HITT- Securing Advanced Business Solutions in Cybersecurity and CX- May 20, 2025

The video discusses the importance of securing advanced business solutions in the context of cybersecurity and customer experience (CX). Industry experts, including Jason Kaufman and Mikey B, highlight the growing threat landscape exacerbated by AI technologies, which enable new forms of impersonation and fraud. The session emphasizes the need for effective customer identity verification, particularly in the financial sector, and showcases a platform that integrates voice biometrics to enhance security measures. A live demo illustrates how the system verifies identities while accommodating various voice characteristics. The presentation concludes with a focus on technology integration and the importance of reliable solutions for underserved rural markets.

Transcript is auto-generated.

Introduction to High Intensity Technical Training

First, it is time for today’s high intensity technical training. And as always, your comments and questions are welcome in the chat window. We’ll do some live q and a after the call. We’ll also be responding to questions during the call. Today’s discussion revolves around securing the wide variety of advanced solutions available to business. You’ve got cloud, CX, AI, advanced networking, SD WAN, IoT.

We’re going to talk about the threat landscape as it affects all of these and the massive opportunity that exists to recommend powerful solutions that address these needs and the associated threats.

Telarus cybersecurity solutions architect, Jason Kaufman, and Mikey b, Michael Baillargeon, UC and CC solutions architect, they will both present today’s hitt training along with industry experts that they’ll introduce from Content Guru, a leading global provider of enterprise cloud CX and contact center solutions and at the forefront of generative AI evolution.

Jason and all, welcome to each of you. Glad to have you here today.

Cybersecurity and CX: An Interesting Combination

Yeah. Thanks for having us. If you look at the, the screen right now, you’re probably thinking, hey. That looks like a great, great band right there with Mike probably leading guitarist, Keith on the drums. But, no, we’re just here to talk about technologies, specifically cybersecurity and CX.

The fab fives. With the fab fives.

I like it.

So so yeah. One thing we wanted to go over today, and you’re you’re probably wondering, hey. You know, cybersecurity and CX, you know, it’s an interesting combination.

And I wanted to define a problem in the cybersecurity space that is being solved with CX.

Usually, Mikey b is always coming to me in the exact opposite. He’s like, hey, I got a problem over here on CX world, and I need help with the cybersecurity in order to solve it. So as soon as I had a question right here that we need to flip that and have him solve a problem for me, he’s like, let’s put that on the Tuesday call, like right now in the hit series because I wanna show people that I’m not always coming to you. So this is why we wanted to highlight this.

So we can go to the next slide. If you’ve been to any of our events, you know, the GEAR UPs, the Ascends, Partner Summit, you know, we’re starting to finish up all the landscape on that one. It was really cool breakout sessions. You guys haven’t signed up, please do.

But one of the things we’re always talking about this year is how to take between the CX and security space. And as you can see, we’re gonna define one of those today.

But if you’ve been to any of our events, you’ve seen this slide time and time again, and here’s a real practical example of that.

You’ve seen this slide time and time again, and here’s a real practical example of that. So let’s go to the, to the next slide and define this problem. So the problem this time, I wanted to say it as a cybersecurity problem, is the growing threat landscape. So if you’ve been on any of our cybersecurity HIT calls or any of our cybersecurity trainings, a lot of things we go over is what AI is enabling in the threat landscape and the expansion of that.

AI’s Role in Expanding Threats

So now you can you know, people are leveraging AI generative AI to come up with, you know, emails or or text messages or content on on the, social media platforms. But coming up with something that is impersonation or something that’s directing somebody somewhere where they should not be going and make it very believable. And now we’re seeing that threat actually go into the video, the video collaboration and the voice, mediums to where that AI can actually have a live conversation with somebody and not only sound like there’s somebody else, but also have knowledge of that person. So the vishing, the smishing, all those ishings that are out there right now are severely impact and are are greatly expanded by using AI.

Another issue is a lot of these companies, especially in the financial space are required by compliance and other governance and risk components like know your customer, anti monitoring laundering, and also data protection laws like GDPR, CCPA, any of the other state privacy laws that are that are out there. But the big one on this one is know your customer.

And the importance of that is every time you go in and sign up for an account, you know, it could be a bank, it could be you know, everybody has a crypto account even though you don’t wanna admit it, or some other subscription.

They always wanna verify that you are who you say you are. So whether that is entering some identifiable information as part of the application, submitting your driver’s license, you know, we’ve all taken photos of the front and back of our driver’s license. You know, we got sent to a third party that we had to answer fifteen different questions about our history, and we had to hit a certain score. All that stuff is verifying that you are who you say you are.

