Krome Cast: TECH-IT-OUT - Horizon Hosted Telephony - Replacing an ISDN Phone System

In this episode of Krome Cast, Tech-it-out we are talking about Hosted Telephony, and the Horizon hosted phone system from Gamma.

With the ISDN switch off coming in 2025, organisations are having to evaluate which new business phone system is right for them, in this episode, we discuss the business phone system considerations needed when replacing an ISDN phone system, how to upgrade from ISDN to cloud-hosted phone system, and our opinion on why a Horizon hosted phone system from Gamma is the best phone system for businesses.

This podcast features Krome’s Commercial Director, Sam Mager, along with Krome's Pre-Sales Telecommunications Consultant, Jonathan Ledner, sharing their insights into some of the functionalities and key benefits of using a Gamma Horizon Hosted Telephony System.

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Transcript

Sam Mager  00:10

Welcome to Krome Cast, Tech-It-Out.  I'm Sam Mager, Commercial Director for Krome Technologies.  I'm joined once again today by Jon Ledner, Telecoms Pre-Sales Consultant, to discuss, when looking to upgrade your phone system, the key considerations to factor in.  Jon, welcome back. 

Jonathan Ledner  00:24

Good to be back. 

Sam Mager  00:25

So last time, on the podcast, we talked about Microsoft Direct Routing for Teams. And obviously some very interesting, I actually learned a lot, personally about that. But there's some specific use cases where that is an appropriate technology. I think today, it would be good if we can go into for our audience, the various different options that are available for telephony. And I guess the applicable use cases because as we know, every business is different. And as we've seen over the past 18 months or so, communication, telephony communication is still very much key and having the right platform in place is incredibly important. So I guess if you can kick in initially with just a brief overview, and I know brief is difficult between you and I, but a brief overview of the different options that are available. And then let's just dig into, I guess, the use cases and type of businesses that would select them and where they're appropriate.

Jonathan Ledner  01:11

Yeah. So last time, we had a chat, we had a chat about the whole Teams thing. And yeah, the events in the last 18 months have impacted everyone in various ways, but especially telephony. So organisations that were on Teams for example, it's great for those guys. Because they've been very, very, it's been very easy for them to dash off home or work remotely. But then you've got these other organisations, where they're very much old fashioned phones on desks. And those are the types of organisations that haven't been so fortunate. So for example, there are many, many businesses out there at the moment that are still using what we class as a traditional phone system, and what I mean by that there are phones on the desks, those phones follow a wire down to the server room or the cupboard under the stairs or whatever, and there's a box bolted to the wall, and then that box then plugs into the BT phone line. 

Sam Mager  02:07

That's your traditional kind of Avaya, Mitel, Panasonic.

Jonathan Ledner  02:09

Exactly that. Yeah. And those, it's very much it's been working for 10-15 years, leave it alone. So the various issues with that, primarily, about 2016, I think was Openreach announced that they are looking to switch off the ISDN network, ISDN2 ISDN30, and that there are they're still aiming for 2025. And there are an estimated still an estimated 2 million circuits out there in use, 2 million organisations still using them. So you've got these old fashioned phone systems, plugged into these old fashioned phone lines, ticking time bomb, they're gonna switch it off. 

Sam Mager  02:24

That's off? No more business, done.

Jonathan Ledner  02:48

No more business. If you don't do something, we're just going to flick a switch. So there's that, and then along comes the pandemic, where that causes another problem. Because as we're saying about the Teams people, well they just grab their laptops and ran home and plug them in. But you can't do that with your traditional phone system where it goes to the box under the stairs or in the server room. So those are the limitations of those types of systems. So, with regards to the whole ISDN switch off thing, so what some organisations have done, is they've got that old fashioned phone system, and they have sort of cheated the system a bit what they've done, is they have enabled the old fashioned phone system to route calls over the internet. Okay, because there is an alternative to ISDN. You might have heard this terminology before, SIP Trunking. Yeah. So what they've done is they've basically lifted the bonnet in the phone system, tweaked a few bits, and plugged it into the internet. For want of a better way.

Sam Mager  03:50

This is basically a sticky plaster. But that won't get you past 2025?

Jonathan Ledner  03:54

Well, it will, it will get you, that will get you past 2025, because that gets past the ISDN problem, but what it doesn't get around the problems of, first of all, the phone system is day by day getting older and older and older the technology is coming out of date, there are loads of functions that your competitors are using that you're not, because you're using this old system. And then there's the whole pandemic argument where you can't pick the phone up and take it home and work from home or work remotely.

Sam Mager  04:18

Which touch, touch wood, we don't see that again anytime soon, but I think that this kind of hybrid way of working is now certainly here to stay. So yeah, people looking to advertise new staff, people are expecting to see this split model work from home work from the office or work from anywhere.

