ShoreTel’s bold move last week acquiring hosted UC provider, M5 Networks, verified the company’s strategy to provide cloud-based Unified Communications for its customers looking for a hosted model, in addition to its on-premise Unified Communications solutions.

“The move positions ShoreTel very well to be a key player in the hosted Unified Communications space and a part of the fast-growing cloud based business model,” said Hirsh. “The addition of M5’s product portfolio is a positive one for our customers as it provides more product choices (hosted and on-premise UC solutions) designed to suit their unique business needs.”

As ShoreTel’s largest non-carrier Value-Added Reseller (VAR) partner, Hirsh gave a call to action to ShoreTel for clear communications to its resellers on the addition of M5’s products to its portfolio. “It is critical that ShoreTel communicate how it wants partners, such as Transcend United, to sell the M5 offerings, how it plans to integrate M5’s assets (which includes a customer base of more than 2,000 companies) and how this move fits in to ShoreTel’s overall business strategy.”

According to ShoreTel CEO, Peter Blackmore, "this acquisition is a critical step in our evolution and enables the company to capitalize on trends in cloud computing and advance our enterprise communications strategy."

He added, “the addition of a cloud UC offering is a very important strategic move for our company. ShoreTel is now uniquely positioned to provide customers a choice between on-premise and hosted UC solutions.”

M5’s chief executive Dan Hoffman says merging the company’s product portfolio with ShoreTel’s makes a lot of sense. “Combining what we each do, it is
chocolate + peanut butter,” he said. “ShoreTel has the best app on the market to insert your desk phone into your smart phone. Their UC and collaboration suite is polished, as are all their interfaces. And they make their own handsets, allowing them to control this all-important customer touch-point.”

He continued, “ShoreTel has a formidable presence in the channel. M5 needs these things. ShoreTel doesn’t know how to be a cloud service provider, but they do understand what their competitors have not figured out – cloud isn’t just partitioning software and running it in a data center – it needs to be in your DNA.”

“One of the reasons our relationship with ShoreTel has been so successful is our shared belief that the customer is job one,” added Hirsh. “M5 also believes that unparalleled customer service is paramount to success and I think this will be a huge asset for us as we resell the new ShoreTel solution that includes hosted UC.”

M5 will operate as a business unit of ShoreTel, headed up by Hoffman. With this move, ShoreTel and its resellers are poised for growth as industry analyst firm Gartner predicts that the “Voice as a Service” market is expected to show a 36 percent growth rate in North America before 2015 — to $2.2 billion.

Transcend continues to be recognized for its staggering growth of more than 500 percent over a three year period.  Transcend has acquired four companies in 28 months with successful integration and has sustained outstanding customer service and a strong reputation with vendors.

“To maintain our leadership position and grow through acquisitions, we were keenly focused on keeping our reputation for stellar customer service and strong partner and vendor relationships,” said Rick Hirsh, Transcend CEO.  “We made sure to spend the right time and resources on identifying and acquiring appropriate companies to integrate into Transcend United’s business model, which allowed us to maintain our leadership status and grow at a fast pace.”

 “Transcend United Technologies, like all 2011 Technology Fast 500™ companies, has excelled in fostering innovation and channeling it into spectacular growth — against the backdrop of one of the most  challenging economies in history,” said Eric Openshaw, vice chairman and U.S. technology, media and telecommunications leader, Deloitte LLP.

In order to be eligible for the Deloitte recognitions, companies must own proprietary intellectual property or technology that is sold to customers in products that contribute to a majority of the company’s operating revenues. Companies must have base-year operating revenues of at least $50,000 USD, and current-year operating revenues of at least $5 million USD. Additionally, companies must be in business for a minimum of five years.

For a full list of both Deloitte rankings, check out 2011 Technology Fast 500 Rankings and 2011 Greater Philadelphia Fast 50.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com

Mobility, Mobility, Mobility

Richard Tarity. Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing

Transcend United Technologies

Interop is one of the most exciting trade shows of the year and 2011 was no exception. I’m always fascinated by the latest innovations exhibited there in areas such as cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility, data center, networking and IT management.

