BizTech Next Level BizTech Podcast

54. Is Microsoft Teams Always a Right? Fit With Guest Andrew Bond

January 31, 2023

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Listen in as we wrap up an important talk track with Microsoft Teams and more. Today you’ll hear from our veteran partner in the space, Andrew Bond of Trinity Networks, as he talks Teams, UC & how he’s helped customers in distinguishing what they need in the changing tech landscape. He might even talk about a job offer he once got on a fax machine!

Transcript of episode can be found below.

Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next level BizTech. All right, everybody, welcome back. We are wrapping up the Microsoft Teams track. So, so this track is titled, is Microsoft Teams Always the Right Fit. So a as we get through this, we’re gonna answer that. And you know, who we’re gonna hear from today is we’ve got on one of our longtime fantastic partners, good old Mr. Andrew Bond from Trinity Network. Andrew, how you doing, man?

Andrew Bond (00:38):
Good, man. Thanks for having me on.

Josh Lupresto (00:41):
Appreciate you coming on. I know you got a lot of expertise. You’ve been doing this, so you’ve seen a lot of cool evolutions. And so before we get into the weeds and teams and all that good stuff, I want to hear about your background. You know, where, how did this space suck you in? Did you always know you wanted to do this? How did you get here?

Andrew Bond (00:59):
I had no idea I wanted to be here. I went to a college in Ellensburg, Washington called Central Washington University. Thought I wanted to be in banking and finance. And that just happened to be around the time that banks were starting to go out of business. One of them in particular are Washington Mutual, three rescinded offers later because the departments were being literally shut down before they announced the the mortgage crisis. I went to a fundraiser with a friend of mine and she sat me down on the table with a gentleman named Rick, and he said, man, you’re pretty cool. You should be in, you should be in the telecommunication space. And I was like, what is that? He goes, I was like, he’s like cell phones or something. He’s like, oh, no, that’s, that’s, don’t do that. That’s terrible. He’s like, no, you still like pots lines and t1 s I was like, I have no idea what that is, but tell you what, I’m working at a restaurant and a bank as a teller and another restaurant, and I’m lost.

Andrew Bond (02:01):
I was like, but I got a degree, and well, I’ll take a, you know, I’ll take an interview with somebody. So I went down to this office that he told me to go cold call, which was Integra Telecom sales office in Bellevue, before they had all these fancy towers in restaurants, in bars, and knocked on the door and asked for this guy named Michael Alexander. And he walked me into his sales manager’s office, which was Craig Hawley, and I asked him to interview me for a job, and the next week he brought me in, and then I moved to Florida. And then that guy, that same gentleman, Craig, tracked me down and gave me an offer over a fax machine, which was kind of funny. Yes, I had to go to a Tom phone to get the interview or to get the, the offer letter.

Andrew Bond (02:50):
My dad called me. He’s like, there’s this guy named Craig called the house like five times. He’s looking for you. He said, he wants to hire you. I was like, Hmm, all right. So I gave him this phone number. He is like, that’s in Destin, Florida. What are you, what are you down there for? So anyways, got my offer letter, got in my car a couple weeks later, drove from Destin, Florida back to Seattle, started training, see that was in like November. Started training in December and had a quota in January, and God, the rest was history. And then, and then I got a wild hair started here in the, actually it was my neighboring office partner at the Integra office was the channel manager for Integra. Hmm. And I kept, you know, hearing about their models. I inquired, got a little interested in it, and at month 10 of employment after getting my first President’s Club award, I quit my job and became an agent and had waited out for a few months due to some threats by HR for non-competes and Nons solicits, but mm-hmm. took a little sabbatical with my earnings over the last 10, 11 months and figured it out. Met a really great man named Mark Brewster, and we kind of figured things out. And here I am selling a lot of different products. I never thought I would know, understand or even think to Google or watch a YouTube video about, or talk to your team about