You’re not just somebody that’s filling out an application based on somebody else and, you know, want to open up account under somebody else’s name or make some changes on that account. So know your know your customer is very important in the financial industry because money is very important to a lot of us. And protecting that money in the account that we’ve earned, making sure that that money stays there. Banks are starting to get heavily regulated to make sure that they follow certain practices to ensure if I call up and I wanna move money around, you know, the twenty bucks that I have in my account, that they’re gonna verify that I am who I say I am before they take take that twenty bucks out of there.

Challenges in Call Center Authentication

And the problem is where the the threat landscape goes is where the biggest authentication weaknesses are. Now what I say by that is imagine you’re in a call center and you’re getting hounded with calls day in and day out, and you’re having people saying, hey. I need to move money quick. I have all these different you know, whatever story they wanna tell you. The threat actors are doing the same thing. They’re telling you that stuff that that drives the emergency. They’re telling you they’re telling you information that make you believe who they say they are because they’re great actors and actresses.

So how can a how can a call center effectively apply some defenses as part of the interaction in order to, you know, apply those common, compliance requirements for know your customer? How can they protect their clients better to where somebody calls in, they’re effectively very confident that they know that this is the person that’s calling into them. And the call center agents, you know, how do we do that without putting so much policy and stuff on them to where they’re just overstressed in order to not make a mistake? How do we have a smart interactive system do this on their behalf? And that’s where I’m gonna turn it over next slide here for Mikey b. Now you can all call him that because you’re all friends, to go over a little bit what we’re seeing in the industry, and then we’re gonna turn it over to one of our suppliers who does this very well.

Transition to Industry Insights

So, Mikey b, reports to you, buddy.

Perfect. I don’t see the presentation, Chandler. Am I am I in the wrong meeting?

I see the presentation, but I don’t think it’s fully loaded. Kindly, can you make sure all the there we go.

We’re all about animations here.

Okay.

Do you see it now, Mike?

I don’t, but I built it. So I’m just gonna run with it.

There you go.

Hey, everybody.

Few things. Back in twenty twenty four in Hong Kong, an employee of a major company spoke to their financial manager and was told to move twenty five million dollars worth of cryptocurrency to a different account.

In twenty twenty, in the UAE, a bank manager was convinced by another branch manager to move forty six million dollars into another account. In March of twenty nineteen in the UK, the CEO of an energy firm instructed the CFO to move three hundred thousand dollars to another account. What do all these have in common? One, it wasn’t you. Thank goodness.

Two, they’re all updating their resumes now. But three, it also talks about that deepfake, cloning of voices that goes out there. How many people you can go on the interwebs today and get Taylor’s, what’s her name? Jason, what’s Taylor? What’s her last name? I forget.

Who?

Taylor. Taylor, Swift. Oh, you’re a Swiftie.

Yeah. I’m trying to get you to be a Swiftie.

But amazing. Yeah. I know. I tried to get you. I’ll look at you next.

No. As a dad of three girls, I’m absolutely a Swifty. So but you can get Taylor Swift’s, voices. You can get any voices of any actor, actress, anyone famous.

It’s a real threat.

So think of three areas to make sure you add some extra security. Area one is voice biometrics.

Voice Biometrics: A New Security Standard

However, because of deepfakes, your voice can simply not be your password anymore.

It has to be a unique phrase.

Right? So if you’re if you’re if you have password, it’s just Mike Balargin or Jason Toppin or Keith McMahon, it’s not good enough anymore. Ten years ago? Sure. But not anymore. So you have to come up with a passphrase for voice biometrics.

If that phrase fails, that have to be then sent to the agent to say passphrase failed.

The second area that’s before the agent. The second area where, security should be kicking in is with the agent itself. We call that agent assist. Right?

Those coaching cards that can get that can get popped up to guide the agent through the talk rack of what or whatever that they’re selling or service they’re providing. The key to that is to ask questions like, you know, on the on the on the coaching cards, did you validate their passphrase again? Did you validate this? Did you send out a SMS and get the valid, multifactor, authentication numbers back?

So remind the agent to revalidate that client. And then the third place where fraud is should be detected is post call.

Post-Call Fraud Detection Techniques

So we can use AI to, one, auto score all of those call recordings, which is great. Hey. Jason’s our best agent. He’s getting nineties.

Mike, not so good. He’s in the thirties. Right? But more importantly, you can actually now look out for catch phrases that may warrant that might be fraudulent.

