Telesystem Debuts Enhanced UCaaS Platform with Cisco

Telesystem, the Ohio-based business communications company, on Monday unveiled a new UC interface, in partnership with Cisco, that it calls the “latest innovation in the UCaaS marketplace.”

Bruce Wirt, Telesystem’s chief business development officer, tells Channel Partners the offering represents a “huge increase” to the capabilities previously offered by Telesystem from a hosted VoIP perspective.

Telesystem’s Bruce Wirt

“Partners before only had access to voice and softphone capabilities, with a resale Zoom license required for video and meeting collaboration,” he said. “The new UCaaS product incorporates voice, video, chat and meeting collaboration via a single app that can be placed on up to five devices. Most importantly, every seat option comes with a softphone included, so partners have the ability to save customers significant money by eliminating the desk phone for mobile workers.”

This offering provides geographic points of presence in several areas of the United States, offering low latency communication that gives Telesystem a “leg up on many of our competitors,” Wirt said.

“UC nodes will be present in New York [City], Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Ohio (Toledo), Michigan (Monroe), Illinois (Chicago), Texas (Dallas), Colorado (Denver), and California (Los Angeles),” he said. “This offering also incorporates collaborative video meeting rooms that can be offered to each user at a competitive price point. Going forward, customer employees will be able to have their own virtual meeting room that people can jump in and out of at any time; there will no longer be a need to reserve a video conference bridge. This differs from Zoom and Webex, which are both pay-per-license products, and most organizations will oversubscribe these licenses across groups or teams to save money.”

On deployments of any size, Telesystem does a fully managed implementation with live customer training, Wirt said.

“Telesystem has a longstanding relationship with Cisco, but the partnership ramped up following Cisco’s acquisition of BroadSoft,” he said. “The resulting product launch is the result of nearly a year of collaboration and negotiation.”

To go along with the launch, Telesystem is increasing the residual and SPIFF commissions available through its partner channel.

“Currently Telesystem sells through a mix of direct and national master agent partners; the highest commissions are available from our Elite partners: Telarus, CNSG, TCG, TBI, Chorus Communications, MicroCorp, Telegration, IQ Wired, Teledomani, Telecombrokers and VGE,” Wirt said. “Telesystem views the channel as our growth arm nationally. Through organic growth and acquisition, we have a strong presence in the mid-Atlantic, the northern Midwest and Mississippi. This offering, combined with our secure SD-WAN product and our 100 network-to-network interface (NNI) appearances, give our partners the ability to increase our penetration into any market in the United States.”

Telesystem does business with 13 national master agencies, providing services to thousands of selling partners across the United States.