One of the key themes I took away from the show in October was mobility. Everyone is talking about mobility. Why? It is because work is no longer a location, but an activity. We used to only be able to imagine being able to connect with customers, co-workers and partners at anytime, from anyplace and from any device. But that is now reality and technology like Transcend United’s Mobility solutions helps businesses meet the changing demands of the mobile workforce.

Knowledge workers of today are much different than the past and mobility plays a huge role in that. For example, today’s generation of users are used to working with data and applications in the cloud and expect immediate access to information. Additionally, this new breed of workers expects to be able to get information from anywhere, at any time, using any device they’d like to use.

This shift has made mobility a critical component in today’s workplace. Mobility enables businesses of all sizes to integrate leading smart phone and tablets with existing enterprise communication and applications and infrastructure securely, simply and cost-effectively.

Additionally, businesses today are deploying mobility to address the key challenges associated with factors that impact today’s worker, such as bring-your-own-device demands from employees (they are using to working with a device of their choosing), soaring international roaming costs, poor in-building coverage and integration into corporate PBX and Unified Communications (UC) systems.

Thus, mobility is an inherent component of Unified Communications, which easily integrates with multiple PBX platforms and UC systems. Mobile workers are free to communicate on devices of their choice from any location (office, home, hotspots) and any network (Wi-Fi , 3G/4G or cellular).

Organizations can no longer ignore this trend, it is imperative enterprises make mobility a key focus to give mobile workers (a number that continues to grow) more choice, flexibility, access and performance.

Read more about Transcend’s mobility offerings.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

                                                                     Photo courtesy of LifeSize

But wait. There’s even better news. Last month LifeSize and Avaya, another Transcend United partner, announced that LifeSize’s leading HD video collaboration products (LifeSize Passport and LifeSize Express 220) are now compliance-tested to work with key Avaya IP telephony solutions. The LifeSize applications now are compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with: Avaya Aura® Communication Manager and Avaya Aura® Session Manager with Avaya one-X® Communicator and the Avaya Desktop Video Device (audio only). That means that if Avaya provides your unified communications infrastructure, simple, cost-effective HD videoconferencing is virtually at your fingertips. It’s a pretty neat solution, and according to Paul Cantwell at LifeSize, it’s all part of the plan. “At LifeSize, we believe that video products work best when they are easy to implement within a company’s existing infrastructure.” Cantwell says. And according to Eric Rossman, Avaya VP of developer relations. “By participating in Avaya’s compliance testing program and committing to open standards, development partners like LifeSize are helping businesses get more out of their network investment,” Rossman says. “This helps our customers more easily communications-enable critical business processes and uncover new value that can help them build their bottom line.”

These new developments from LifeSize and Avaya represent a big step forward in making the technology more accessible and affordable to companies of all sizes. And since Transcend United is a valued partner to both companies, we’re in the perfect position to help our clients evaluate whether low cost IP-based HD videoconferencing is right for them. We may be a little biased, but we think the answer for many companies will be a resounding yes."

If you’d like to know more about Transcend United’s partnerships with LifeSize and Avaya, visit our website. 
 

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

Written by Steve Benson, Sr. Vice President, Transcend United
A service strategy by yet another name.  

We have lived through the market buzz of how Application Service Providers (ASP) will change the enterprise-buying trends.  But the software giants couldn’t figure out the license strategy to support it, so it stalled.  Forget about the security and compliance nightmare that were afterthoughts. 

Moving through the innovation cycle, Salesforce.com comes along with purpose-built software for multi-tenant provisioning, changes the market semantics to Software as a Service (SaaS) and all is good in corporate IT procurement departments. 

The Small-to-Medium-sized Business (SMB) and Mid-Market migration to SaaS technology creates the market and offerings range from infrastructure appliance replacement to core ERP and portal technologies. Google validates the market and the fun begins. After playing in the datacenter with the Google appliance, Google “SaaS-ifies” everything and is leading cloud adoption into the larger-enterprise markets.  

The latest stage in the movement to Utility Computing utopia is the “Cloud”.  Who doesn’t have a Cloud offering?  What sales cycle doesn’t include Cloud if only in discussion about the weather?  Cloud is selling and buyers appear to have embraced it—regardless of the same underlying risks and issues presented by its ASP and SaaS predecessors.  I’d speculate that with Cloud technology, there is far less due diligence on risk, and a much higher threshold for risk assumption, both educated and ignorant.  

