Over a year ago, the technology provider CBTS partnered with Edge to help improve communication and collaboration efficiency at Edge member institutions. Through their Hosted Enterprise Unified Communications as a Service solution (UCaaS), organizations gained access to on-demand communications and applications that delivered scalable collaboration services faster, helping to improve business agility and better meet an organization’s needs. 

“Our relationship with Edge has grown into a true partnership, where we are both working to solve members’ issues around technology and telephony challenges,” shares Linda Mazzo, Executive Account Manager, CBTS. “We’ve worked closely with the Edge team to offer members a variety of options that bring positive outcomes. In addition, we’ve built out a connection to the EdgeNet network to provide our services on the existing network-to-network interface (NNI) that Edge currently offers its members. With this approach CBTS has engaged with many long standing members of the Edge community, including Passaic County Community College, Stockton University, and Middlesex College and brought on new members such as Jackson Township.”

Best-in-Class Solutions
As one of the top twenty communications providers in the country, CBTS is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell and has over 1,500 technologists dedicated to advancing IT and helping customers reduce risk and solve their business challenges. “Our technologists and engineers bring a breadth and depth of experience to thousands of customers and share best-in-class solutions in each of our practice areas, including cloud, communications, telephony, networking, security, and consulting services,” shares Mazzo. “We start with a consultative approach to understand what our customers currently have and identify their end goal or the challenge they’re trying to overcome. We then dig in deeper with assessments and analysis, where our architects and engineers develop a solution that fits the member’s needs, business objectives, and goals. These objectives might include simplifying management of telephony, enhancing communication within an institution for end users on premise or remote, the ability to utilize cell phones, or providing services, such as E911 and mass notification, all from one cohesive system. We then design a solution to fit their needs, including end-to-end implementation and ongoing support through our cloud offering.”

Mazzo continues, “When many organizations purchase a phone system, they often choose a solution that meets their needs today, not thinking about 10 plus years down the road. You can quickly encounter obsolescence in features and functionality if you do not budget for annual, or at least biannual, updates for a phone system. For redundancy purposes, CBTS will stand up four phone systems inside our two data centers that are strictly your phone systems and yours alone. CBTS is responsible for constantly being on top of those released updates that come out year after year of new feature functionality.”

CBTS also pairs every customer with a service delivery manager who conducts monthly or quarterly meetings to review the new dot releases, firmware updates, feature functionality, and determine what an organization wants to deploy inside their environment. “Along with being responsible for the lifecycle management of the phone system, we also offer the routine moves, adds, and changes,” explains Mazzo. “Through a ticketing portal, you can submit tickets to request items like a voicemail password reset or a more complex task, like adding new staff. CBTS acts as an extension of your IT staff and looks to take some tasks and responsibilities off of your plate so you can focus on other initiatives and goals.”

Guaranteed Quality and Cost Savings Through the Edge and CBTS partnership, Edge-connected members can further leverage their investment through a dual, diverse, direct NNI between the EdgeNet network and the CBTS hosted platform. “Edge members receive large dedicated fiber pipes from Edge that can deliver internet services, as well as allowing them to take advantage of dedicated circuits to leverage as a service solutions,” explains Gene Ratto, Director Sales, CBTS. “Since these are dedicated circuits that your organization is running voice traffic across,” Mazzo adds, “There is a guaranteed quality of service that Edge members will receive similar to paying for local lines through a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) provider. This NNI is not an over-the-internet solution where you could experience intermittent issues; you receive a guaranteed quality of service.”

“We’ve worked with Edge to connect NNIs located in Newark and Philadelphia,” says Ratto. “For an Edge member that wants to connect to the CBTS UCaaS solution, you can ride across the Edge fiber, specifically a virtual local area network (VLAN) circuit that goes from your environment, across the Edge self-healing fiber network, and dynamically routes to either the Newark or the Philadelphia NNIs. This ensures resiliency and redundancy inside your network, so that no matter where a link is lost on the NNI side or even in the EdgeNet network, you can still be dynamically routed to the CBTS UCaaS interface. Our CBTS data centers are located in Cincinnati, Ohio and Ashburn, Virginia.  When riding across that Edge self-healing network going to one of our two NNIs, the traffic can be routed up to four different circuits to get to our two data centers. With an enterprise architecture that has been designed by CBTS and Edge Engineering Resources, Edge members can count on maximum uptime.”

Kirk Rooney, Senior Solutions Design Engineer at CBTS, says that by leveraging the existing Edge connection, members can get this connectivity to the CBTS data centers free of charge. “If an institution chooses another UCaaS provider, there will often be additional costs above and beyond the cost of the UCaaS solution. Especially if an organization wants several circuits to multiple data centers like we provide, this can often range in the thousands of dollars per month. As an Edge member, you can count on substantial savings and tap into this connectivity to the CBTS data centers at no cost to you.”

Protection from Outages
An important benefit of the CBTS UCaaS solution is providing business continuity in the event of a power outage. Whether a storm hits, there are component failures, or other risks arise, an outage can be detrimental to an organization. “One thing that we’ve learned over the last year is how vital it is to be flexible and have the ability to continue with business no matter where you are or what happens,” says Rooney. “If you have a solution that solely runs and depends on equipment or hardware located onsite, servicing that hardware is very challenging if you cannot go to the facility. Or if you have a single device that breaks onsite, the turnaround time to replace that hardware can be lengthy. Additionally, parts can be difficult to find for older phone systems. This is why a resilient and redundant phone system located in the Cloud is a valuable solution and can allow an environment to be up and running at all times.”

With a cloud environment, the phone system is never interrupted, even if power is lost or phone lines go down that service inbound and outbound calls. “In today’s environment, CBTS works with customers to build a disaster recovery plan to ensure everyone stays connected and an organization can continue operations,” says Rooney. “By moving the voice system to the Cloud, you will never experience an outage. In fact, we’ve never experienced one minute of outage for the CBTS core for any of our customers. Plus, the UCaaS solution also allows organizations to avoid being dependent on other technologies. For example, with an on premise phone system and someone using a softphone, they have to use a virtual private network (VPN) to be able to access that phone system. Issues may arise, whether the firewall doesn’t allow that many users or they don’t have the appropriate licensing on the firewall. When you take the phone system and move it to the Cloud, you’re not dependent on other departments and their technologies in order to make your technology work.”

Expanding the Network
Many states do not have individual State Contracts to purchase UCaaS for their participating cities, towns, universities, and state agencies. To expand the reach of these valuable solutions, CBTS has twelve dedicated public sector account managers working in over twenty states and is developing new relationships with Edge’s Research and Education Network (REN) peers. To help more organizations take advantage of current technologies like UCaaS, Edge provides access to the CBTS UCaaS solution through EdgeMarket. “We see a bright future across the country to connect with your peers,” says Mazzo. “CBTS is currently working on several partnership proposals with other networks that offer services and benefits similar to our three active RENs, OARnet, Edge, and OCEAN. We are also looking to foster more collaboration opportunities between the RENs. With each of these partnerships, we will need state contract vehicles, so EdgeMarket will be essential in providing a convenient and affordable means for organizations to procure services and enter new realms of possibility.”

To learn more about bringing business agility and opportunity to your organization through the Unified Communications as a Service solution, contact info@njedge.net.