Cisco Webex is the #1 meeting platform in the world.

In addition to crisp, clear audio and smooth video conferencing, Cisco Webex offers screen sharing, white boarding, and editing tools. Each member of your team can have their own personal meeting room with a unique URL. Participants can join by VoIP or dial-in, and the organizer can record the meeting, including video and sharing.

Implementation and operations While the actual schedule is an output of the planning process, CBTS can offer an approximate timeline for the Hosted Enterprise Unified Communication solution.

In the days following the signing of the statement of work (SOW), the MPLS circuits will be ordered and the project will officially kick off. Days 30 through 60 following the signing of the SOW mark the design and planning stage during which the MPLS fiber optic cables are received and the session initiation protocol (SIP) is provisioned and tested.

CBTS will provide an implementation strategy and programming data completed within 75 days of the signing of the SOW, and circuits will land within 90 days. In turn, the client will complete the site-readiness requirements within 90 days of the signing of the SOW. The client will also provide complete and accurate end user/site data and meet all agreed upon deliverables and timeframes.

Between 90 and 120 days, the Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution is connected and provisioned. Shortly thereafter, Group 1 is placed and user testing begins.

By day 150, Group 1 user data has been received as well as the port fiber optic cable. By day 165, Group 1 is cutover and day 2 support begins.

The number of port events and timing is based on client tolerance and port constraints.

All communications are managed through the enterprise network operations center (ENOC). There are two types of tickets; an incident ticket is for an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality, while a service request ticket covers a request for something to be provided. The client can open a ticket through the service now portal or approved users/callers can call the ENOC. The client can request a ticket status via the service now portal, by replying to an email notification, or by calling the ENOC.

SOWSigned

ProjectKickoff

MPLS CircuitsOrdered

ReceiveMPLS FOC

SIPProvisioned/

Tested

MPLS CircuitsInstall Test

CustomerReadinessComplete

HostedEnterprise UCProvisioned

Group 1User DataReceived

Receive Port FOC

Group 1Placed

Day 2Support Begins

Designand

Planning

HostedEnterprise UCConnected

PST(user testing)

Group 1Cutover

DAY1

DAY30

DAY60

DAY90

DAY120

DAY150

Estimated Timeline

DAY165

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Choosing CBTS as your Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications partner

Your organization has an opportunity to completely transform with a cloud-based unified communications solution.

You can move from costly CapEx investments to a predictable monthly fee that always guarantees the latest technology. Your team will have access to limitless collaboration and innovation possibility, no matter where they are or what device they use.

Our Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications solution is never one-size-fits-all—it’s tailored to fit your business needs today and for the future. Choosing CBTS as your UC partner means you’ll have 24x7x365 support from Day 1, allowing your IT team to focus on the initiatives that drive your business.

CBTS has decades of experience providing the highest quality voice solutions. In fact, our parent company, Cincinnati Bell, has been synonymous with voice solutions for more than 145 years. We’re using that expert experience to consult, build, transform, and support cloud-based unified communications solutions for companies of all sizes and across all industries.

Contact a cloud communications expert at CBTS today.

References

1. 2014 Frost & Sullivan Global Cloud User Survey; 2015 Frost & Sullivan US Cloud User Survey2. McKendrick, Joe. “One Way To Start The Cloud Journey: Unified Communications” Forbes. Published 09/16/2017. Available at:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2017/09/16/one-way-to-start-the-cloud-journey-unified-communications/#1b6cb88e6238 3. CIO Review. “CBTS: Cloud-Based Services Deliver Collaboration, Savings.” Available at:

https://unified-communications.cioreview.com/vendor/2017/cbts