Bottom-line is the cost savings game and for some to keep pace with the early adopters or perceived competition.    What are the drivers?

·         Agility

·         Cost

·         Device and location independence

·         Scalability

·         Maintenance

·         Security?

·         And more…

Sound familiar? These value propositions are very similar to those touted for ASP and SaaS.  The Cloud is evolving and we’ll place our bets on the right applications and infrastructure services targeted at the right Perfect Profiled Prospect.  No hollow “Cloud” buzz for the sake of market lemmings.  Targeted value proposition for the right services, based on a customer’s wants and needs, with weighted risk and rewards laid out on the table.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

ITExpo West is the premier IP Communications trade show, showcasing the latest technologies, regulatory issues and trends in the communications industry.

At the show, Transcend and partner LifeSize will provide demonstrations of  the LifeSize Video Conferencing Solutions, which help users increase productivity, enhance learning, and reduce costs.

Transcend employees will also showcase solutions from Riverbed, the IT infrastructure performance company. Riverbed helps companies run their IT more efficiently, take pressure off budgets, and increase the return on investment.

Last but not least, there will be demos of ShoreTel ‘s award-wining VOIP system.

Don’t miss us at ITExpo West-booth #726.

Also, check out ShoreTel’s Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Gavin on the panel, “Turning Your Unified Communications Solution into a Mobile Asset” on September 13 from 11 to 11:45 a.m.

Gavin is also speaking on the “SMB Communications: It’s All About Options” panel on September 14 from 2 to 2:45 pm.

Don’t miss Transcend United in booth #726. Register for ITExpo West.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

]]> http://www.transcendunited.com/wordpress/transcend-united-technologies-to-highlight-business-efficiency-enhancing-products-at-itexpo-west/feed 0 http://www.transcendunited.com/wordpress/attack-mitigation-and-wingshooting-event-with-transcend-united-and-radware-11-august-11-minnesota-horse-and-hunt-club http://www.transcendunited.com/wordpress/attack-mitigation-and-wingshooting-event-with-transcend-united-and-radware-11-august-11-minnesota-horse-and-hunt-club#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:21:00 +0000 Jacki Katzman http://127.0.0.1/wordpress4/?p=266 Continue reading →]]>  

Date: Thursday, 11 August 2011 Where: Minnesota Horse and Hunt Club 2920 E 220th Street Prior Lake, MN 55372    A new category of threat has made its entrance on the security stage in a big way. The recent months have been spent trying to understand such cyber-hacktivism acts as Operation Payback, Operation Sony, and the Lulzsec’s FBI InfraGard hack. We believe the efficacy of these attacks will encourage even more actors to take the stage, spawning a cycle of malicious activity with the goal of taking down mission-critical applications. No one can predict what’s next, but given the increased frequency, the new application-focused attacks and the technique effectiveness, it is time to sharpen the defenses! Join Transcend United & Radware, as we discuss: The current situation and lessons-learned from recent attacks The increased attack risks and effectiveness of the recent generation of DDoS attack tools The corresponding inadequacies of modern day perimeter defenses Firsthand forensic analysis on the necessity of deploying active counterattack / active defense techniques such as the first-ever Radware Emergency Response Counterattack Team (ERCT) Participants will be eligible for a complimentary data center vulnerability analysis. The Attack Mitigation Seminar will be held at the Minnesota Horse & Hunt Club, one of the country’s premier sporting clays clubs. The Horse & Hunt Club features five world class sporting clays courses, throwing millions of targets every year on hundreds of acres for wingshooting enjoyment. After our presentation on the lastest perimeter defense techniques, we will have some fun sharpening our own skills on one of the sporting clays courses. Be sure to wear comfortable clothes and shoes for some light outdoor walking. Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

ShoreTel CEO Peter Blackmore had great news for shareholders.  On the FY 2011 financial report call held on August 9, 2011, he reported that in fiscal year 2011, revenue reached a company record of $200.1 million, an increase of 35 percent over fiscal year 2010 revenue of $148.5 million.  He also told investors about these exciting developments:

• Synergy Research results show that ShoreTel is the fastest growing major vendor in the enterprise IP telephony market  – by a significant margin. 
• Nemertes awarded ShoreTel its unprecedented 8th consecutive Nemertes PilotHouse award for Unified Communications (UC)
• Gartner gave ShoreTel its highest possible rating:  a STRONG POSITIVE for Unified Communications in the SMB market

The Fastest Growing Major Vendor in Enterprise IP Telephony
In the call, Blackmore cited the most recent Synergy Research data, confirming what ShoreTel partners have been seeing in the field:

• ShoreTel increased to share of worldwide pure IP telephony market from 4% in the December quarter to 4.5% in the March quarter
• ShoreTel increased its share in in the pure IP telephony market,  from 8.4% in the December 2010 quarter to 9.1% in the March 2011 quarter. 
• ShoreTel grew revenue by 35% over the past four quarters, while the US enterprise IP telephony market grew 8%.

This growth makes ShoreTel the fastest growing major vendor in the enterprise IP telephony market this year by a significant margin.

8th Nemertes Pilothouse Award Celebrates Technology, Value and Service
For an unprecedented eighth straight year, ShoreTel claimed the Nemertes Pilothouse top prize in IP telephony.

The Nemertes PilotHouse award for Unified Communications (UC) recognizes vendors identified and rated by IT professionals as their strategic partner for delivering UC products, which integrate voice, video, conferencing, messaging, and presence with office and business-process applications to improve collaboration.

On a scale of 1-5, ShoreTel received top scores in each of the categories reviewed:

•  Technology:  ShoreTel received a rating of 4.18 for technology
•  Value: With a score of 4.65, ShoreTel received the highest score of all the IP telephony vendors in any market category.
•  Customer Service: ShoreTel received a 4.18, demonstrating its ongoing commitment to brilliantly simple solutions

“ShoreTel obviously is doing something right; no vendor ever has consistently won the same category multiple years as ShoreTel has in IP telephony,” said Irwin Lazar, Vice President and Service Director, Nemertes.

Gartner Again Rates ShoreTel as “Strong Positive” for SMB Unified Communications 
Blackmore informed investors of another ShoreTel “Win.”  ShoreTel Unified Communication solution for SMB Offerings received a “Strong Positive,” the highest possible rating given, in Gartner’s report titled “MarketScope for Unified Communications for the SMB Market, North America.” 

Gartner’s MarketScope provides specific guidance for users who are deploying, or have deployed, products or services. Per the report, this MarketScope focuses on the premises-based (or infrastructure-based) UC market for SMBs.  A Strong Positive means that Gartner analysts consider the vendor a strategic leader in the space; they advise customers to continue with planned investments and recommend that potential customers consider this vendor a strong choice for strategic investments.

This is the second year in a row that ShoreTel has received a ”Strong Positive” rating.

Mobility is Key, Partners Make All The Difference,
Blackmore indicated that ShoreTel’s strong growth and operating results testified to the strengths and appropriateness of the company’s working business model.  He announced ShoreTel’s intention to triple its investments in Mobility R&D, citing the explosive growth in the smartphone market of over a 100 million smartphones sold every quarter  

Importantly, he credited the partner channel for the excellent FY2011 results.  “Our growth is driven primarily by our outstanding win rate coupled with our ability to steadily attain a higher consideration rate,” Blackmore stated.  “This is the result of strengthening on go-to-market capability with our partner channel and building ourselves in marketing activities.” 

Transcend United recently introduced LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel, its new cloud-specific backup system exclusively for ShoreTel customers. LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel provides ShoreTel customers the ability to back up critical telephony data, including the ShoreTel Director configuration database, voicemail, Auto-Attendants, Call Detail Records (CDRs), logs, and the Shoreline Directory.

Transcend United recently merged with LiquidSpoke to create  the nation’s largest ShoreTel unified communications technology reseller. The combined entity is also one of the largest technology resellers in North America, offering advanced capabilities for service desk, IP Telephony, Wireless, WAN Optimization, Videoconferencing, and Backup/ Recovery including a state of the art 24 x 7 Network Operations Center (NOC).

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

“Our Unified Communications engineers work with businesses of all sizes and levels of IT expertise. We know what it takes to secure an IT infrastructure and protect IT assets with a business continuity  disaster recovery plan that embodies best practices. With LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel, ShoreTel customers have one less thing to worry about.”