Things like close my account, transfer crypto to, transfer to this to the Cayman Islands. Things of that nature that now you can look out for. So as you talk to financial institutions or really anyone in the space that deal with clients and money, cybersecurity and CX come together. So from a CX point of view, we look at voice biometrics.

We look at agent assist, and we look at AI keyword, what we call word cloud. And then from there, we can also bring in some extras, cybersecurity tools.

Jason?

Yeah. Thank you for the rundown. So as you can see, it’s it’s a perfect representation of, in cybersecurity world, risk mitigation.

But we’re using a CX solution in order to do that in multiple different touch points to ensure that person is who they say they are when they’re interacting with the business.

Live Demonstration of Solutions

So I I’m sure you’re like, hey, great. This is all great in theory, but we really would like to see that live. And we actually have that prepped for you today. So I’d like to turn it over to Keith at, at Content Guru in order to go over a couple different slides on their solution. And then he’s also probably gonna do a live demo so you can see it in action on how that sounds from a user’s perspective, so you could talk about it as as you’re getting out there. So, Keith, floor is yours, sir.

Share my screen here.

And share sound. Okay.

Alright. So you should see. I’m gonna go to the a little bit of the explanation first, and then we’ll talk about what it is all about. Just confirm you can see a slide that says experiences in financial services.

Yes, sir. You’re good to go.

When we talk about voice biometrics, we are not limited to financial services, but it is one of the more common verticals that we see the requirement as was explained earlier.

And these are the customers we have successfully, not an exhaustive list, but implemented voice biometrics with.

The takeaway from this slide is two things. One, we can do banks and credit unions and large and small, and the other one is that, we can work with, we don’t have a preferred biometrics vendor, whether it’s Pindrop or Veridos or Duo or another option. What I’m gonna show you today is gonna be supported with all of those vendors and more with some configuration.

So this is the takeaway here. We can do this large and small.

What does biometrics do? It does three things. It enrolls, participants, it verifies them, and it checks their status. So there are three moving parts to biometrics.

And these little icons below are a little preview. I’m gonna show you how we do it next, and I’m gonna show you how we build it next. So, those will look familiar in a second.

So that’s gonna be, the way that, our big picture approach to this.

And I’m gonna come back to here. Alright. So the next thing that’s gonna happen is I’m gonna put a call in. It’s gonna go through some steps. It’s gonna show some, payment stuff and and verification of who I am, and I will put it on speaker so everybody can hear.

Please select the starting category.

It’s gonna start the demo.

Demonstration of Biometric Security in Action

Of CG Health Insurance. How may I help you today?

I’d like to check the status of my claim.

I can help you with checking the status of your claim. First, can you please tell me your policy number?

One.

Great. Thanks. I can see you’re enrolled in our biometric security. Please can you say my voice is my password.

My voice is my password.

You have passed security checks. I can see your claim hasn’t been processed because there is an overdue payment on your account of thirty seven dollars and sixty seven cents.

Would you like to clear this now?

Yes.

We have your card saved on file ending six six eight five. Would you like to use this card?

Yes.

Okay. Can you please confirm the security code on the back of the card?

One two three.

Thanks. Processing your payment now. I’m afraid the payment was unsuccessful. I’ll connect you to an agent who can help.

Right.

So we want so that so that did because I pulled a couple of things.

It took about a minute or so. It didn’t seem long, but it really wasn’t.

And I wanna show I’ll highlight a couple of things.

Hey, Keith.

Can can we can we get a mute?

Keith, can you mute one of them, please?

Sorry. Is that better?

Yeah. I was staring a little Jimmy Hendrix, a little bit reverb going on.

I had a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of So, to make these point earlier, I said my voice is my password.

That’s sort of a standard demo thing. That evolves with time and security challenges. That could have been anything of the customer’s choosing and what the vendor has to offer. So the vendors all the the the vendors we work with offer more options, but I just wanted to highlight that that is not the exclusive way to authenticate.

But in the demo environment, it’s what we’re it’s what we do just for a little simplicity, just to go to to show it. It did a couple of things. So it asked me who I was, and it said, do you wanna make a payment? And I said, yeah, I’ll make a payment.

That could have been a withdrawal if it was a bank or a transfer or any financial transaction. And when it failed, that call could have gone right to the agent, but in that case it said, would you like to talk to an agent? So we have the ability to route reroute the call if there’s a question about the confidence, the questions they’re asking, the request they’re making, or if the information is not adding up. And I’ll show you in a second how we authenticate that. But, and that’s how we’re going to handle that from a biometrics perspective. Vendor agnostic, I will say most of our recent customers have opted to go with Pindrop for their own reasons, but we work with just about anyone on the market.