Josh Lupresto (04:28):
. I, I love it. You know, this always solidifies to so many great people and great things came out of Integra. I, I don’t know where this space would be without that. I mean, there, there was just so much that I, I just think so many goodness, so many people that started so many awesome things out of that. So I’d love to hear the, love to hear the backstory. again, proves the windy path model, right? Nobody sets out to do this, but like, you, like we were talking before the podcast, it just kind of sucks you in, you know,

Andrew Bond (04:55):
Hooked. God, I can remember my first product training with my sales engineer back then. I was so, like, oh, this is so interesting why I didn’t even, I wasn’t even drawn it. I took my tech some, like, high level technology classes in college. I was like, why weren’t they this interesting? But I guess it’s just you’re hustling to do stuff, so you wanna learn.

Josh Lupresto (05:19):
Yeah, no, it keeps, it keeps us, keeps us moving on learning, learning new things. I think that’s the, that’s the goodness in it. Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about, you know I, I wanna really start out with, you know, we’re, we’re talking again teams and, and we’ll get into some differentiators around that. But walk me through maybe just your first iteration of really where you started to see, you see uc, proliferate, and first time you heard about Teams. Right? Let’s start at the beginning. What, what was that exposure like?

Andrew Bond (05:49):
My first uc experience was terrible. . I was one of the first agents in Seattle to sell speakeasy hosted telephony solution, or their hosted VoIP solution. And I think the first 10 customers I brought on board, and they’re pretty decent size, I first thought like, wow, this is gonna be great. I don’t need to send my leads to phone system vendors anymore. I can build a practice out of this. And they all, I think all of ’em return their equipment and said bad idea. So, kind of chipped my tooth on that. And then fast forward a number of years, I met a company called G 12, and they told me I should still fho hosted phone with them. And I laughed at ’em. I was like, whatever. No way. You’re crazy. I’m not doing that. And they kind of brought me out from the grave of disbelief and, and uc.

Andrew Bond (06:40):
And, and even then, I didn’t sell it a ton. It was just, it was always there. I would do it for my own customer base, but it’s such a lead generation referral business built up with phone vendors and IT vendors. I kind of just tread, you know, tread it real carefully. But yeah. And then, you know, my first iteration of seeing what is now teams is skyper business vendors. So I started getting into selling SIP trunks for skyper business vendors and figuring out, you know, what trunks they needed that, you know, what SIP trunk providers worked with, what SBC providers partnering with them, just, you know, trying to use CPE vendor, you know, telephony vendor to, to make, you know, more MRC, right? Mm-Hmm. . So that was my first version of it. That was the safe version for me. Like I could find the, I could find the, the SBC vendor and the integrator, and then I could sell trunks to them. And then, you know, then today, now it’s, it’s teams. So,

Josh Lupresto (07:36):
So what I, I is that, I guess, you know, that that first deal or that first engagement, right? Where, where you learned about teams and, and kind of in, in the uc side, were there any aha moments for you in there? Did, was it, you know, what, I guess, what was the shining moment in that or anything that made you think differently about a thing you thought before once you got to go through it?

Andrew Bond (07:57):
I guess us as a company were going, I was going through this moment where I was like, God, I have so many tools that I use. I really just wanna like, condense it into this like one place. And teams hadn’t come about yet. And, and Slack was there and I, I think it’s when Slack, when I started using Slack with other enterprise organizations, like they would bring me into their org mm-hmm. , I was like, gosh, I could really build my workflows in here. And then, you know, Skype had been acquired and Microsoft was figuring out what the, or they had, wait, Skype had already been acquired. They’re figuring out what to do with them. Like, is this gonna be a, a chat tool? Yeah. And once they made the, the transfer into collaboration, and then obviously the Zoom showed up, it was like, oh, wait a minute, this is gonna change the phone side of the equation big time.

