Telarus BizTech Unboxed: Fusion’s Full Stack Technology Solutions, and Cake!

Hey everybody. Welcome back to BizTech Unboxed. I’m your host Josh Lupresto SVP of Sales Engineering. Joined here today with my good buddy, Matt Nelson, Director of Engineering at Fusion. Welcome in man.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate you guys taking the time.

Guys, listen. You’ve seen a lot of weird stuff on this BizTech Unboxed. We’ve had box cutters. We have had blocks. We have had different ways to do things. Never before a knife, but I was promised some cake.

So we’re just gonna jump right into it.

And I know it looks like I have a kilton, but I guess we got aprons, Yeah.

You gotta have an apron to bake.

Let’s do it, man.

Alright, dude. We got a lot of stuff here. You got a lot of layers to go through. Give us a little quick background on who Fusion is, just the foundation, and then we’re gonna get into kind of the base layers here.

Absolutely. So a lot of folks think of Fusion as a network aggregator. There’s a lot of folks that think that we’re just a a Microsoft licensing provider, but what we’re gonna go through today is the full stack of offerings that Fusion has.

Alright. Let’s let’s kick it off with what do we agree? This is Royal Blue. Let the chat.

Royal Blue?

I suppose. Alright. What do we got here?

Managed Network and security. This is the the base or the foundation of any business in our eyes. And when you break down these little icons throughout the bottom there, really what we’re talking about is switches, access points, routers, Internet connectivity, whether that’s satellite or five g or fixed access.

Okay. So you got all the connectivity sides covered. A lot of different options there that everybody can kind of see as you look at this.

As I look at things like SD WAN and Edge and Wi Fi and LAN and all that, I think you got a lot of good OEMs that you got to call out here. So you know, that’s just the way that people come to us. Hey, who do we have that does this OEM? So who are the OEMs you want to call out right here?

Yeah. More often than not, that’s what we get on incoming requests is, hey, can you manage my Meraki network? Meraki is big for us. Fortinet has been a really valuable partner for Fusion, and then VeloCloud is a is a staple for fast failover.

Man, walk us through maybe just you got a gigantic opportunity here. Walk us through that. There’s a lot going on here.

This is a this is actually a great example. I think about a couple of things here. First, if I draw your attention just to the value of the deal, a hundred and thirty six k a month, that’s that’s a big deal, especially when you think about the upfronts that are that are paid out to TAs. But from Fusion’s perspective, it’s the five point five million dollar total contract value. You know, that’s that’s what we’re after. And the way that we got into this particular opportunity was initially just providing network access, the the foundation layer. But we quickly found out that a massive Meraki network that they wanted somebody to manage for them.

That’s pretty common though. I mean you see that it’s well, look, we would love to sell them everything. Right? Not that a hundred thirty six isn’t giant, but like if they don’t have this tech, surely we can sell them that tech. Obviously, and manage it net new, but you get into some of these via just a takeover. Right?

Yeah. That’s absolutely right. And I I it’s one of the reasons that I work for Fusion. There’s a lot of flexibility. There’s a lot of thinking outside of the box. We’re not just pinned to one or two core products. We will customize solutions.

Love it. Alright. Do we get up to what do we say this was? Royal Blue.

Royal Blue. Guys debate that amongst yourselves in the chat. Chats going crazy. Alright. What do we got here?

We’re talking collab and communications. What’s cooking?

Yeah. So when we think about collab and communications, we’re obviously thinking about the traditional UCaaS type of products that are out there.

But also SIP trunks or pots in a box, pots replacement type of products.

So obviously, you know, Teams is hot. There’s a lot of stuff cooking there. You’ve got the Talkdesk partnership as we go deeper into CX.

Pots replacement, what kind of gear are you guys using on for pots replacement? Shout out to Graeme Scott. Pots is hot still.

For our POTS replacement product, we’re using the Data Remote Box. I the thing that I really appreciate about Data Remote is their intense focus on certification. Whether it be fires, alarms, elevators, and I know lots of folks say that, but these guys are relentless and they’re bringing new gear to the market. They’ve got some of the longest battery life of any POTS replacement device out there. So we they’re a really valuable partner. We like working with them.

You got a good higher education example. Love to see that. Walk us through what do we have here? What happened? Why did we replace it? And how was their life better?

Yeah. Another really really good example, and this happens more often than not when we get whether it’s a college campus or senior living facilities, they’ve got this aging infrastructure, and they’ve got these POTS lines that they’re being notified are going away. So that is our foot in the door for this particular opportunity.

But as soon as we got in there, we discovered that they had an aging Cisco system, expiring gear. They needed a solution, and we were able to layer in Teams Operator Connect for their calling.

