Video Transcription

Chris Frey:

I think there's probably lots of reasons, and I could probably spend all day talking about it, typically we do spend all day talking about it. I guess from the... Aside from Mitel, I would look at the industry as a whole, and that we were on this bell curve trajectory towards cloud adoption. And then as soon as the pandemic hit, it really became more of an elevator type approach.

On-premise solutions weren't set up to handle remote workers at scale so the cloud adoption just skyrocketed literally overnight as workers went home. And although that was already the trend, it's really kind of amplified it to exponentially. And I think the result of that is a huge shift in revenue, a huge shift in time and energy and the businesses became overnight consumers and buyers of cloud and employees started looking elsewhere for their next gigs and their next jobs. 

And we've definitely seen just a steady trend and a flow of money and people to cloud and UCAS and CCAS solutions away from the on-premise solutions. The analogy I like to make when possible is, "We all kind of feel like we have a choice in this, but ultimately the choices are kind of being made for us." There is a steady flow of people and money to different modalities and different solutions and it is a way from the on-prem solutions.

And that's pretty indicative of what we've seen with all of the on-prem producers out there. Many are staying or trying to hang on to their premise business as much as they can, but we see increased costs, we see poorer response times on tickets upgrades are fewer between, and the value of those upgrades seems to wane. 

I think staying on these on-premise platforms, especially those driven by windows servers is continues to be a liability. I think security plays a big piece in that, especially with the amount of ransomware attacks that we see. And I got to say, like, from a ransomware standpoint, nobody really likes to talk about it. They're prevalent, they happen, but they're that deep, dark, dirty secret that companies push way down and don't want publicized and on-prem solutions are definitely subject to those types of exploits.