Wrap your ears around an intriguing conversation with none other than Dean Mansouri, CTO at Univoip. This episode is all about the seismic shifts in our communication universe. We chart the course from the hosted PBX era to the dawn of unified communications as a service, and how tech titan Microsoft disrupted the status quo.
Discover how Univoip navigates these changes to provide Cloud voice for Microsoft Teams, and how this pivotal role is helping to redefine the way we communicate. We engage with the remarkable progress of voice quality and the growing understanding of QoS in local area networks. The talk also transports us to the future of Microsoft 365 Communication, revealing Univoip's innovative cloud-native Microsoft 365 tenant, and the potential benefits customers can unlock by using Microsoft Teams as their phone system. The episode closes with Dean's excited anticipation for co-pilot and generative AI. Intrigued? Let's get to it! Don't let the future call you on the landline.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Wrap your ears around an intriguing conversation with none other than Dean Mansouri, CTO at Univoip. This episode is all about the seismic shifts in our communication universe. We chart the course from the hosted PBX era to the dawn of unified communications as a service, and how tech titan Microsoft disrupted the status quo.
Discover how Univoip navigates these changes to provide Cloud voice for Microsoft Teams, and how this pivotal role is helping to redefine the way we communicate. We engage with the remarkable progress of voice quality and the growing understanding of QoS in local area networks. The talk also transports us to the future of Microsoft 365 Communication, revealing Univoip's innovative cloud-native Microsoft 365 tenant, and the potential benefits customers can unlock by using Microsoft Teams as their phone system. The episode closes with Dean's excited anticipation for co-pilot and generative AI. Intrigued? Let's get to it! Don't let the future call you on the landline.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, super excited for this chat with Univoip. Dean Mansouri, CTO at Univoip, how are you?
Speaker 2:Great. How are you, Evan? It's a pleasure to be here with you today.
Speaker 1:Likewise, this is a topic that goes back to 30 years when I started in this industry a little company called Dialogic building telephony boards and haven't looked back. You've been in the telecom, voip, telco space for how many decades is it? Do you want to put a number on that, or are you a little shy here?
Speaker 2:It must be more than three decades Of course I was three years old when I started.
Speaker 1:Okay, Very good. Well, before we jump into Univoip, maybe introduce yourself your role and a little bit about the company's background and mission these days.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, thank you. As you mentioned, I've been in the industry for longer than I want to admit. Univoip is an ever-evolving Cloud voice service provider. I say evolving because when you started back in 2005, we used to call it hosted PBX and over time the marketing caught up and it became hosted telephony, then it became Cloud and then it became unified communications as a service. Along those years we made a pivot because we realized 10 years ago we used to think voice was a center of universe, maybe 15 years ago, and unified communications meant that you just added these other modalities to voice at the center of everything.
Speaker 2:But I think that conversation has changed with Microsoft coming into the space, companies like Microsoft, where they come in to unified communications from the collaboration side and voice to them is a feature. It's not really the center of universe like we used to think about it. Yeah, we admit that we've lost that unified communications were to companies like Microsoft. We made a pivot and we decided to provide Cloud voice for Microsoft Teams to make it very easy for customers to make that pivot from a premises-based PBX or even a hosted PBX If customers are using a Microsoft Teams and they're benefiting from all the features, functionality of Microsoft Teams, there is no reason why they shouldn't be using the Microsoft PBX. I'll stop there and give your feedback on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been an interesting evolution, to say the least. You were with another managed services company, macerg, that was acquired by Comcast. You've seen this pivot to manage services. What does that look like for your customers? How do they perceive Univoip as a provider today, versus maybe just a few years ago?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the average customer really isn't interested in the leads. They just want a communication system so that they can talk to their customers and colleagues. It just has to make sense for them. Who we target today is any organization that is using Microsoft Teams. They're finding that it's making them more productive, the collaboration, the messaging, the meetings all in one place. And yet they're using a third party phone system which is on an island by itself. So when you look at the situation, they're spending more money to keep two different platforms and the user experience is diminished because it isn't using just one platform. You're having to switch from, you know, your collaborative, internal collaboration. All of a sudden, this other client that has to be managed, whereas now you can reduce costs and Enhanced user experience by just using the, the teams, pbx.