Integrating Biometrics with Contact Center Solutions

And just to refresh really quick, this is DTA, the desktop task assistant. This is the storm. Storm is the cloud contact center, platform software of Content Guru. And this is where the agent takes the call. What I’m going to highlight here is that it captured what the bot in this case came back to me with working in the IVR in the back end. And what I said, so the agent knows that the payment failed, yes I was verified, or wasn’t verified.

So here’s the idea, just passes it to the agent and whatever information is relevant, whether it’s completely secure and confident or it’s not so confident, the agent will know that as well. Any questions about that experience or requirements before I go into the how it really works and what are the options?

Keith, Keith, we’re answering questions in the chat, so you can continue and people are asking questions.

Okay, fair enough.

So behind any storm integration is a product called Flow And Flow is not your average IVR, matter of fact it’s robust, it’s easy to use, it’s drag and drop, it’s no code.

And I mentioned earlier there’s three reasons, there’s three ways biometrics are used, and that’s to, enroll, check, and verify.

And within the storm flow platform, we have the ability to have what we call action cells, and they have the ability and all I do is drag them over here from the from the menu list.

Call Flow Functionality Overview

And those are three really simple call flows. Right? I just wanna highlight that you can have different flows, IVRs, for different use cases. You can combine them into one or you can have one, two, or three of them. So we have this functionality built in the ability to connect to anywhere and stay compliant anywhere. So the idea is that it’s really all under one roof.

But what about the actual use case I just did?

Now I opened up a different flow screen and you’ll see here on the right the information that I required to authenticate can be listed here. And this is where the customer gets to decide. Do they want to do a confidence level?

I happen to be verified, but if I hadn’t been verified, it would have come back as not verified, need to be updated, needs to be checked, whatever it is. And and it’s a really simple build out in the sense that if I’m not verified, I can go down one route. And if I am verified or not verified, I can go one route. And if I am verified, I can go down another. I can go to a certain agent, a certain skill, a certain queue, and those agents can be alerted that I am trying to impersonate somebody, or I’m just my voice is different someday, or I don’t know my password, or I’ve forgotten some information.

Hey, Keith.

And then the business will decide.

Handling Voice Variations in Biometrics

We did have a really good question in the chat about what if somebody’s sick or they’re not you know, their voice doesn’t sound like it does every single day. How does the system handle that interaction?

And that’s a great question because the the vendors allow for variation in voices. Now you’d have to like, for example, Pindrop, the reason we’ve had a couple of deals, use them recently. They do a very good job of capturing, what your normal voice is and then what it would sound like a little bit buried. Now if you’re really sick, you know, and you have no voice and you can barely talk, it would probably reject it and then get you to an agent for some other verification.

But the vendors, in particular, Duo and Pindrop, have the ability to detect, you know, what’s a normal range of variance for somebody’s voice. And that’s part of the advancement here.

So you know, it is one of the ways that, they’re not only capturing fraud, but ensuring that people don’t have to go through unnecessary checkpoints if they’re verified. But that’s something the vendors do. The the the biometrics vendors enable on their side, but we will do whatever they wanna do. And that has a lot to do with the confidence level set.

So if the if the if it’s a high confidence, the highest of confidence, it may reject more than not if your voice is a little bit raw on a particular day, where you have a cold. And if it’s a lower confidence level, it may pass it. And that’s a business decision, and that’s part of the testing. But that gets better every day with every version release.

Addressing Accents and Language Variations

That used to be a big problem, not so much. And it’s the same way they account for accents and languages.

And, you know, for example, if you’re from Scotland, it used to be, you know, biometrics wasn’t your thing, but that’s no longer the case. You know, thick bros and all of that are accounted for as well. So that’s part of the the vendor offer.

We connect those and and that configuration is something that we’ll help with in terms of confidence level, in that in that case.

So that’s the idea. It’s not a complicated, build for us. It’s a question of who’s the per vendor, what’s what are the security requirements.

And the biggest takeaway here is that all of this is easily configurable and easily changed. You know, there’s a new threat on the market, you know, somebody got through for some reason.

You can change their criteria, you can change the confidence level. And if a customer wants to, they can change their biometrics vendor as well. So they can start with one transition to another for whatever reason and go back if they have to. So we’re a we’re an agnostic platform for this, very end user friendly.

User-Friendly Configuration Options

And the last thing I’ll say about this flow screen here is that if somebody has the right training and the will to do it on the customer side, they can manage this themselves with the vendor, participating in the configuration options if necessary or will support that completely.