Jonathan Ledner  04:33

So there is a better way of doing it. So if you are one of those phones on desks kind of businesses, and you might see that with a more traditional type business, you might see like a large school, academy or something like that, where they need phones on desks, any type of organisation where you have to have phones on desks, there is a way of having phones on desks, but not being reliant on that old technology. And this is called Hosted Telephony. So through me saying to you phones, box, go plugs into the into the ISDN lines. Well what you've got now is you've got your phone and to the end user, it just looks like a normal telephone, pick it up and say "hello". But what it actually is, is, it's an internet based phone, and you plug it into an internet connection, be it straight into the back of a router or into your local area network on your office, and it goes off and registers itself to a phone system in the Cloud. And that is an always up, always running phone system, that you don't have to maintain yourself. You don't have to employ an engineer to come out and look after it.

Sam Mager  05:36

Legacy equipment, aging, etc. Not a problem.

Jonathan Ledner  05:38

All of that sort of stuff. So you don't have to worry about any of that. The only thing that you need to look after is the physical phone on the desk. And in the event of a disaster. Pick it up, take it home.

Sam Mager  05:47

So we resolve that. Let's call it the pandemic problem. But we had that ultra-mobile way of working and can we have the hybrid, So you know, we leave phones on desk, but I can still connect to that phone system, that connection remotely?

Jonathan Ledner  05:58

Brilliant question. Yes, you can. So you remember, we were talking the other week about the whole Teams thing and headset on, you make a phone call through the PC, tap the number in or mobile app, you've still got all that functionality with a cloud-based phone system because those cloud phone systems offer that functionality where you can have the soft phone, phone on the PC, or the mobile app. So you can quite literally be out in the car. And these synchronises with hands free on the car, and you can answer your DDI, or, you know, work as a part of a call center. from home. Whenever from anywhere with this soft phone. So yeah, it will it gives you that freedom see if needs be leave the phone on the desk or work and go and work remotely.

Sam Mager  06:43

There's a lot to consider there. And you've also got businesses of as you've described there that will have the PBX in the cupboard. To the people that have, want to be bleeding edge or potentially already are. But if you focus on customers that are, I guess that are staring at that the steep drop off come 2025, the end of ISDN, and whatnot, they'll be planning you know, how do we get there? Maybe not really knowing how and a bit worried about how to do that. So how do we as a business, what are we, the processes you personally follow to interact our clients and ensure that we understand where they are, I guess, where they want to go and the overused phrase everyone uses, but the journey that we take them on? How do we ensure that we get them to where they want to be? 

Jonathan Ledner  07:24

Great question Sam. The most important thing, first of all, is, as you say, the conversation with the client there, sitting down, talking to them what they're doing, walking around their business, looking at how they're doing it to try and make sure we identify the correct path in the first place.

Sam Mager  07:40

When you think about it actually, physically actually understanding how the business operates.

Jonathan Ledner  07:44

Best thing you can do walk around, go up to, you know, that person, why are you doing that with that phone? What you doing? And all of that, but with, we've got to, that's the point where you're looking at the conversation we had last time about Teams, or this time about physical phones on desks. And what we would look at is, look at the way that they are operating their business. So for example, this would be, if you are multiple sites, dealing with each other's phone calls, transferring calls between sites and stuff like that, then this type of system is something that you're gonna really want to look at. Okay. And as I was saying earlier, like universities or large offices with desk, this is the sort of system you're going to want to be looking at. And there's also other things that you need to look at, about reporting, and looking at, measuring calls coming in and all of the whole reporting side of things, and we would have a detailed conversation with them on that side of it, then what we would look at is, when it comes down to the physical switching over, we would then do a full analysis of, let's say, for example, hypothetically, you're the customer, you've got an ISDN phone line an ISDN30, you got 300 DDIs, that's the first thing we do we get full details of that circuit and find out and we say, right, okay, what are all these DDIs? Who are they associated to? Find out what they're using all the DDIs for? And find out how all the calls are routed through the whole business, get that old phone system, and to use the term I used earlier, lift the bonnet up this and have a look. How is it wired up? What's going on? How are you routing all your calls through? Because the primary thing here is to make things better than they were. Look at how you've done it in the past. Make sure that when we put the new system in there is as little disruption as possible. But also make sure that we train the customer on all the new benefits and all the new features

Sam Mager  09:38

About to say yeah, to leverage that investment to get more out of it, right?

Jonathan Ledner  09:41

Because it will do so much more than pick it up and say "hello". So that's what we would that that's the key thing we would be then doing. And then we would work closely with our carriers and Openreach to make sure that we see a seamless port, of the phone numbers, usually out of hours to be honest, to save time to do it. Everyone comes to the office on a Monday morning. And what you want them to see is, Oh I've got a different phone, but nothing else changes.