Andrew Bond (08:46):
Like, it might even kill you see as we see it, it’s just gonna be collaboration and then we’re gonna see consolidation amongst all this over time. And we’re kind of seeing that now, right? Yeah. And now I see probably, cuz I’m in the Pacific Northwest is Zoom and Teams, and it’s an easy grab, not an easy, but it’s, it’s a, it’s a nice transitional pickup for the agent. And that agent can go into an account or the consultant or whatever, and I go, Hey, you’ve got Zoom users over here, you’ve got team users over here. There’s a way to make it all in one and let’s just make it easy for your org. Provide a, a user experience and an administrator experience. That’s great. And doesn’t waste our time like managing so many vendors and, right. I think that’s what’s great about Teams. I use it, I have their, you know, team’s phone turned on. Every client that I speak with, I have, I talk about Teams phone, if they have Zoom, I try to turn into a Zoom phone user. Like that’s the aha. Aha is like, Hey, I can grab these licenses and, you know, do good by your customer and then honestly make your money along the way.

Josh Lupresto (09:56):
So, so as you get into those conversations though, what, let’s talk about the hard things. What, what are the, some of the difficulties you face, right? If you, if you go into these conversations, is it people that just don’t totally understand the capabilities, people that have old tech, that they just, it’s work, they don’t see the need for it? What are some of the hard parts about those conversations when you’re talking to prospects

Andrew Bond (10:18):
Mm-Hmm. , I think the first one is stop googling bad things about Microsoft Teams. , it’s gonna tell you the bad things, right? ? Yeah. Like, I realize this bad stuff. I’m like, no, no, no, just think about it this way. Just the, the hard part is them understanding how do they transition from local PBX and hosted phone to their collaboration tool that’s gonna be their phone system. And how are they gonna manage that and are they gonna manage it in house? Are they gonna manage it externally? How can you make that easy for ’em? Right? And as you go down to like the, the solutions technology track your job is to make it, to identify the technology that makes it easier for them to run their business, whether it’s small business, medium, large, enterprise, whatever. Right. And, you know, during Covid staffing was terrible and activating, you know, users on the fly was the most important thing, especially remotely and with teams, you know, educating the customer on how to do that and just like opened up this huge door. And I think the panic around that time allowed that like you know, that that customer worry, they kind of just are like, just make it happen, Andrew. Like, who do I need to do to make this happen? Yeah. Whereas before they’re like, well we have, you know, we’ve had the system for a while, it kind of works, but then it didn’t Yeah. And had to do it. That roadblock was like almost removed from that, that moment. Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (11:39):
Kind of curious is, you know, as you’ve been in this space so long and the success that you’ve had, has there been any vertical that you’ve had more success in? Or maybe a vertical that you’ve not focused in because it’s just, it hasn’t, they haven’t understood it as well or, you know, curious in that? Or is it, is it everybody at this point?

Andrew Bond (11:58):
Everybody has a Microsoft license, three ,five, they should have teams in some capacity. Well, they will have teams, they should have teams phone in that capacity, especially for the simple of the uc user. I’ve had a lot of success with healthcare construction companies in the last couple years just because that’s been my biggest like, growth area. And that’s, I have a lot of accounts in that, in, in that vertical. But anybody has a license, it’s like, Hey, might as well use it. If not, you’re just not, you’re not maximizing what you’re already paying for. So kind of throwing it away for people with double licenses, right? Yeah. So you can bring Zoom into team and teams into Zoom and, you know, try to simplify that experience. So

Josh Lupresto (12:44):
That’s a good point. I, I want to, I wanna get in here in a second to, you know, where it was direct routing and operator connect and all of that good stuff. But, but let’s start real quick with you. Bring up a great point of, of a lot of these people already have some sort of elic. What, what percentage of them maybe ballpark it here, do you find as you get in the trenches with them, understand how to do teams for voice on their own?

Andrew Bond (13:09):
I think they’re like 20%. They know, like they have the license, but they just don’t, what do they need to activate? What type of license does the user have to have or it’s technical conversation. It’s no different than, Hey, I sipped trunks for this phone system. What SBC do I need? You know, it’s just like, what, what kind of dots do I need to connect to make this work? And, you know, and it’s way easier now than it was back then.

