Archive for category: News

The future of work is changing rapidly.

The coronavirus pandemic has shifted many companies away from the physical office leaving people wondering how long they’ll be working remotely and how their work will change once they return to the office.

This is the new digital telecommunication world we are in now.

Teleworking has been around since the late 1990’s.    Back then a few innovative companies including Nortel Networks decided that they could save money on corporate real estate and improve employee satisfaction and productivity.   It didn’t hurt that companies like Nortel and Cisco made network equipment that allowed for remote offices to work in the first place.   High speed bandwidth was just coming into play in the ‘90s – before that it was dial up modems which were not capable of supporting a digital workplace.

Slowly, over the years, more and more companies allowed workers to work remote and meanwhile the technology that allows for unified communication (voice, text and video) kept getting better and better.

Fast forward to 2020.  The digital office isn’t temporary. Instead, the pandemic has accelerated a shift that was already in the works for a while. Much of the abrupt transition that companies made because of the pandemic will be here to stay, and it’s up to companies to consider the unique needs of their workforces as the future continues to evolve.

The pandemic accelerated the work from home movement by at least 5 years. It was already moving in this direction before, but the pandemic actually forced companies to experiment on new ways of working.

Explosion of Zoom, Teams and other collaborating applications hit mainstream.   Zoom was there but most people hadn’t used it before March this year.   The pandemic forced people to try it (and other collaborating tools) and they found them to be easy and they liked it!   The boom for these high bandwidth applications also drive IT sales of PCs, Headsets, Laptops, soft clients, directory services, call centers and virtually every part of a company’s telecom infrastructure.   Do you want to own a data center with servers and perpetual licenses when you could get Zoom or Salesforce or G suite from the cloud and pay on a per user basis?  Many companies are taking this opportunity to move to the cloud.

This movement to home has been both good and bad for employees.   On the positive side they aren’t wasting time in the car commuting.  They’re taking advantage of the time that they have at home, which they would have normally spent on the road.  However, they’re working even more and taking more time out of their personal day, or they’re not focusing on the families. Some companies are asking their people to block their calendars for personal time, which is a new situation for sure.

From a company standpoint E-commerce was already a piece of the business. Now it’s becoming the business itself.  When talking about digital transformation, business must look at the payback. Digital transformation is the business performing and growing better.

Working from home is really about the art of bringing together — the right tools and the processes and people. It is estimated that 50% of all jobs in American can be done remotely and long after the pandemic is over there will be more jobs done from home than ever before.

First American Business

100% of our staff works from home.  We remotely access our customer’s networks to trouble shoot and resolve issues and if we need to go to a site we nationwide network of over 800 technicians in the field that we can deploy locally as needed.

In short, we are fully operational, productive and supporting our customers during this time of change in the Telecom world.

Coronavirus Support

When things get tough our team gets going. The Coronavirus has impacted virtually everyone everywhere. Last Month one our very own Resource Coordinators (affectionately known as “the Mask Lady”) proactively sprang into action and started to make protective face masks for people in need and even sending some to our own team members and technicians. She is leading this effort for the First American Business team and has made over 500 masks so far!

These masks are making a difference at several local Houston hospitals!

Expanded Team

Business continues to grow for First American Business in both the Enterprise and the Government side. As a result, in the first Quarter of 2020 we brought on 4 new people.

• Engineers (Tier 3): Sean Poppell, Wayne Page
• Solution Architects: Hugh Simpson
• Payroll Administration: Julie Potter

This greatly enhances our support capabilities on Avaya, Nortel, Cisco and Ribbon products.

LAB Build Out

Our lab is now complete!

• We have made significant investments obtaining and building a formal LAB. The Lab is based in Tampa and contains Avaya CM 6.3, 7.1, 8, Avaya IPO, Nortel CS1K, Cisco, and Ribbon in the near future to name a few. This will allow our engineers to fully recreate issues and test solution prior to moving them into production.
• We have several projects where staging hardware is a component. Our new lab allows us to test designed solutions; Simulate issues while troubleshooting and provide hands-on training of new software as it becomes available
• We are currently working with Alliance-IT on getting lab/demo software licenses for the Lab.

Spring 2020!