So this is not a, you know, this is an open ended platform for end users, for us, and for everyone in between.

So that’s the idea behind this. It’s very straightforward.

What we’ll do is when we get an opportunity, we’ll say, what are your security concerns? What are your requirements? What vendor you do you prefer? We’ll make some recommendations based on the feedback we get, and then we’ll bring in who if it’s Pindrop or Duo or whoever it happens to be, and we’ll talk about how they handle things, background noise, detecting, you know, if it’s a sounds like, you know, a a fraudulent call from the background noise in the environment, location, or whatever it is. A lot goes into biometrics. It’s not just to Mike b’s point. It’s not just my voice is my password.

Global Compliance Standards

There’s a lot of criteria here and we will keep up with whatever the new vendors are doing and and be able to support that and and adapt to critical changes. You know, Storm is a global company. So we are represented all over the world in, you know, a couple dozen countries. So we deal with vendors from all over the world with lots of customers with lots of concerns. Large banks, small banks, credit unions, the medical, the insurance example here, that’s a big one. So every vertical, every industry, and every requirement can be exceeded. A little bit of discovery and a little bit of vendor selection.

So I’m not look are there questions in the chat, Riyad, or did I miss one?

Yes, Keith. So one of the questions was any conversational data stored on Storm?

We don’t store conversational data. We are a pass through. So we’re not going to know if it’s PCI, we’re not going to know credit card numbers. We’re going to know the information that is part of the CRM or the database that we are getting and posting And we are a pass through for that, which is the important part.

No. We are not, gonna be able we’re not gonna store that. That would be a conversation with Pindrop or Duo or Veridos, the storage requirements and, you know, how they’re authenticating and those things. And they are very secure.

High Compliance Certification Explained

We don’t work with anybody that doesn’t match our compliance level. Our compliance level is very high seeing as we have a FedRAMP high certification. So we have a very big, bar to reach when it comes to compliance.

For people not familiar with that certification, that means that they could sell directly to the DOD. So that’s, like, one of the one of the highest highest government, security clearances you can get. So it’s it’s very well respected. And when you’re looking at, you know, data storage and, you know, all the all the questions that you have for us compliance, they check every single one of those boxes. We just went through a training at our engineering summit with them, and it was quite extensive.

Yes.

I believe it’s, it’s equivalent to an aisle four, if that’s where We’re right now.

Yeah.

So compliance is something we do, pretty much better than anybody and every one of our our vendors has to meet that standard. Internally, we’ve always met that but, you know, we have that compliance security discussion first with customers so we can get all those concerns out of the way. And then we talk about functionality and and biometric software selection.

Voice Recording Process for Clients

Hey, Keith. Quick question on functionality. And so, to get somebody to record their their voice, I think you saw it on I think you posted on the last workflow where you had the three different steps where record, verify.

Is it just assigning a number to that work flow and then that’s the number you give to the person after you verify their identification to record their their voice? Like, how how does that work? Just, like, simple simplicity of onboarding a new client.

So there’s two scenarios. One is they already have voice prints and they’re transitioning. They can take those voice prints and import them. If they’re creating new voice prints, we will assign the unique ID when it’s created and they that will be assigned to that person, that contact, that customer, for for perpetuity.

So that’s the way we’ll know. Not only who they are, but, of course, what they sound like and what their password is. So, yeah, at the time they’re registered, if they wanna if they, for some reason, are deleted off the system, they’d have to come back and they get a new ID. So, you know, that’s how that would work. It’s at the time of registration or more critically, if a customer has voice prints that they need to bring with them, whether they’re vendor switching or they’re just switching their contact center platform, we can support that as well. You know?

So that’s super simple.

No Vendor Lock-In Policy

The for what that translate to me is no vendor lock in. So just because you’re holding biometric data of your clients, doesn’t mean you’re you’re locked in with that one specific provider.

You can actually take it Not at all.

To to other ones if you’re not happy. Alright.

Every industry will be different and every, biometrics, supplier will have improvements that a customer may want to move to or move from. And that’s just the thing. We have lots of customers that are global and you may use different vendors for different locations for compliance, for security, for whatever those requirements are.

So we are agnostic in that regard.

But the theme here is that the BRAIN module or the AI toolkit called BRAIN allows us to connect to the best vendor in class.

And that’s not just AI automation, that’s also biometrics.

So, that our discovery with the customer is a lot more pleasant because we we listen for requirements and make some recommendations or just do what the customer wants.

Yeah. Exactly.