Love it. Love how these just expand. I mean, we’ve grown up in this space, it seems like deals never finish where they start. We always just find more. Right? So that’s a great door opener for you guys regardless where you came in.

Alright. I had a think I had a car this color once. Wasn’t really a crowd favorite. A little bit of teal maybe there.

That’s that’s teal. I don’t know. Alright. Add on solutions. You got a lot of stuff here.

Walk us through that.

Yeah. There’s quite a bit here. And when I talk about add on solutions, these are add ons to all of the layers or all of the independent products below it. The most popular things to call out, texting inside of Teams.

It’s it’s the way that people communicate. You gotta have the ability to send and receive text from your work phone But there’s other things like providing a basic compliance call recording, notifying people that they’re being recorded, or even attendant consoles, receptionist consoles. Some of the things that we tend to forget about sometimes and and leave behind. We can layer all of that into the Teams interface, make things as easy as possible for folks.

Yeah. Are you seeing I I know you guys got a specialty here in this call recording side of things. Walk me through that a little bit. Why is that so meaningful right now?

Well, there’s a couple of reasons. One of the things that Teams native call recording is lacking is the ability to enforce compliance. And when I say that, what I mean is I want all outbound calls recorded or I want all inbound calls to this particular hunt group recorded and I don’t want that user to have the option to turn off that call recording. So that’s that’s what I say is the the compliance side of call recording. But then in addition to that, it’s just the storage. The the lengthy storage and retrieval of those recordings. So if you need ten years, we can accommodate that.

Got it. Alright. Then let’s go to the example here on the add on side, transportation provider. What happened here?

Well, so this is another example that we see a lot of.

Customers coming to us and saying, hey, I’ve got seven different vendors. I’ve got contract dates end dates all over the place. I need to simplify my life operationally. I need to make things easier to manage.

So this particular opportunity, trucking and logistics firm, they’re already using Teams Calling, but they had different contract end dates on that versus all of their e three and regular Microsoft licensing. So that was our end for this particular opportunity. We can do both those things. We can unify the contract end dates, manage it all for you and oh by the way, we can provide SMS, MMS that’s fully compliant as well.

Got it. Good.

There is there’s one other thing I suppose that we need to add to this. There’s always one thing that creeps into the conversations anywhere that we’re talking about and it’s our good friend down here, mister AI. So walk me through, if I get the placement right there. Perfect.

Walk me through what does AI mean to you guys? You’ve got some notes up here.

What is that? What are you guys doing there?

Well, there’s it’s one of the most ambiguous subjects out there I feel like. Everyone knows they need AI, but they don’t know what kind of AI they need. They don’t know what the application is. So what Fusion is focused on right now is layering in the AI to the places it makes sense.

A good example is contact center. AI is easy to use, but where do I use it in my contact center? Well, you’re reporting and analytics. Assembling reports, something as that simple, applying AI, really helps out efficiencies in the contact center.

How do I front end my contact center? Intelligent virtual agents. That’s another place where AI fits in. But we wanna take it a little bit beyond that too.

When we think about security and SASE and network gear back down to this base layer, we want to consume all of that data along with the network access, the circuits, and produce actionable intelligence that somebody can work on.

AI is the way to do that. That’s how you assemble all of that data. So without giving away some of the products that we’re getting ready to to release, I think that’s a good teaser.

Oh, fair. Alright. We love a little teaser.

Alright. Then I suppose as it says in my contract, you know, where they take out the purple Skittles in the green room and there’s the other thing is cake that I get. We got cake. So maybe as I cut this, walk us through here with my friendly little pointer here.

How do you want everybody to think about you guys? What do you want the the walk away message to be? Think fusion when you got a lot of things that you can help people with here. So what do what do you want the message to be?

What we do and and that’s the key to it.

It’s one product. It’s the full stack of products. I don’t have thirty different SD WAN providers. Right? But I do have best of breed SD WAN providers.

I can provide network access and I can assemble that into a single view, single pane of glass for the customer and make their lives easier. So to me, when I think about this, it’s about efficiency. You know, how do I reduce vendors and make the customer’s life easier?

I love it. Let’s dig in. Well, I think that’s a good spot. Cake turned out great.

We got a lot of layers in here. Cobalt, royal blue, sea green, orange. I I don’t know, man. But I think that that wraps us up.

Oh, we got one more for those watching and those listening. We do have a little promo action going on. You wanna talk to them about this for mister tonight?

Just to generate some interest, we wanna reward some TAs who think of us. And so if you reach out to Samantha, you can scan the QR code there and register a lead. You’re going to get a gift card.

Love it. Okay. Alright. Well, I think that’s all we got. Matt, dig in. Let’s go.

Okay. Alright. Until next time. Thanks everybody.