The service supports disaster recovery (DR) strategy by providing restores to warm and hot standby servers at the Transcend United data center. The LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel solution dramatically reduces the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for your mission-critical data and servers.

Benefits of LiquidWare Cloud Backup:

• Risk Reduction – virtually eliminates incomplete backups and/or tape damage
• Disaster Contingency – lets organizations manage risk with its inherent disaster recovery capabilities
• Reduced Backup Times – transmits only changed portions of a file, while compression further reduces data size
• Reduced Recovery Times – ensures that restores begin immediately and occur at LAN speeds with local storage of backed up data in addition to the cloud data vault in the Transcend United datacenter.
• Ease of Future Planning – upgrades automatically as data grows 
• Productivity – enables IT staff to focus on other business initiatives by removing the tedious tasks of managing the backup and restore process
• Cost Effective – charges based on a monthly ‘usage’ – only pay for the ShoreTel servers and V-switches which are backed up
• LiquidWare Cloud Backup – service can provide a full range of customized services for your ShoreTel Communications System that include DR Planning and warm/hot standby server configuration

“We kept ShoreTel customers’ business needs front and center when we built LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel,” adds Rick Hirsh, CEO, Transcend United Technologies. “It’s scalable to serve the needs of enterprises large and small.   It’s an efficient and cost-effective alternative for ShoreTel users who want to ensure data protection and optimize business operations across the company.”

LiquidWare Cloud Backup for ShoreTel is the first product to be released by Transcend United since its merger with LiquidSpoke to create  the nation’s largest ShoreTel unified communications technology reseller. The combined entity is one of the largest technology resellers in North America, offering advanced capabilities for service desk, IP Telephony, Wireless, WAN Optimization, Videoconferencing, and Backup/ Recovery including a state of the art 24 x 7 Network Operations Center (NOC).

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

Until 31 August, small business owners who don’t yet have an Avaya IP Office Suite installation can enter a contest to win a full installation – free!  The “Small Business Innovators Contest” invites entrepreneurs to use the IP Office ROI tool to calculate potential savings.  The company that can then come up with the most innovative use for the IP Office savings will win:

•    Grand prize: One business, will win a new IP Office solution and related products (valued at up to $50,000 MSRP) and a $5,000 American Express Gift Card!
•    Runner up prize: Five businesses will get up to $10,000 (MSRP) worth of Avaya IP Office equipment and related products

Innovation is the engine that makes every business more productive and helps it to grow. Avaya wants to show small businesses how VoIP unified communications systems can create savings to fund innovation.  In less than 5 minutes, the IP Office ROI tool can point out the ways the Avaya Unified Communications solutions can enhance communications, while lowering the total cost of ownership.

Interested innovators simply fill out the ROI tool and submit the resulting PDF report. Then, write a simple 100-250 essay explaining the innovative ways to apply the anticipated savings over the next five years to better serve customers, staff and suppliers.

Avaya IP Office is built from the ground up specifically for small and medium-size businesses to deliver the communications capabilities big businesses are used to, with a complete solution for telephony, messaging, networking, conferencing, customer management, and unified communications.  Avaya offers three versions – Essential, Preferred or Advanced Edition of IP Office  – that are tailored to provide the right combination of capabilities. 

Transcend United is an Avaya Connect Gold Partner. 

Transcend passed the Avaya on-site Service Assessment for Implementation & Maintenance with a 97% Customer Satisfaction Scale Rating. 

Transcend United also hosts the Avaya Contact Center Association, which educates members on Avaya Contact Center features, functions, enhancements, and best practices. The next meeting will be held in Minneapolis in September.  Learn more at Avaya@TranscendUnited.com.

Transcend United is one of the nation’s largest unified communications technology reseller.  Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

A recent blog post from Riverbed offers insight into the culture behind the company’s WAN optimization solutions, a culture of customer communication that Transcend United also lives by. 

Blogger Philip O’Toole, an engineer on the Riverbed Cloud Steelhead development team wrote from Fort Lauderdale, FL, about the Riverbed Advanced Access Program (RAAP). He explains:

"Before Riverbed release a new version of the RiOS software, several engineers go on-site with a pre-selected customer and install the pre-release code on their appliances. We discuss the new features with the customer, test it in their network, and return with their feedback to our colleagues at headquarters… It keeps us engineers in touch with the customers, shows us the strengths of our products in the field, and points out the areas needing improvement.