Josh Lupresto (13:34):
Oh yeah, no doubt.

Andrew Bond (13:35):
I mean, operator connect, just check the provider you want, right?

Josh Lupresto (13:41):
Yeah. well, let’s, let’s dive into that. So I remember, you know, when, when all the crazy stuff happened in 2020, Shane and I, and we all in our internal engineering and Andrew Bowser, everybody, we sat down and we said, okay, this direct routing thing is all coming out and there’s Microsoft Teams and it wasn’t a thing. Now it’s a thing. And, and, and all of our providers popped up and said, we have direct routing. And we said, okay, cool. Everybody’s got direct routing. Great. And then as we went and we quantified that, we said, tell us how you’re architecting it. Tell us how you’re built. And some would come in and say, well, I mean we can, we can connect you to Microsoft Teams. Well no, it can’t, you can’t make a native call out of the team’s client. We have to bring up our third party app.

Josh Lupresto (14:24):
And then others would come to us and they would say, well, we’ve actually got the Azure, our SBCs that are Microsoft approved the Ribbon SBCs, or whatever they are. They’re in our virtual Azure cluster adjacent to the Microsoft network. You know, so there were clear differentiators but it, you had to get to the architecture to kind of see through the marketing side of it so that, you know, that being said, now that we’ve evolved a little bit from teams with voice to direct routing and then operator Connect now comes out onto the scene what are you finding that that talk track is like, are you, are you getting asked, oh, do I need direct routing or operator connect? Are you just going in with Operator Connect? What, what’s that conversation like?

Andrew Bond (15:07):
I try to go in with an open mind to what experience the customer wants and and respect how much they want to manage and technically manage and what they want the experience to be. Cuz they’re gonna be with that experience in management for the next 2, 3, 5 years. I haven’t done a ton of operator connect deals because most of my customers, they just like the phone system managed by their external or internal IT guy. They just like, they don’t wanna do it anymore. They just wanna like outsource that task to somebody else and ends up being Bridge or with a, with a vendor that actually builds the Microsoft phone system and then they procure the operator connect themselves. But it’s like a hosted phone provider, right? Right. And they just charge per seat. So I try to respect that and I, I try to just make sure that that decision that they make, if they don’t like it, they can pivot another direction without like causing anything catastrophic in the form of an ETF

Josh Lupresto (16:10):
Fair.

Andrew Bond (16:11):
But I, I’ve, you can go what, three pathways now, right? You can do Bridge into their phone system with an sbc, you can do Operator Connect by building a Microsoft phone system, or you can do I guess the other version of Teams Bridge, which is their, you know, hosted phone provider connected to Microsoft. And then the user net sees who the, that uc provider is. And I guess there’s the ones that put their app inside of teams as well, which not a huge fan of, but I, it’s cool, like if you have that, those providers today, I won’t mention their names, but if they’re, if they’re with those providers today, they can easily transition to that teams experience. Yeah. Again, customer, customer wants, right? They want, they want to take their X, y, Z VoIP company and put it in there, capable of it, and then do it.

Josh Lupresto (16:56):
Yeah. I, I think the, the important thing that helped us, at least from an engineering perspective was when you know, we, we were going down the road for just a traditional uc pre-sales discovery, you know, conversation to understand what they needed. We found ourselves from never having to say, you know, anything about teams to just a pre-qual of, Hey, do you have Microsoft teams? How do you want to use it? How do you plan on using it? Because those seem to pop up at the very end of like, oh yeah, by the way, we have teams. And now that’s such a more meaningful interaction of we just, we have to ask half of our questions in a discovery have to be around that or their expectations to use it or limits. Cuz you know, some of the, I think some of the uc, others have, have conditioned them to think that, yeah, I can do anything that I need in here. So it’s interesting in that