Speaker 2:And you're right, you know I've been in this industry. So I was actually one of the founders of a company called broad core and Back in 2004 and you did a few things right and we were acquired by Mesa G and I stayed on and you know I was in charge of the cloud communications Product at me surgery after the acquisition and then I you know I I saw what I saw in the industry and I, you know, wanted to take some time off, and one thing led to another, and here I am at Univoj, really executing on that vision that you know we we're a cloud voice company, you know we are a select and what we ought to be doing is Providing voice solutions, making it easy and reliable for customers In with respect to the application, the business application that they want to use. I'm, you know, the most prolific application out there. More than you know, 50% of the organizations use Microsoft Teams. Right, so it made sense for us to really focus on providing cloud voice for Microsoft Teams.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. And and yet you stat you kept the VoIP name in Univoj. Obviously it's kind of a throwback to a A days when VoIP was the Wild West, right. I mean you had thousands of VoIP providers. You know questionable voice quality. I think VoIP had a pretty bad rap in the early days. But we've come a long way. I mean voice. Now you talk about high definition voice. You talk about spatial audio and quality of service. And how have you, how have you built all of that into your service over the years so you don't get what you get on mobile phones drop calls occasionally, or you know, delays and jitter and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:It's. It's not an issue as like it was, you know, ten years ago. Definitely. You know there's that there's a lot more understanding, especially in the IT community that we work with. They totally get that they have to have some sort of a QoS in their local area network. They understand that. You know, for their their traffic in the wide area network has to be managed in some capacity and, and you know, some companies will just throw band with that it and you don't really get involved with that as much anymore.
Speaker 2:I think there's more understanding on the customer side. So we do recommend, you know, guidelines for making sure that their real-time traffic is prioritized within their plan plan right, but it's not so much of an issue. I remember back then, as you mentioned, voice sucked, right, you know, years ago. And you really have to. You have to explain To customers that look, you need to have managed switches. You can't just use a hub. You know you're gonna have to use some sort of sort of a prioritization whether you use the VLAN or not. So all of those are challenges, but today that's not so much of a challenge and I think it's because just the the IT Teams really understand that much better than they used to, you know, 15 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great, great point. Well, we still remember. So it's still impressive how far you guys have come and tell us you know, the other prediction many years ago was voices dying, voices dead, which of course isn't true. Either voice video is going to kill, you know, telephany or voice communications. And yet here we are, still making phone calls, still communicating, still getting a little bit tired of video calls actually, and a lot of us going back to voice only. So voices here to stay, I think, probably.
Speaker 2:I still think it's the most effective mode of communications, but I do see that other modalities have increased in usage and it has given voice, you know, a role in everyday communications that isn't the same as, let's say, 15 years ago. So today I have many calls with customers, but they're not let me pick up the phone and dial their number. It's let me send them an email and ask for a meeting. Right, and so most of my calls and we use, of course, microsoft Teams here internally and most of my calls are basically voice conferences, right, and not everybody has to show their face. Of course I always do, but voice is still there. It's just not used in the same way.
Speaker 2:You know I don't pick up the phone and dial somebody's phone out of the blue, sell them. Would I ever do that? Right? And most people don't answer their phones anyway, right, because of all the spam. So, yeah, it's scheduled and we get on a meeting. We can add more people into it. You know I can have an ad hoc meeting. We can share our screen on the fly, we don't have to think twice, whereas in the past you know it was a phone call and you have to explain what you were looking at Right, maybe send a screenshot or something If you were sophisticated enough, you know, 15 years ago to do that.
Speaker 2:So voice still there. It's just used in a different way. I think it's not just let me pick up the phone and dial somebody's number. It's definitely reduced the number of you. Look at our CDRs in general and compare the number of users. It's definitely gone down throughout the years. That doesn't mean that voice isn't being used. It is just in a different format. It's in a meeting, right. It's, and it could be a one to one meeting Right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I think the other area that our industry has take made great strides in is mobile voice. Mobile voice and you know teams on your phone or on your iPad. It's gotten really better, much better than it used to be. It used to be kind of a Cluj, and so it's. It's native now to devices and firmware and the hardware. So that's come a long way. You must see a lot of mobility opportunities out there as well, and you offer quite a full stack. Tell me about the other services like contact center, sd way under things are what's out there with your customers these days.
Speaker 2:So with the Microsoft teams. You know, the way we would succeed in this is that if you really made everything really easy. So we do provide cloud voice Microsoft teams, but we also fill the gap in where Microsoft stops providing service, such as, you know, an advanced overlay call center. You know, SMS faxing, analog devices, paging systems, door entry systems. We support all of that from a single pane of glass management application. So we built, you know, when we made the pivot five years ago. What we did is we built our network from the ground up. We rebuilt it with. It's a completely programmable network. We can press a button and take a layer to switch out of service without dropping a packet. We replicate data centers at will and this programmable network supports cloud native applications.