It also teaches us Development engineers to think about the product holistically — which was an explicit goal of the program when it was first devised… The RAAP helps us to design better products when we are reminded that Riverbed needs to sell a solution, not just a box running some clever software. 

…Speaking solely as a development engineer, customers located in the French Riviera, Hawaii, and Tahiti are particularly welcome. "

Riverbed® provides comprehensive WAN optimization solutions to a host of problems that prevent enterprises from sharing applications and data across wide-area networks anywhere in the world.

Riverbed WAN optimization solutions accelerate applications including: file sharing, email, backup, document management systems, IT tools, and ERP and CRM solutions. Steelhead® appliances and Steelhead Mobile increase network throughput and application performance by up to 100 times. Riverbed Cascade® provides enterprise-wide network and application visibility and analysis for both enterprise customers and service providers.

As a Riverbed Platinum Certified Partner, Transcend United’s IT optimization professionals are deeply involved in the real life performance of Riverbed products at Transcend client sites.

While installation of a Riverbed appliance can be simple enough to be done by a clever 6-year-old, creating the customized architecture for a specific implementation requires holistic knowledge of the client’s IT organization. 

Transcend engineers are certified by Riverbed to:

• Strategize:  Determine the business drivers, measure financial impact (TCO/ROI), and evaluate options for implementation.
• Design:   Identify and document requirements, technology standards, technical components, and the environmental landscape.
• Migrate:  Formulate the best options to migrate to the new solution architecture, considering relevant organizational, financial, security, and operational readiness factors.
• Implement:  Deploy, configure and test your WAN optimization solution according to Riverbed best practices.
• Operate:  Run, plan, redesign, analyze and measure your WAN optimization solution as your IT demands evolve.

“Transcend gets deep into the customer IT organization to deliver the best possible results," he adds.  "And sure, we’ll go to Tahiti – or Cleveland, or San Francisco, or Alaska in deepest winter – if a client needs us!"

Transcend United Technologies is one of the nation’s fastest-growing unified communications technology resellers in North America, offering advanced capabilities through core infrastructure vendors including Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, Riverbed, and LifeSize. Transcend United’s product portfolio includes solutions for service desk, IP Telephony, Wireless, WAN Optimization, Videoconferencing, and Backup/ Recovery including a state of the art 24 x 7 Network Operations Center (NOC).

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

As enterprises seriously consider how to maximize the benefits of social media, someone has to address the question of:  Who is responsible for it?  Which organization should make the technology, staffing and policy decisions regarding social media and social media interactions?  Who runs the show? 

Christian Goffi, Social Media Practice Lead at Avaya Global Services, argues that the call center is the ideal home for Social Media.  In a podcast interview with Telecomreseller, Goffi suggests that, while organizations are currently managing Social Media out of the sales, marketing and brand management departments, the unified communications call center has the experience, technology and metrics to successfully manage and profit from Social Media.

Goffi says a Social Media is not just a technology: at its best, it is a strategic corporate initiative that looks far beyond simply Facebook and Twitter.  It requires a well-developed policy of deciding when and how to engage in Social Media exchanges.  The strategy needs to integrate the divergent goals and objectives of internal organizations. It needs to realistically account for the organization’s flexibility and responsiveness to change.  

The Contact Center’s established relationship with the customer and established set of performance metrics are strong arguments, Goffi says, for giving the Call/Contact Center overall ownership of Social Media.  The question of whether a Social Media interaction replaces a phone call or is a new kind of interaction with a different audience is beside the point, he argues. It doesn’t matter how the customer chooses to interact, but how the organization responds.

Moving forward, Goffi suggests, top notch enterprises will capitalize on new call center technology features that make it possible to filter, prioritize and engage customers in the media they choose:  be it voice or other media.  Some are already adapting for Social Media the metrics developed to measure the effectiveness of their service agents in managing phone conversations and transforming such dialog into new sales. In other words, they are building on their telephony foundations to monetize social media. 