Andrew Bond (17:41):
You, you know what I think teams has done a good job of cuz of their, their collaboration tool is like, so it’s, so, it’s, it’s widespread and out there so quick. You don’t have to do as much discovery because you’re just, in most cases, I mean not maybe not large global enterprises, but large business and below, you’re just turning on teams phone, showing people how to use the phone system. You could run ’em in parallel with other systems until the user education catches up to it. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty,

Josh Lupresto (18:12):
It’s easy. Not

Andrew Bond (18:13):
Like cut the cord of the PBX and swap your phone numbers tomorrow and everybody’s running around the office like a chicken with its head cut off, like a funny dysfunction, you know?

Josh Lupresto (18:21):
Yeah, yeah. You can easily run in parallel, no doubt.

Andrew Bond (18:24):
Nice. A nice transition.

Josh Lupresto (18:25):
Yeah, it’s good point. Let’s, let’s get into, you know, let, let, let’s pick a more recent example of something that you’ve worked on. And we can leave customer names out of this or, you know, one that you’re working on or have worked on recently. Would love to, to kind of hear from, I I think part of the message on this podcast is, you know, the deals don’t always, the way that they finish doesn’t always end up being the same as what we thought it was when we started it. So I would love to hear a good example of something that you walked into and maybe here’s what they said it was versus here’s the tech stack they actually had. Here’s the tech stack. They actually ended up here are the problems that they had. Right? And how did, how did we solve all this?

Andrew Bond (19:05):
You’re speaking specifically in like uc contact center? Yeah.

Josh Lupresto (19:09):
Uc, contact center teams that will lump it in there anyway that you see fit.

Andrew Bond (19:15):
Yeah, I think the most recent one during Covid, I, I was, I’ve never been through a recession in this, you know, being an independent agent, you know, I, I started in the recession and then came out of it. So I was never really, really impacted. I think it was a benefit to me to start and the way it was, cause it kind of made you grind a little bit. But, you know, covid happened. I kind of sat in my office and was very quiet for a little while. I was like, well, here it is. It comes to big recession. I don’t, I don’t know what to do with this. And then the phone started ringing and email started going and was when people started scrambling to get their users remote. And I just happened to have three really big customers that had issues with their on-prem or hybrid on-prem systems you know, like virtualize, you know, virtualize a via Mitel or whatever mm-hmm.

Andrew Bond (20:12):
Or hybrid, hybrid hybrid setup. And as we dug into it, that barrier was moved once they had that problem activating new users, having good quality with those users. So that, that triggered with one of my larger customers today, a pretty large cloud contact center deal, which then transitioned to a very large UCAST deal. So over 2,700 users. And in the midst of that is when teams was kind of growing on the telephony side and becoming to be a lot easier to use with the eight by eight bondages and like G 12 s in the world, right? Mm-Hmm. . So I was able to pick up UCAST teams integration and then really get my mind embedded in it. Like the bright light had already gone off in my mind. I just haven’t had a chance to, to trade or transition that with a customer deal that magnitude.

Andrew Bond (21:05):
And it was so, it was so easy. Maybe call it the vendor and the technology, or both the customers really complicated. You know, high touch high action customer calls every single day for months on end. But the amount of involvement, once the, the solution was put in place in their activating it, now it’s just, it was easy from my side and the customer side. And even like the, the, that customer still has their internal people that rolled that out and they’re like, that was so much easier. Like, why couldn’t have been that way with the other vendor? I’m like, oh, it’s just two different types of technologies, right? Yeah. other ones, you know, on the, I’m really starting to get into Estie WAN cloud security, and I’m, I am pleasantly surprised that my managed service provider, IT consulting community that I’ve serviced for over a decade plus, they’re starting to jump in and, and want to talk with, you know, the Catos and the halos and the, you know, the aggregators and the actual owners of the, of the technology stacks and try to make that a part of their solution offering.