Language and Regional Adaptability

And it’s also, like, based on where they’re based, as well. Like, let’s say it’s, it’s a language thing. I know, like, Google, for example, has better languages in, in certain regions. So and we offer over a hundred twenty languages.

So it’s based on where they’re located and what what we can offer them, and they might bring their own. They’re like, oh, no. We’ve used that vendor for many years. Can you guys integrate into it?

And we’re like, yes. Of course.

So it’s the it’s really the art of the possible. You know, I think I’m I’m gonna maybe close with this thing. The contact centers has become the new front door since COVID.

It’s the way people are engaging and will engage more in voice biometrics is one of those expectations that customers and end users and customers have. So we can bring that with a purpose and with cost and efficiency and compliance and to Riaz point language and location in mind. And all we have to know is, you know, what their requirements are and, you know, and understand what they wanna do and, you know, and we’ll we’ll find a match. And we’ll bring in the vendor to have the conversation about their product with their compliance and their security and their features through them, you know, and we’ll build it. That’s it. It’s not a it’s not especially complicated for us. You know, the discovery is critical and, that’s something we’ll handle with the with the software vendor.

Client Eligibility and Industry Support

Hey, Keith. Keith, there’s a question. Are there any contact centers you will not work with?

I didn’t fully understand it, but maybe, like, on based on, like, agent count, that that would be, like, we usually do over a hundred agents. That’s our ideal customer more, like, on the enterprise side because it does get pricey when when you’re, like, a little bit smaller.

But when it comes to verticals or industries, no.

We can support anybody anywhere remote, in person, hybrid, we can support them all with any third party custom work as well. What if a database integration or a particular screen pop or or or data transfer, we can cover that as well. But the answer is usually related to seat size to Riyadh’s point.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Really, really appreciate it, Riyadh, Keith. Excellent excellent demo here. And, Mikey b, any, closing remarks before we turn it back to the to the voice of Telarus?

No.

It is all about land and expand. So we have six swim lanes of technology, and they all get together at one time. And the last thing I’ll say, and this pains me as a Chelsea fan, go Spurs. Onto you, Doug.

Bet paid. Bet paid.

Isn’t Chelsea playing in the conference, league couple days from now?

No. No. That yeah.

In the final. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s different. Yeah.

Europa League is tomorrow.

Yeah. Europa League. Yep. Doug, back to you, buddy. Enough football talk.

Lot of loyalties out there. Love it.

Great presentation, you guys. It is amazing where AI is taking us and how, voice biometrics, all of these different things that we’ve talked about today play a role in this. I’m fascinated with what it can do for the things that we used to look for sort of instinctively for those of us that have worked in those environments.

Listening for certain catch phrases, listening for certain types of, phrasing or things that might tip you off to something that’s going on, and now it can be done systematically with these tools and resources. It is just fascinating. Great to hear more about what, Content, Guru does, can do for the industries that you serve. And the questions and the comments that we had today were just tremendous. We’re about out of time for that presentation today, but, all of these folks will continue to be available in the chat if you have additional questions that you’d like to bring forward, and we’ll continue to respond to those. But, thanks, Jason, Mike, and all the experts from Content Guru for the powerful presentation today.

Introduction to New Supplier: Vive Business Services

Well, next up on today’s call, we are very excited to introduce Telarus Advisors to a brand new supplier. It’s Vive Business Services. They provide fiber Internet up to ten gig. They provide technology solutions that increase businesses’ security, scalability, productivity, and efficiency.

We’ve got Brad Botts here today. He’s VP of the channel at Vybe and joins us now with today’s introductory presentation. Brad, so happy to have you on the Tuesday call and glad to have five as a new Telarus supplier.

Thank you, Doug. Welcome, everyone.

Happy Tuesday. The month’s already getting past us and month ends upon us.

So just a little bit of history of me. I I came aboard, six years ago. I ran a commercial, sales team here at Vibe and then, transitioned into our carrier wholesale channel division. Started that up and, have about six employees that work for me from, sales engineering to to sales and sales support.

Overview of Vive Business Services

I’m based out of Florida. And then Will Harper, who’s on the call as well, is, the dedicated account manager for Telarus.

He’s based in Virginia.

And, my people are spread out through throughout the US, but we handle any customer across our sixteen states and and, three hundred sixty world markets. We became a supplier, the beginning of this year. We’ve already sourced, numerous quotes. We’ve got a few sales, so we’re getting some traction there. And and, Doug, if you wanna go to the next slide.

So just, just an overview.