Sam Mager 10:05

Yeah, and obviously we do that, as a business I know we do the floor walking, and the handholding and so on to make sure that knowledge transfer is there and is as seamless as it can be, no one likes change, but I think when people see the benefits, and certainly we've seen businesses when they see the benefits of the new functionality, people really get behind that.

Jonathan Ledner  10:23

Yeah. And that's because it's cloud-based, you've got all these great stuff like, you don't have to worry about an engineer coming out every six months, and tweaking this and tweaking that. And the latest software update, you don't have to worry about any of that, all that's done. And also, you know, that additional functionality, if you think about it, you've no longer got a physical restraint of a box that can't do it anymore.

Sam Mager  10:47

Okay, let's just dive in a bit there. But we talked about kind of enhanced functionality. But can we list some of those out and people will watch this and go, this enhanced functionality, what can I have? if we can call out a few of those things on a paradigm shift, if you like between the box on the wall to the new world, top five things, what do you think are the real standouts?

Jonathan Ledner  11:07

Real standouts, obviously the big one, DR, pick the handset up, take it somewhere else. So for example, let's say for example, you've got two businesses, one in London, one in Manchester, and Manchester goes offline, you can just get everyone to London, plug them in, and they'll go, nobody will know. And going again, off of the two two site thing, calls come to Manchester, you want to transfer someone from Manchester to London, just transfer them across. If you're transferring a person to the next desk, and those two systems are the same system as if they're under the same roof, other great functionalities reporting, that's a great one. Yeah, and reporting can be anything from how many calls are we missing? How long does it take us to answer the phone? Who's answering the phone the most? Sales guys?

Sam Mager  11:54

This is the report I like.

Jonathan Ledner  11:55

Is he making "Hello , he's not in, ok l'll call back..hello", or is he actually making and having meaningful conversations, and other great stuff like capacity. 10% of our calls are engaged, coming in. Or we haven't got the capacity, because we need this, we need that, we need more staff, we need more users, we need to look at how the ring groups are being managed. Anything you could possibly think of, you can run a report on it and measure it and manage it.

Sam Mager  12:24

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Obviously a big one I think we need to chuck in there, is for everyone, it's about money, right. But the commercials.

Jonathan Ledner  12:31

Good point, actually. Good point, very good point Sam. And with a hosted solution, it's, it's really, really simple. It's per user, per month, with an inclusive amount of minutes that pulled across the whole group. So it's very, very, there's no surprises, you know, you've got that many users, that's going to be your bill. But what's also really simple there is flex, if you've got more users joining you, you just order more handsets and plug them in. And so if you add five more users, you just know, your bill is gonna go up for five more users. And you haven't got any horrors waiting around the corner. With a phone system bolted to the wall. As soon as you bolted to the wall, it starts aging, doesn't it? it's like buying new cars isnt it, soon as you drive off forecourt.. Well, that's the same with the old traditional phone system, you haven't got this problem. So it's per user per month, inclusive minutes. No, no surprises, no bill shock. And if you just need to add some users, you can very easily work out.. 

Sam Mager  13:34

I was gonna say, so we can burst up and down. So it's like your infrastructure service and new cloud consumption where you burst up and down as required. For those businesses that have seasonal work, whatever it might be, and for X amount of weeks per month will not be they'll need more staff, they can add those people add those lines, etc. Add the minutes they require, but then easily turn that down again, when the needs be quiet. So does there's that subscription on demand basis, which, let's be honest, the whole industries moving that way.

Jonathan Ledner  14:02

What you can also do which is really clever, and the client can do this themselves, they can decommission the user, get the phone, put it back in the box, put it on the shelf. And then the next year, they can recommission the user. And then just go into your stock list and reassign a handset. There you go, there's your handset Off you go. That simple, so simple. And the client can do it themselves, log into a web based portal, and they can control the users. Fred decides to leave, Fred leaves, Sarah comes along, recycle that piece of hardware, do it yourself, none of this phone up an engineer, I've got to put in a change request, two days, none of that. You just manage the whole thing yourself. Obviously, if there's complicated stuff, ring groups and stuff like that, then that's what we're here for. 

Sam Mager  14:46

Of course.

Jonathan Ledner  14:46

We will help with that. But that day to day, you know, where you don't wanna have to ring up to ask something really, really basic, do all yourself. So very, very simple to manage on the money side of things, and very, very simple to manage. 

Sam Mager  14:58

In administration. 

Jonathan Ledner  14:59

Exactly that.

Sam Mager  15:01

And we should probably cover off, as I'm sure we'll put it somewhere in the title of the podcast, but there's lots of different options out there and people that provide the type of services we're talking about as a business personally, and we're very much about this as you know, but we use the technologies that we promote, and we use the Horizon platform from Gamma for our own telephony. 

Jonathan Ledner  15:22

Yes we do Sam. 