Speaker 2:So our management application, called service control, is a cloud native application. It's a single pane of glass for customers to interact with the service, whether it's opening a ticket, looking at their invoices, adding a user, deleting a user, subscribing to a new telephone number, assigning the telephone number to a call platform. All of that is is doable from the single pane of glass. With the single code base, you can manage our, what we used to call, you know, our cloud PBX, our sick feature server to fill the gap for those occasions where Microsoft teams may not be the best fit or if you need to add a fax to your environment. So we allow our customers to procure telephone numbers, initiate a port request and then decide which call platform they should be pointed to. So they could go to Cloud Voice for Microsoft Teams, which is based on direct routing and you can take a number, unassign it and park it or reserve it or move it to another service. So it actually adds another layer of redundancy because you can take your telephone number and point it to our signature server all in real time in one place. That's oftentimes people are surprised when they're seeing this. It's hard to explain, but once you're actually in the trenches and wanting to move your numbers around or wanting to control your numbers, you don't want to. Let's say you have a block of a hundred telephone numbers. You don't want to have to pay the provider to point a hundred telephone numbers to your Microsoft Teams 365 tenant. So we allow you to park those numbers and, online within seconds, move that service to Microsoft Teams or move it to FACTS or to our signature server and then assign it to whatever service you want, and that's really the differentiation.
Speaker 2:Now, our goal was to make this as simple as it can be. It's even the onboarding is automated. In fact, we have a. We're delivering on the promise of a cloud buying journey where it's all self-driven you can use a link to subscribe to services with a 30 day free trial, without committing to anything, without interacting with anyone. The workflow will allow you to connect our cloud voice backbone to your Microsoft 365 tenant, Procure some numbers, associate them with your users, test everything and then initiate a port request.
Speaker 2:All of this is done in an automated workflow and you can actually, within 15 minutes, you can connect our cloud voice backbone to your Microsoft 365 tenant and then start to assign phone numbers to your users, because we've got Azure Active Directory visibility, so we know which users have the proper licenses right. So we really try to make sure that we have the right and the right number of users to connect to. So we really try to make this as easy as it can get. And, of course, we've got 724 round the clock support and we help our customers be successful in this migration from your traditional phone system or your hosted PBX over to a completely experience, and that whole process is made very easy to do business with and it's easy to onboard. Like I said, 15 minutes to connect your cloud voice backbone, our cloud voice backbone, to the customers. Microsoft 365 tenant.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's impressive, to say the least, and this is a platform, this technology, you built yourself over the years. There are many resellers or people using Cisco platforms, or this is something you've designed and built in-house.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's completely proprietary, so we control the design. In fact, the management application has been developed from the ground up with our own engineers and our development team, and it's customer feedback. You know it's a cloud native application so we are continuously enhancing it. Things get added. We're not doing any monolithic upgrades once a year. You know it's continuously enhanced based on partner and customer feedback, and so our solution actually supports the indirect model as well, to allow partners to bring in their customers and have the same level of access and control over the customer's services.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Yeah, that's super exciting. Wow, and tell us, do you talk about where your data centers are or which clouds your platform lives, or is that something sort of proprietary?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so every customer that signs up, we automatically create voice paths. So there will be a primary and secondary for our virtual SVCs, which we use ribbon SVCs, that SWEs and they're automatically provisioned During that 15 minute process. Part of that is provisioning all of the SVCs that need to be primary, secondary, but our services are in AWS and in Azure and so this is really a global design. So, you know, the number management service control includes number management. Of course, you can procure new numbers, initiate port requests and it uses the E164 in a global plan. So, even though today we're really focused in North America, but we have customers in other parts of the world using the same platform and so as we grow and evolve, we don't have any restrictions in how we're gonna grow. We are a cloud, you know, truly a cloud solution provider. Right, We've got, you know, data centers, but we're also in cloud spaces like AWS and Azure.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. That's well done, and you must have quite a global opportunity as well. When I think of telephony and telecom. There's so many countries around the world advanced countries in terms of tech Germany and Japan who are really living in the past as far as their communications infrastructure. So how are you tackling the global marketplace?