You know, we were three companies that came in to came to one in during the pandemic. So in twenty nineteen, we were I was hired by our holding company, GTCR, out of Chicago, and they purchased Northland Communications that had various, communities across the US, Eagle Communications in the Midwest, and then via broadband spread out to the US as well. And then during the pandemic, we merged three companies together, merged billing systems, employee base, networks, and, off to the races. So we’re, as I mentioned, sixteen states are all listed there.

I won’t go through each of them, but the core of our networks through the center the center part of the state from Texas all the way up to Nebraska. We have some small pockets out in the northwest region of the US, and then we’re starting to grow our southern, southeastern, part of the US and the Carolinas and Georgia in particular. And so we’ve kinda grown organically through acquisition, through, build outs of our fiber network across, the communities we serve and and continuing to, to enhance that as as as we move forward. We’re forty five percent owned by, Sparklight Cable One, and and we’re in a position to be fully owned by them here in the next couple years.

So we’re excited about that partnership and and working with them and expanding our footprint.

Business Segments and Market Positioning

Next slide. So why why buy? What’s you know, we’re we’re a broadband, you know, started as a cable company, became more of a broadband enterprise type, company to our customers. You know, we we have three segments of our business. We have the residential side, we have the commercial side, and then we have, you know, the carrier wholesale side and and and channel partners. So we’re excited to grow that aspect of our business.

You know, we’re basically what I I tell all of our partners and end users is we’re the best option in these rural underserved markets.

Typically, when you get in these markets, there’s one or two choices, the ILEC, which are big in nature, not the easiest to do business with.

Their service isn’t reliable. Their costs are higher. So we really try to provide a cost solution, a cost effective solution that’s more reliable and get more personalized service. So, yeah, I mentioned, you know, merging the three networks together. You know, we’ve we’ve done that. All of our markets are connected redundantly to each other. So you can you can just understand the vastness of our network with three hundred and sixty markets connected together redundantly, to provide reliable service for your end user, which is important.

Community Engagement and Employee Involvement

We’re nimble. You know, we’re seven hundred employees strong. Most of our employees work and live in the communities we serve, and that’s important because there’s value in in ownership in the end user. They may, you know, go to church with them.

You know, the kids play sports together. So, we’re very entrenched in those communities we serve, and we take it very serious in terms of reliability.

And I just say we’re easy to do business with. That’s really, that in a nutshell. We’re a dedicated account team. You know, we have dedicated presales, which is my team, post sales support, billing, all employee owned. We outsource nothing. It’s all US, domestic based support, which is important for, you know, ease ease of getting a hold of someone as well as a a quick resolution. Next slide, please.

This is, I won’t go through this chart. This is our our network and as a whole holistically, as you can see, the middle of the US is kind of the heart of our network with pockets in in the in the northwest and the southeast, and it’s fully redundant. We have period points in some of the major, NNI or pops throughout the US.

So we’re we’re we’re pretty pretty much covered from a redundancy perspective.

The next slide.

So, you know, not only do we provide broadband, you know, connectivity both either via coax or fiber services depending on your end users need and and and cost point, we also provide, you know, voice serve solutions from, you know, basic pods, PRI, up to UCaaS, hosted services, as well as we all have our own cloud division that we offer, which I’ll get into. So we’re more than just a a connection to to your end user. We can be that or we can be everything with more of a bundled solution, and and provide all of our services if if needed. Our NOC is fully owned and operated by us, US based. It’s our personnel.

Comprehensive Service Offerings

We have two of those centers throughout our network, that back each other up, and it’s twenty four seven three sixty five. And if, you know, your end user becomes a fiber based customer, they automatically get routed directly into our network operating system, go bypass tier one support, go into tier two, into tier three support for fast resolution and and more of a a white glove treatment, in terms of any any type of issues that might arise with their connection.

Next slide, please.

So just a high level of our cloud, you know, we offer everything from a managed firewall, which is an appliance space.

You know, we’re a Cisco based shop, and then we have, data backup, which is an appliance space through Datto. And then we offer, hosted solutions through Intermedia as well as Momentum. So we white label those, but but we take true ownership of that.

And then we also do manage Wi Fi, which is really becoming big for for customers, especially SMB. You know, they may want a Wi Fi connection for their customers that come in the coffee shop or a nail salon and then have secure access for their employees, for that Wi Fi.

Next slide, please.

So this, you know, just kinda shows, you know, data protection solution, you know, at a high level. We also offer Office three sixty five licenses.

You know, that that includes Teams integration, which is is highly important for customers to communicate, in the world today. And then we also, offer the managed, security solutions that your end user might need. And, again, we own that division, you know, what we call, BTS or VIVE Technology Solutions. They’re employee based, and and we own and operate those solutions and that support.