Andrew Bond (22:13):
And even the customers, like, you bring it up and you’re like, Hey, I want to see what your, you know, what your direction is with your network is, is this year and your security, I have these list of vendors. Would you like any, want me to host any appointments? And you don’t have to be the subject matter expert of this stuff, right? You have to be the procurement expert, not the subject matter expert. And that’s something I’ve done a good job of, of refining in the last four years and, and showing them how I’m gonna be that procurement specialist. I always say like, I’m, I’m a subject matter generalist of all of this stuff, and here’s my, and be awesome. Like, here’s your expertise. Here’s my, here’s my generalist stuff, here’s my, and also that expertise is the procurement side of this. And, you know, vetting these vendors out and looking at price and making sure you follow that that price timeline and that technology timeline. So yeah. That’s

Josh Lupresto (23:05):
Good. That’s good. I love it. I I love that it just starts with an inquisitive mindset of what are you doing for this? I mean, that’s all, that’s all we’ve ever talked about, right? And, and I think early on in, in the security world, if we, if we tried to push some of the security initiatives that we’re pushing now to customers 5, 6, 7, 10 years ago I remember when we did some of that and they would say, wait a minute, you wanna put this fully managed box in my environment that I don’t get to touch and have visibility onto what it does ? Yeah. Right. Try again, buddy. Now we’re having that conversation to where you’ve got this massive, you know, oh,

Andrew Bond (23:42):
Like a cup of that .

Josh Lupresto (23:43):
Yeah. You you got this shortage shortage and they’re, they’re, they’re the either a, they can’t get the tech from supply chain, so they need it managed as a service or they don’t have the right people, or they didn’t, you know, even pre employee shortage, they didn’t have the right security people anyway. And now over the last couple years, I think the, the bad guys have gotten a couple steps ahead. And so people are all trying to play catch up. And so we’re just trying to help ’em fill those gaps. And so I I, I love your, your questioning mindset because it does, it just opens down those doors because they’re gonna do these things. They’re gonna tackle 30, 40% of their security initiatives, whether they like it or not. And all you’ve gotta do is just ask. And that question before that was a no, we’re not, is to, yeah, to your point, we’ll, we’ll take seven of those, or whatever it might be.

Andrew Bond (24:25):
I la like last year and the year before I did, I even did a managed Meraki deal for a customer. I had, I was like, really? You guys wanna manage this with Meraki? And it came to a staffing issue, like a pure, we can’t find employees to staff tier one and Meraki specialists. Like we just, we can’t find ’em and we can’t staff ’em. But yeah, all the things I remember going to like, your, your guys’ and various other distributor, you know, boot camps and five years ago I was like, I would I ever sell that? I’m not a contact center expert. I’m just gonna , I’m gonna stay over here now fast forward. I’m like, oh, that’s why you do it. Okay. Got it. And it makes, our industry would be so boring if we just sold pots lines and tea, you know? Well, you don’t sell pots lines in T West, but I’m just saying like, yeah, the old, the old product sets, like you sell that it’s gonna be boring and, and they’re gonna expire, right? So just keep moving forward. You’ve got, you guys have done an excellent job with your, you know, claris universities and the other vendors. They’ve, it’s wild to see how much the, the free education, we have access to a few clicks in our, you know, a, a registration.

Josh Lupresto (25:30):
I just, I, I, I think we just have to appreciate the kind words. And I, I think we, there’s just the, the rate of change over the last couple years has been unlike anything that I’ve even ever seen in the last 10 to 15 years. And so we have to just do our best to help everybody keep up. It used to be easy to do it at event after event, and there’s just, there’s so much and there’s so different, so much different technology, and now it’s just different and it’s harder. And so yeah, we’ve, we’ve gotta be able to put that stuff out in front of their, and you know, obviously as well as all the resources and things like that. But no, it’s, it’s a good, it’s a good time to be in it. And yeah, there is no shortage of what, can I grab off the menu anymore? For sure.

