Video Transcription

Chris Frey:
Garry is a sales engineer with RingCentral and there's a particular reason why we've asked Garry to be here. Garry, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your history in the phone business and your current role with RingCentral?

Garry Simpson:
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. There is a little secret. I've been with ShoreTel for quite some time and then I was with Mitel during the acquisition and then moved on to RingCentral. The topic of what we're talking about today is especially near and dear to my heart because I've actually seen all different elements of it, even was a customer of ShoreTel's before I became working for ShoreTel directly.

Yeah. Now in RingCentral, I am working with customers to move them from on-prem systems of all sorts, but in particular, obviously ShoreTel, Mitel customers, those guys are near and dear to my heart because obviously I know the platform, I know where they're working and so it makes my job a little bit easier moving them to the cloud, having that knowledge of where they're coming from.

Chris Frey:
Garry, I want to explore on some of the things that customers should be considering moving from a heritage ShoreTel Mitel solution to the RingCentral UCaaS solution. It's a lot of what I do day to day. Same with Lori, talk to customers about what do you have and where are you going? Then what do you need to consider during that process? I've got a couple different topics I want to touch on here. The first one that I would like your thoughts on are going to be security and stability.

Garry Simpson:
Sure. Yeah. The on-prem systems, in a lot of cases, the security of the system is based on the folks that manage it. Either the external party that does that or the onsite employees themselves. With the cloud, that gets moved off the burden of IT and into the cloud provider because the cloud is now the service point. It's not necessarily the onsite systems, the onsite servers and whatnot. There are some benefits though.

The whole concept of upgrading and making sure that you're up to the latest patch to be secure and/or to be stable, that again comes off the shoulders of the local IT staff and moves to the cloud provider and you don't have to worry about it anymore. As a customer, that's one of the nice things moving to the cloud, is that I don't have to worry about that middleware piece.

Someone else is going to do that and the someone else who's going to do that is fully trained and they've got a staff and everyone's going to be well up and educated on the latest threats. It really makes things nice when I'm moving to the cloud to just take that one off the plate altogether.

Chris Frey:
What about from a security standpoint? Really I'm looking at things like ransomware. Ransomware is kind of a dirty word. I mean, it is a dirty word and it's probably more prevalent than what most people believe it to be because we don't talk about it. It's again, a dirty little secret for many, many customers. Ransomware seem to be a... It's a prime candidate, systems that rely on servers, window servers in particular. Is that addressed with the move to a UCaaS environment?

Garry Simpson:
Yeah. It's along the same lines as what we were talking about earlier, is that if you are running a virtual server, server farm of some sort locally, you are responsible for making sure that that is not attacked or overtaken. That really goes away because there's no middleware. For cloud you really only have the endpoints that the users are actually using to make and take phone calls and communicate with others and then there's the cloud provider.

That middle tier, that attack vector that a lot of hackers go after is gone. A lot of times that just, again, comes off the plate of IT. I don't have to worry about that anymore. That's an entire staff of people that is going to look after that and no longer becomes a concern, so definitely a positive for the cloud move.

Chris Frey:
I would say too for people that if you were to experience some ransomware attack, which I hope nobody does, but if you did, even if you have other systems that are compromised, you still have the ability to get your calls from anywhere. You could take your calls from. Even if you can't use your work computer, you still have the means of logging in someplace else and at least maintaining connections with your clients.

Garry Simpson:
Absolutely. Yeah. One of the nice things about the cloud is that I can use my mobile phone, I can use a webpage, I can use the installed app. There's a bunch of different ways to connect. It doesn't have to be a singular point where a PRI comes into or a SIP trunk comes into and those servers have to be up and running. Now all of a sudden I can go home and work. Even if there's a problem at the office, it doesn't have to affect me so, absolutely.