Next slide, please.

Introduction of New Residential Solutions

One of the growing, products that we recently launched, it was more on the residential side. We would include, you know, Wi Fi, firewall.

Wi Fi and firewall, to all of our residential customers is an enhanced solution.

We started rolling that out to our business. So Eero, who’s actually owned by Amazon, it’s a it’s a very compact, robust, Wi Fi solution, you know, that allows, you know, multiple portals and security for small business.

So if they don’t wanna get a a a more expensive, managed Wi Fi or firewall solution that, you know, could cost, you know, several hundred dollars a month, you know, they’re more cost conscious, have basic needs, and we can deploy the euro, which which has really been our top seller, amongst our commercial team.

Next slide.

So, again, just, you know, I you know, Vibe, Unified Communications Solutions that we use through Intermedia is is our newest product.

It’s if any of you know about it, it’s a very feature rich business, hosted voice system.

Does full integration with SMS, with collaboration, teams, so you could get the full solution for your customer, from voice communications to, any type of electronical communications as well.

Next slide, please.

Case Study: City of Groesbeck

Just so you know, a case study, I won’t go through this in detail, but, you know, the city of Groesbeck, Texas is is a long time customer of ours. And they approached us about an aging phone system that was antiquated, hard to get parts, manufactured discontinued. Their cost of ownership was was, extremely rising. Their reliability, they were, you know, having outages.

So we were able to put in our, VIVE UCaaS system, for all their users and and meet their needs there and give them obviously a, more of a operating expense versus a capital expenditure to, you know, to meet their their city budget. And then they also rolled out a new, body camera system, which a lot of, police forces have today. But in the rural communities, that’s that’s become a more of a requirement.

So we’re able to put in a fiber optics network as well as some, backup solutions to help, you know, get real time access to that data, you know, live feeds as well as their, traffic light, systems, you know, for security and and and for their police force.

And I’ll I’ll I don’t know if Doug’s here to send out this live presentation, but I have a couple video. I won’t go through those, but we have some videos of some customer testimonial. And then on our our YouTube page, we have, different types of solutions and and, that you can give to your end user to educate them on Vibe. So, pretty simple. You know, my presentation was as elaborate as the last gentleman, but but we we you know, our our ask is, you know, give us an opportunity.

Conclusion and Call to Action

We’re gonna be the best option in those rural communities, whether it’s just a broadband connection to overlay other services on, multiple connections or redundancy or any of the, hosted or cloud solutions that, you know, you wanna do a true bundled solution with your with your client.

Brad, terrific presentation. Thanks to both you and Will for being here today. We appreciate it. A terrific introduction to Vibe and its services.

Couple of questions that, surrounded just the, availability of services. Is there a way for advisors who may have clients to qualify a certain area or location for either your fiber fiber or coax services?

Yeah. We, you know, we leverage, ConnectBase, which I believe Telarus is a part of.

And I know your quoting team has sent us quotes from advisors.

So I would, you know, kinda go through that that avenue. And then we have a internal tool called a GIS tool that Will would look up and and immediately find out if it’s on that near net. That data is in our on that, near net building list in ConnectBase, and then the rate cards are in there as well.

So, you know, my advice, mister, is to shoot a note to Will Harper and myself, you know, and then we’ll qualify that and and, you know, provide a a quote within either same day or within three days.

Hopefully, that answered the questions.

Very good.

Also with regard to the, areas that you cover, some of the material mentioned, there was a focus on some of the rural areas where you do have, coverage available.

Is that a real focus of Vybe at this point? You’ve got many, metro areas covered as well. And is there some planned expansion into other areas or more of a focus again on expanding into rural areas?

Focus on Rural Expansion and Future Plans

Yeah. So we’re, you know, we don’t really dive into the tier one, tier two cities. We’re in the bedroom communities. I’ll give you an example in Dallas, we’re in, you know, Corsicana, Paris, Texas, Stephenville, Marble Falls outside Austin. So we’re in a lot of those bedroom communities that are that are really growing from a business perspective, and a lot of branch offices are being, you know, opened up in those communities.

Yeah. Our plans are really, you know, through our act you know, through our being acquired through Cable One, Sparklight.

We plan the back half of this year to start beefing that up, and doing some strategic build outs in into new communities or even the communities that we serve today.

Wonderful.

Well, terrific presentation. We are thrilled to have Vive as part of the, Telarus supplier family. Look forward to having you back on the call soon to hear more about your successes. But, thank you very much, Brad and, Will for the time today. Look forward to having you back soon.