COVID-19 Roundup: Biscom, RapidScale and More

With no end in sight to the COVID-19 pandemic, more channel companies like Biscom and RapidScale are making offers to help businesses stay productive.

Biscom is a provider of secure document transfer offerings for regulated industries. It’s providing free 120-day use of its Transit solution for up to 100 users per organization, and more if needed on a case-by-case basis. All features and functionality are active and available.

The Biscom Transit free offer is being made through the end of June. Those who sign up before the end of the month will get to use Transit for free for four months.

Biscom’s Bill Ho

Bill Ho is CEO of Biscom. He said Biscom is making the offer to anyone who needs to share files and email securely. It’s especially useful for those with remote workers without a secure tool and who work outside their company’s network.

“This offer is open to both customers and partners, and provides a service that we believe is easy to adopt and use, and helps maintain their security and compliance needs when working with confidential information,” he said.

Each company gets its own “tenant” which is a unique URL and is completely separate from all other companies’ data.

Transit can be used for health care/patient information and other Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-protected data. It also protects financial data, confidential agreements and contracts.

“Many companies and partners were unprepared to work remotely because of infrastructure constraints, policies and procedures that did not take into account an extended work-from-home scenario, and it even impacted the simplest of items,” Ho said. “Many people may not have company equipment with the tools and VPNs needed to securely connect to their organization. With Transit, you have a web-based secure messaging application that works on any PC or device, and provides security without a VPN, allowing people to use their own personal computers easily and safely.”

RapidScale Cloud Offerings

RapidScale‘s upgraded cloud solution is now available to enable remote workforces. These offerings include VMware’s SD-WAN by VeloCloud, VMware Horizon DaaS 9.0, and RapidScale’s Microsoft 365 email and productivity suite, combined with Microsoft Teams collaboration tools.

Together, they help drive increased efficiency, productivity and security among remote workers. RapidScale integrates these offerings with an identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) add-on based on Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory delivered through RapidScale’s customer portal.

RapidScale’s Duane Barnes

“Now more than ever, we need to help organizations keep their businesses running,” said Duane Barnes, RapidScale’s COO. “The advanced technology powering our DaaS and SD-WAN solutions enables us to empower more companies to succeed in their businesses. Our cloud solutions that focus on application delivery and performance, combined with identity management, will help IT leaders manage their environments and employees.”

As a VMware Cloud Verified partner, RapidScale can better support organizations of all sizes that need to enable remote employees to work more securely and effectively.

RapidScale supports organizations in their transition to the cloud. It also helps meet their business objectives of reducing legacy IT costs and offloading IT tasks so they can focus on business strategy.

RingLeader Rolls Out Secure Mobile Application

RingLeader has developed CrowdVoice, a secure mobile application that brings UC, social messaging and international calling all under one umbrella.

The app features include text, chat, SMS and picture, and video file sharing. Additional features like custom caller ID, fax-to-email, voicemail-to-email and group chat enable business and organizational leaders to run their operation more effectively while reducing costs.

RingLeader’s Neil Darling

Neil Darling is RingLeader’s CEO and founder. He said RingLeader’s partners have benefited from using CrowdVoice as a tool in their service toolbox to securely provide communications continuity. It also helps them maintain the requirements that many business customers have been forced into during quarantine.

“Although customer needs may be similar, they usually require a platform that can be deployed to meet their specifications,” he said. “As a social communications platform, CrowdVoice by design efficiently combines essential UCaaS features with social messaging to mirror a customer phone system where it will operate seamlessly from an end-user smartphone (and/or with a VoIP desk phone) working from austere remote locations. CrowdVoice is an encrypted application that only requires a Wi-Fi or 3G/4G internet connection to keep customer business communications operational. That’s a big…

…plus for RingLeader’s channel partners who are on the front lines of keeping businesses functioning during this crisis.”

In response to COVID-19, RingLeader is pledging 25,000 months of free service on CrowdVoice. New customers will also receive a U.S. phone number and an international phone number in Canada or Mexico. With these free tools, it’ll be easier for people to keep in touch while staying within budget during the pandemic, the company said.

“We’ve received feedback from our channel partners that their customers are clamoring for a just-in-time solution that is secure (so as to protect business information) for mirroring their on-premise phone system with a cloud-based system, accessed primarily by end-user owned Apple and Android smart phone devices,” Darling said. “Since RingLeader provides both SIP trunking and cloud-based VoIP solutions, RingLeader has been a good fit to help those partners migrate customers to home offices, since the customers phone service was already managed from the cloud. If the customers were already leveraging SIP trunking, the consensus from the partners is that customers could easily be migrated to the CrowdVoice platform during the onset of the pandemic.”

Pandemic Expected to Increase SMB Use of Managed Services

SMBs are looking to leverage more managed services after the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey by Analysys Mason.

The research firm surveyed over 400 SMBs in the United States between April and May 2020. It assessed how their businesses have had to adapt since the beginning of the pandemic and how they expect it to change in future.

The top findings include:

Vendors that support SMBs during the crisis will be in a good position to upsell IT services to these businesses in the future, according to Analysys Mason.

About half of the SMBs that started using or have increased their use of an IT service expect this to translate into an increase in spending. Collaboration solutions are one of the most popular IT solutions being considered by SMBs to help manage the impact of the crisis. But demand for other IT services is strong.

The initial increase in use of an IT service is often the result of free trials, which has inhibited the revenue opportunity for vendors to a certain extent. However, vendors that provide free trials and support SMBs during the crisis may see a surge in demand for paid-for solutions after restrictions are relaxed.

SMBs’ short-term priorities include ensuring that IT can be remotely managed and supports remote employees.
Consequently, businesses expect to reallocate some budget to support these goals.