Speaker 2:As I said, our solution is made to support a global dial plan and we have customers in these parts of the world and there's definitely an opportunity for us to expand services to these other countries as the opportunity presents itself, but the focus is still really in North America. I can tell you, based on the latest data from Microsoft, there are 300 million monthly active users of Microsoft 365. Wow, but only about 5% to 10% are actually using the PSTN connectivity. This is global and, as of the last earnings call, that number is 17 million. So there's 17 million users globally that are using Microsoft teams as their phone system. They're connected to the PBX and the outside world, but if you think of that as 300 million, only about 17 million are using the PBX, which is nothing to sneeze at, right. 17 million is probably more than any voice provider, cloud, new task provider out there, right, right. Yet there is still so much opportunity. I think there's, you know, whether it's SMB or Enterprise. There's so much opportunity for companies like Univoy to take advantage of the marketplace and offer the service.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned, it's really a no-brainer If you're using Microsoft teams as your internal collaboration yet you're using a third-party phone system. I guarantee that you can reduce your costs and enhance user experience by migrating to a Microsoft Teams native solution. And I don't mean, you know, using Teams to integrate this, because there's solutions out there where you bring in your own feature server, right, you're selling your own UCAS, and then you're saying, well, okay, if you're using Microsoft Teams, we have a way to integrate. What that really means is that you're still using a third-party phone system and you're using voodoo magic to connect, you know, to the Teams clients. So you have to be running some plug-in or some app that's foreign to Microsoft, right, and try to replicate that experience. But it'll never be the same, because the minute you try to call somebody, it's actually picking up another provider's soft phone to make to complete the call, or it's just a disjointed experience for the user. And what we're doing is we're saying look, you don't need a phone system, you can use Microsoft as your phone system.
Speaker 1:You know, Brilliant, you had me. You don't need a phone system Mic drop on that one. So you've seen it all over your career all the landmines and the pitfalls and the obstacles. So give us a little sneak peek into the future. What are you excited about on the horizon? Microsoft has so much on their roadmap that you can leverage, I imagine, when it comes to co-pilots and generative AI. But what are you personally excited about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think co-pilot is going to be huge once more and, you know, once it becomes mainstream and I think it will at some point I think where we might come into this is there's so much data that passes through our network. Of course we don't store, you know, any of the traffic we can. Right, if customers want call recording, you know we can add that to it. But when you do that, it's not about recording that call, it's identifying actionable tasks that you can present to the users or the companies so they can make decisions based off of it. It makes no sense if you're recording, let's say, your sales staff, or maybe for compliance. That's what most people do for compliance. But there is a different layer that is going to be more prevalent and that's just understanding the calling patterns, understanding what works and what doesn't work and setting up, for example, notifications to the management team. That you know. Here's the trend when these phrases are spoken in its selfless form, this sales team is more successful, right? So maybe there is a training opportunity, actionable task to train your organization to say these words, you know. So there's going to be a lot of usage of that data. You know the data is there, but it's very hard to pinpoint and figure out how to make it useful. That's where we would come in.
Speaker 2:In the future is to have not just call recording, but tools that allow you to make good decisions based on actual data that you weren't analyzing or you couldn't analyze. It was humanly impossible to analyze data, but now you can do it with AI. There's so many tools that are coming out. You know, co-pilot is an example of that. Right, I can get a summary of our call, I can get transcriptions of it, I can get pointers already. You know, if I'm talking about a subject, I can get all that information from it, from our own OneDrive. I don't even have to go outside, so it's great. I think that's where this is really going to be a productivity tool that companies won't be able to do without.
Speaker 1:Well, I can't wait to get my hands on co-pilot. I'm already a huge open AI, Jack GBT user and at least maybe 10 other tools that I'm using at the moment, so I'd want more to the basket. Well, thanks so much for your insights and your you know introduction. What are you up to the rest of the summer? Any travel, personally, professionally, anything on your radar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I actually drove my son from Los Angeles to Memphis. Well, my wife and I drove him. He's starting medical school in Memphis University of Tennessee Health and Science Center, and so we decided to take a road trip. He says, dad, I need a car. I said you have a car. No, I need it over there. I said, no problem, Just drive it over there. And so we did. It was actually a lot of fun. You know, we started quite a trip.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love the great American road trip, still alive and well. Well, thank you so much, dean. Look forward to seeing you out and about in the fall various events. I'm sure we'll catch up with you. And thanks everyone for watching. Feel free to reach out on social with any comments, questions, dms are welcome and catch you later. All right, thank you, evan, take care. Thank you very much, dean. Take care everyone.