Andrew Bond (26:06):
Yeah. I mean, you guys bring on a new employee, it makes it so much easier with the various universities. I’m like, oh my gosh, I couldn’t even, with everything else going on, like begin to, like, where would I start? I’m like, oh, you start here and you start here. It’s great. So what I gotta ask you, like, what’s, what’s the new sexy acronym or product coming down the pipe?

Josh Lupresto (26:29):
Oh, man. It’s, it’s hard to say. I, I, I don’t, I mean, I, I don’t think there’s anything incredibly new and revolutionary per se. I, I do think that all of the technologies that are out there are just gonna get iterated on a little bit, and we’re gonna have to be ready for all of those iterations, right? So our job, I think from an engineering perspective is to pay attention to all those and see is the next thing that comes out, the next greatest thing in a major paradigm shift, or is a little bell and whistle that got a great marketing logo and, and things like that behind it, right? I mean, think about to specifically to, to the contact center you know, we have to pay attention a lot to, to chatbots and the AI and the artificial agent and, and all of those things because you’re gonna walk into a deal tomorrow and you’re gonna have to make a determination, can I lift and, and unseat this entire platform?

Josh Lupresto (27:22):
Or do they already have an investment, but that invest them investment doesn’t allow them to put a chatbot on the website and then transfer that call to a live agent. So now they’re gonna need that chatbot, and maybe that’s your wedge product to get in and help them and help them modernize. So, so for us it’s just about, you know, staying on top of each discipline like that, you know, security as well. Similar story, but really just staying in front of all of those because I think there’s, there’s been so much money you know, in the last 10 years thrown at the tech stack and the tech space and Silicon Valley and startups and blah, blah, blah, that now we’re just reaping I think the growth of all that and the productization of all that. And so it’s a matter of just sorting through as this growth slows down, hopefully from the products wise of going, okay, these are the 75 things we need to be aware of, not 75 new ones every month.

Andrew Bond (28:15):
Yeah. Cool.

Josh Lupresto (28:16):
It’s fun though. It’s fun.

Andrew Bond (28:18):
It is.

Josh Lupresto (28:20):
I, I would love a, as we wrap this up, I would love to kick it back to you, speaking of kind of the future here of, you know, you’ve, you’ve seen some great evolutions in this. You’ve seen, you know Skype and all, all these things come from nothing to now be this massive, hundreds of millions of users a month. So curious from your perspective, you know, this could be advice for partners that aren’t maybe aren’t yet stepping into this space. What do you think Protips, and really, where do you think this space all goes?

Andrew Bond (28:51):
Well, I think we’re, we are at is where it went, right? I don’t know where it’s really going in the future, but all this stuff that has happened in the last like five years, you’ve been consuming this education and, and products that are out there. Like, you’re gonna grow your, your tiber, your, your net new customers, everything’s gonna grow. I don’t, I don’t know technology wise, like I’m gonna stay in the stuff that I know and I have, and I can take a, a Telarus University education track or a breakout session with you guys or conversations like this and, and turn into a customer conversation and engagement into new MRC. But yeah, I think, I guess in conclusion, I, I think in the uc side, I think teams and Zoom are the future, and it’s gonna get consolidated to just that and our space and watch it in your base, and it’ll lead to more landing and expanding. Like I’ve told people, I get into accounts on dedicated internet or coming on a teams discussion or maybe Estee Wan, and then you just expand out from there. So these, these new conversations may not convert to MRC by product, but it’ll expand you into other stuff really quick.

Josh Lupresto (30:10):
Great point. It’s good stuff. Golden nuggets. Okay. That wraps us up, man. Mr. Bond, I appreciate you coming on with me today, buddy.

Andrew Bond (30:18):
Yeah, thanks for your time. We look forward to speaking with you. And we need to get Mr. Speakman some newly labeled golf balls with some jokes on him.

Josh Lupresto (30:27):
. We will do, man. Let me take us out. Okay, everybody that wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Andrew Bond, Trinity Networks. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, this Next Level, BizTech.