The voice conversation SLED partners should be having

In state, local, and education accounts, the voice conversation often ends before it starts. Most universities, school districts, and government agencies can only buy from providers on approved cooperative purchasing vehicles. If a provider isn't on one, it isn't an option, however good the service.  

For partners, that has kept voice off the table in a lot of SLED deals. You might run a customer's network, security, and collaboration platforms, then hit a wall when the phones come up.

That's starting to change as more voice providers become available on the contracts SLED customers already use.

With that barrier coming down, partners have a chance to change how they talk to SLED customers about voice. Here's where I'd start.

Why SLED voice has stood still

Many SLED organizations have built their phone systems over many years, and they don't replace them often. Telephony rarely makes the top of the IT list. It works, it's wired into every building, and replacing it touches every department at once.

The contract rules made it harder still. Even when an IT team wanted to modernize, it could only choose from providers on its approved vehicles. For voice, that list has been short. Many organizations kept what they had because the options they were allowed to buy didn't fit.

That's why so much legacy telephony is still in place across SLED. Partners who ask about it often find more than they expect.

Start with what's already installed

Walk into a city hall, a county office, a school, or a university, and you'll find phones on desks, in classrooms, in residence hall rooms, and in labs. Many still run on a dozen or more PRIs.

The people using those phones have moved on. Staff and faculty now work in Teams, Webex, Zoom, or hosted calling platforms. Much of the telephony on site was built for a way of working that no longer exists.

So the first question is simple: what's still running, and what is it costing?

Expect more than one platform

SLED organizations rarely standardize on a single calling platform. A university's central IT team might run Teams while its medical school uses Webex and another department uses Zoom. A county might have different platforms in different offices, depending on when each one last upgraded.

That makes voice harder to consolidate. A partner who can only support one platform can only solve part of the problem. Pure IP provides calling for Teams, Webex Calling, and Zoom Phone, so partners can cover the whole organization with one voice provider.

Ask how many people call at once

Once you know what's installed, look at how it's used.

Take a large state university with 60,000 faculty, staff, and students. Only a small share of them are on a call at any moment. In environments like this, we typically see about one concurrent call for every 20 people. That university may need around 3,000 concurrent call paths to support its entire population.

The ratio will differ from one organization to the next. A county office full of desk-based staff won't look like a campus. But the approach works across SLED: find out how many people call at the same time, and size voice on shared capacity across every site.

Most customers won't know their concurrent call figure offhand, but they usually have the data. Call detail records from the current phone system, or the carrier's bills, show how many calls run at once across a normal week. Look at the peaks as well as the averages. A university's busiest days often fall around enrollment and the start of term. A county's might come around tax deadlines or elections. Sizing on real peaks gives the customer headroom without paying for capacity it will never use.

Build the savings case in two steps

Budget offices want to see how the numbers add up, so present the savings in order.

• First, moving from legacy telephony to a modern cloud platform typically cuts ongoing voice costs by 30 to 40 percent. That's before any change to the commercial model.
• Second, moving to concurrent call paths on shared infrastructure takes those savings further, because the customer pays for the capacity it uses.

Ask which contract they buy through

This question used to end SLED voice conversations early. Now it can move them forward.

Ask early which cooperative purchasing vehicle the customer uses. If it's Sourcewell, OMNIA Partners, or HPS, they can buy Pure IP voice services on a contract they already use.

Covering the full customer journey

When I speak to partners, I start with what their SLED customer is likely to need. A voice project doesn't end at go-live. It runs from the first day of the move through years of day-to-day changes. Pure IP takes customers through that journey in four stages, and we can support partners at each one.

1. Implementation

This is the move itself, and it has a start and an end. The customer's sites come off legacy PRIs, numbers are ported, the calling platform is configured, and users go live. For a university or county with dozens of buildings, that's a large telephony project, and it has to happen without interrupting service. Pure IP can run it for you.

2. The voice service

To make and take calls outside the organization, a calling platform needs a connection to the public phone network. Pure IP provides it, with the phone numbers and carrier network behind it: Operator Connect or Direct Routing for Teams, Cloud Connect for Webex, and direct integration for Zoom Phone.

3. Observability

When a call drops or the audio breaks up, the customer needs to know why. The problem could sit in the calling platform, the carrier network, the SBC, or the customer's own network, and each keeps its own records. Pure IP Observability brings that data together into one view of each call. Because we operate the network carrying the call, we can see the carrier side directly. Your customer's IT team finds where the problem started instead of spending hours working out whose problem it is.

4. Maintenance

The customer's needs keep changing after go-live. Staff join and leave, offices move, and students change rooms every term. Each one is a move, add, or change, and in a large organization they never stop. Pure IP handles that ongoing work.

Some partners want us to cover all four stages. Others already deliver one or two and bring us in for the rest. Either way, you keep the customer relationship, and your customer gets one continuous service from start to finish.

How the conversation plays out

Three questions will tell you quickly whether there's a voice project in a SLED account.

• What legacy telephony is still installed across your sites? The answer tells you the size of the project: how many PRIs, how many buildings, how many phones. It also gives you the baseline for the first layer of savings.
• How many people are on a call at the same time? This tells you how much capacity to propose. If the customer doesn't know, ask for call records and work it out together. It's often the moment the customer sees how much room there is to save.
• Which cooperative contract do you buy through? This tells you whether the customer can move now. If the answer is Sourcewell, OMNIA Partners, or HPS, the deal can go through.

If the answers point to a project, get in touch with us and we'll connect you with the partners who can deliver it on the contract your customer already uses.