Transcend United is an Avaya Gold Partner.  Transcend United Technologies is one of the nation’s fastest-growing unified communications technology resellers in North America, offering advanced capabilities through core infrastructure vendors including Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, Riverbed, and LifeSize. Transcend United’s product portfolio includes solutions for service desk, IP Telephony, Wireless, WAN Optimization, Videoconferencing, and Backup/ Recovery including a state of the art 24 x 7 Network Operations Center (NOC).

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

"… Companies realize the importance of a Social interaction. It is not a one to one conversation, it is one to the world! Experienced staff is being handpicked that possess a deep understanding of company products and services while at the same time, are well connected within the enterprise. These are folks that are able to promptly get to the right source of information and get the answer to the customer fast and effectively."

Goffi blogged on what leading enterprises are doing for social media in a blog posting on The Social Media Customer Response Summit, which he described as "a wonderful event put together by the folks at ‘In The Know’ and it is meant to be a place for leading edge companies to share ideas, best practices and success stories with each other."

In his post, Goffi offers several recommendations for companies starting plan for social media.  In addition to calling on experienced staff to ‘represent’ in the cases where a single interaction can be viewed by the world, Goffi makes these ‘getting started’ suggestions:

• Do a Pilot:  No surprise here.  Smart companies have been running pilot programs to assess technologies, see how they work within the technical and organizational structure, evaluate what skills and resources are needed to tip the scales toward success, and build excitement and awareness for wider rollouts.
• 10 Seems to be the Magic Number:  Goffi observed that, of the attending companies engaged in social media experimentation, all seemed to naturally settle on pilot teams of about 7-10 members: this seems to be about the right size to get diversity of skill sets on the pilot team, while keeping the project manageable.
• Recruit Master Staff:  Knowledge of the company and products may trump “cool” when a bona fide company is establishing itself in the social media sphere.
• Consider Placing Responsibility for Social Media in the Customer Service Organization: The temptation to place social media under sales and marketing may be misguided. He suggests that the customer service organization has the installed infrastructure and experience to manage the expanding range of customer interactions.

Goffi’s concludes that Social Media is here to stay and that enterprises are just beginning to ‘scratch the surface’ on how social media will affect the enterprise-customer relationship.

Transcend United Technologies, now merged with LiquidSpoke, is one of the nation’s fastest-growing Unified Communications technology resellers. The combined entity is one of the largest technology resellers in North America, with Unified Communications expertise in platforms from ShoreTel, Avaya, Cisco, LifeSize, and extensive expertise in the WLAN architectures that now support these systems.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

• They earned their fourth US patent
• Storage Magazine-SearchStorage awarded them “Product of the Year” for Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware. 
• Their installed base continues to grow:  ExaGrid reported a Q2/11 sales increase of 40 percent over the same quarter for 2010, with the total number of customers climbing to 1000.   

Demonstrated Technology Leadership

ExaGrid received US Patent no. 7,925,623, the company’s fourth. The patent, which was registered in 2003, was awarded in April, 2011.

This new patent covers ExaGrid’s unique architecture for a two-tiered backup hardware storage system with a front-end landing space and back-end data deduplication repository. The front-end landing space, combined with ExaGrid’s post-processing approach to deduplication, creates the fastest possible backups and allows for the rapid creation of tape copies for offsite storage.

The separate back-end repository conserves disk storage capacity and inter-repository WAN/MAN bandwidth by incorporating Zone byte-level data deduplication.

Since each ExaGrid appliance within a system contains both a front-end landing space and back-end repository space, multiple appliances can be configured into a single GRID backup storage system, allowing end users to seamlessly scale systems in increments of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 or 13TB to a total capacity of 130TB without disruption.

As each appliance is added to the GRID, additional networking, CPU horsepower and memory are also included with the additional disk storage.  This allows the overall performance of the GRID of ExaGrid appliances to scale along with growing backup capacity, all without the need for costly forklift upgrades required with competitive single controller architectures.

ExaGrid’s disk backup hardware system with data deduplication supports the industry’s leading backup applications and utilities, including CA ARCserve, CommVault Simpana, HP Data Protector, Linux/Unix dumps, Microsoft SQL dump, Oracle RMAN dumps, Symantec Backup Exec, Symantec NetBackup, Veeam Backup and Replication, Quest  vRangerPro and VMware Backup.