Sam Mager  15:23

Obviously, I know you've got a vast amount of experience in that area. So I'm gonna kind of lean on the on this one, but to give our audience our joint opinion of why as a business Krome have gone down that road and the benefits that we're receiving from it.

Jonathan Ledner  15:37

So Gamma, is probably one of the leading wholesalers of telephony services in the UK. And we get, we work closely with Gamma for not only ourselves for our own telephony, every phone call our people make, they're making it over Gamma. But we get, we are offering their services through not only SIP trunk, direct routing, but this product as well. The hosted telephony which they call Horizon. Now I, I first started, my first venture into hosted telephony was in 2008. 

Sam Mager  16:15

You're going to age yourself here.

Jonathan Ledner  16:16

I am yeah. And the first bit of kit that was put in front of me, was Horizon. And yes, I've worked with other products, but for us, and anyone else in the industry, everyone knows that the Horizon product is a solid, very well tested, tried and tested.

Sam Mager  16:36

As you know, we did a bake-off of a few providers before we went, and I won't mentioned them

Jonathan Ledner  16:38

Yeah 

Sam Mager  16:38

But we did our independent r&d, our own independent view on it.

Jonathan Ledner  16:40

Yeah

Sam Mager  16:40

We landed on Horizon as definitely being the, where we would put our money, as obviously we did.

Jonathan Ledner  16:48

Yes, yes, it is very much the trusted supplier and that, and that is why not only do we route our own calls through them, but that is why we are recommending that product to our clients.

Sam Mager  16:59

So one of the things that I remember, that kind of swayed it for us was the resilience of that platform as well, A, because we're going to be using it but, but B, we're going to be promoting it probably just a bit more. Again, you being the expert, and me not about they way they build that resilience?

Jonathan Ledner  17:13

Gamma, they're very big on resilience, whatever product you look at, with Gamma, they've got, the way that they route through the network, they literally run it on two separate nodes, one in the north and one in the south. So, for example, you're on the phone, and there was a major, and you're routing through the North, and there's a major outage, and the whole north of the country goes off. Yeah, the phone call you're on, it's gone. But, you just, what happened there, you make another phone call, and it will just automatically route you through the south. And that, and they work in that way with not only this product Horizon, but their direct routing platform, and their SIP Trunking platform. So as far as resilience is concerned, yeah, they are very, very big on it. And they're very open and honest and produce plenty of documentation for any tech guy to take apart, and yeah, I will stand by it.

Sam Mager  18:09

That's, as we will as a business as well. 

Jonathan Ledner  18:11

That's why we that's why we went through it. 

Sam Mager  18:12

Thats why we made that choice, like I say the resilience, the simplicity, the cost savings. Again, we use it. So when we made the decision to move there, we weighed in the cost factor absolutely as a business, but again, from the ease of administration, because we want our guys supporting our clients. 

Jonathan Ledner  18:28

Yeah.

Sam Mager  18:29

Not messing around with our own phone system as much as possible. So that simplicity, and again, you know redundancy, was the other one, which was the real kind of silver bullet, if you like when compared to some of the competitors out there, and once you put all that together as a fairly logical choice.

Jonathan Ledner  18:42

It is a logical choice, it's very, very simple. It is very, very simple to use, it's very simple to consume. And it's very simple to modify. And if you don't get any great shocks. 

Sam Mager  18:53

So Jon, to kind of wrap up, I'll do my usual podcast favourite, but you know, give me a top three takeaways for our audience watching this today. If they take nothing else away from it, three things they should remember, or action off the back of the information we've gone through today.

Jonathan Ledner  19:08

Number one ISDN switch off. 

Sam Mager  19:11

Yeah

Jonathan Ledner  19:11

It's coming 2025. If you're running that old system, as I was saying, box under the stairs connected to the BT network, you need to be looking at something like this. 

Sam Mager  19:20

Resolve it.

Jonathan Ledner  19:20

Yeah, that's your number one. Your number two, functionality. It as I was saying earlier, every possible thing you could imagine you would want a phone system to do, it can more than likely do everything you want it to do, because there are no physical restrictions. And third point, simplicity. It's that, simple bill, your per user per month, that amount of minutes. And if you need to add something very, very simple to add, you just order a handset yourself. If you're happy to do so, plug that handset in and off you go. Very, very simple. 

Sam Mager  19:59

Jon, really informative and again, feel I've learned some things hopefully the audience has. So thank you very much for spending time with me today and going through this really appreciate it. 

Jonathan Ledner  20:07

It's been good. 

Sam Mager  20:08

Thank you 

Jonathan Ledner  20:08

Thanks a lot. 

Sam Mager  20:09

And thank you for joining us once again on Krome Cast. Tech-it-out.  If there's anything you'd like us to cover in future episodes,  Then please do, leave in the comment section below.  And like, subscribe and share and join us again next time on Krome Cast, Tech-it-out.