Winning Awards and Customers

ExaGrid’s product has been named Storage Magazine-SearchStorage “Product of the Year” for Backup and Disaster Recovery Hardware.  The Storage Awards are Storage Magazine’s selection for outstanding products, services and companies.  ExaGrid also won Storage Magazine’s Channel Excellence Award.   

ExaGrid takes the Storage Magazine Channel Excellence Award	ExaGrid also wins the Storage Magazine "One To Watch" Award

Winning customers is, of course, the ultimate market award.

With more than 1,000 customers, ExaGrid grew its customer base and worldwide market share. ExaGrid now has the industry’s second largest installed base of scalable disk backup hardward appliances with data deduplication in mid-market and small enterprise companies, with more than 3,500 systems installed at more than 1,400 customer sites worldwide.

Approximately 50 percent of ExaGrid’s customers have virtually eliminated tape in their storage environments using ExaGrid appliances for both onsite and offsite disaster recovery backups.

Transcend United is a Valued ExaGrid partner, and one of the largest technology resellers in North America, offering advanced capabilities through core infrastructure vendors including Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, Riverbed, and LifeSize. Transcend United’s product portfolio includes solutions for service desk, IP Telephony, Wireless, WAN Optimization, Videoconferencing, and Backup/ Recovery including a state of the art 24 x 7 Network Operations Center (NOC).

Transcend United helps organizations solve real business problems such as improving application performance for branch offices, reducing voice, data, and video communications costs, ensuring business continuity in case of a disaster, and reducing staffing and operations costs in the data center.

Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.

Gartner has rated Avaya a “Leader” in new “2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant Analysis for Contact Center Infrastructure, Worldwide” report.  Avaya rated top in ‘ability to execute’ and raised its stature for ‘completeness of vision, with strengths related to the integration of Nortel technologies. 

While Gartner noted that some heritage Nortel/Avaya customers are concerned about Avaya’s expertise in Nortel technologies, for Transcend United heritage Nortel clients, technical expertise is a non-issue.  Transcend senior engineers have decades of Nortel experience. 

Gartner reports on the Avaya strengths that raised its Contact Center product portfolio to the top of the Magic Quadrant:

• “Avaya is moving steadily along its road map for delivering a comprehensive multimedia contact center suite using a single, cohesive architecture. Users have the flexibility to meter the pace of their adoption of the new architecture…”
• “Avaya has a strong vision for leveraging its Agile Communications Enablement (ACE)  platform to extend consistent customer service delivery models across a variety of customer interaction domains, whether inside or outside the traditional, structured contact center environment, and across a variety of vendors’ communication and collaboration solution sets.…”
• With the acquisition of Nortel, Avaya now holds the top market share position in contact center routing in terms of end-user revenue and agent shipments across all geographies globally. This provides the stability associated with strong product and service revenue and a large installed base.

Support for Transcend United’s Heritage Nortel Customers "A Non-Issue"

In addition to reporting on vendor strengths, the Gartner report also cautions readers on potential vendor weaknesses.  For Avaya: 

“Transcend United has a long and committed history with the Nortel technology.  Our senior-level engineers are expert in just about every Nortel application in the communications space.  We have decades and decades of Nortel experience within our senior engineering staff!”

Since 2003, Transcend United has been a Nortel Elite Advantage Partner, and was the first Nortel Partner in US to receive Expert Partner designation across all available categories. The firm served as one of only twelve members in the United States with executive-level participation on the Nortel VAR Council.

With 200+ certifications achieved across 25 technical and engineering team members, Transcend’s expertise, knowledge and experience on Nortel applications -  traditional TDM, IP Telephony, Unified Communications, CallPilot Multimedia Messaging, Contact Center, Wireless, T1/PRI/carrier network, CallPilot, etc.),  – is unmatched.   In addition, Transcend recently earned the Avaya On-Site Service Assessment for Implementation & Maintenance with a 97% Customer Satisfaction Scale Rating. 

Transcend United also hosts the Avaya Contact Center Association.

Transcend United is one of the nation’s largest unified communications technology reseller.  Transcend United is a member of the CRN Health Care 100, the VAR 500 and has offices or a sales presence in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Omaha, Austin, and Hyderabad, India.   Call 800-800-0353 or email info@TranscendUnited.com to learn more.