It was the spring of last year that our newsletter featured information about our 10 years anniversary. It’s hard to believe we have now reached the year 1 milestone of our second decade!

Things have changed in the business world, and our communities, due to the global pandemic that none of us could have foreseen. People talk about a “new normal” but we will need to see how the virus plays out over time. The one thing we do know for sure is that in the short term there is an immediate impact to all of us, and how we address that we believe is critical.

At the family of First American Businesses, we have a high priority placed on the health and safety of our staff. Thankfully we have had a work-at-home policy in place for years so all of our employees are equipped to log into systems, trouble shoot problems and resolve issues remotely. We have a full suite of Microsoft collaboration tools that make communicating internally and with clients relatively easy.

We are in full operations mode and continue to work at full speed through these trying times. Due to travel restrictions our nationwide field services team of 800 technicians is in place so our customer’s continue to support their projects without flying to a remote location.

We truly appreciate our great customers and we are here to help!

Trade Shows

Early this year we attended the Avaya Engage User Group. Enterprise Connect unfortunately was canceled for March and has been rescheduled for August in San Francisco which conflicts with another engagement of ours so unfortunately we will not be attending this year. We are still hopeful to be able to attend the Ribbon Sales conference later this spring,

We normally have a First American Business team retreat in Clearwater Florida each spring and bring in our entire team but have decided to delay that until the fall.

Ticketing System

The new First American Business Ticketing System Is up and fully functioning. This system has made a big improvement in how we open tickets, dispatch remote field resources and pay vendors. This new ticking system will allow our customers to more easily open and track a ticket with us. Internally it will allow us to update and report key metrics to allow improvements in our delivery.

This new tool is an investment in our overall team’s productivity. Tool enhancements like the new FAB Ticking System have allowed us to grow efficiently.

Staff Expansion

At First American Business we continue to attract top talent. We have expanded our Tier III engineering team with both Avaya Certified engineers in Contact Center and UC and have even expanded our Nortel Tier III team. This is the largest our engineering team has been since business started 11 years ago!

Thanks to you, our customers– we look forward to supporting you in 2020 and for many years to come!

Sincerely,
Mark

Owner, Managing Partner
mark.morningstar@firstamericanbusiness.com

Now more than 5 million paying businesses are using G Suite to work faster, smarter, and more collaboratively— from small businesses to big companies like Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive, and Keller Williams. In the past year alone, 1 million new customers have signed up for G Suite.

What is G Suite?   It is a suite of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google Cloud, first launched on August 28, 2006.  G Suite is comprised of:

• Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Currents for communication;
• Drive for storage;
• Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Forms, and Sites for productivity and collaboration.

While these services are free to use for consumers, G Suite adds enterprise features such as custom email addresses at a domain (@yourcompany.com), option for unlimited cloud storage (depending on plan and number of members), additional administrative tools and advanced settings, as well as 24/7 phone and email support.

Microsoft Corp dominates the $15-billion market for business productivity tools however.   The main reason: Its longstanding product is reliable and IT managers have little incentive to gamble on something new.

However, Google has made inroads by throwing more resources at this lucrative market and targeting business customers. Since Google got serious about developing features for major enterprises several years ago, the number of organizations paying for G Suite has doubled to over 5 million.

Most of those customers are small and medium-sized companies. But some big names that include:

• Airbnb.
• Uber.
• Netflix.
• Spotify.
• Dropbox.
• Pinterest.Gmail

Gmail is key to G Suites success.   Gmail leads the way as the most popular email client, with over 25% of the market share.  Gmail has been around since 2004 and now has over 1.2 billion users.  One of the best things about G Suite is you basically get an enhanced ad-free version of the online email client most users are probably already using.

Here is a side by side comparison of G Suite and Office 365 products:

Microsoft has 60 million commercial customers signed up for its Office 365 product offering.

Google may never catch up to Microsoft but the market is huge and being 2^nd as an alternative to Microsoft is not too bad!

77% of American adults own a smartphone.

(Source: Pew Research Center)

The US smartphone use in 2018 places Americans at #8 on the global scale.

People read almost half (49.1%) of all emails on mobile devices.

(Source: 2018 Marketing Benchmark Report IBM & Watson)

This is an average percentage because smartphone ownership statistics show significantly lower use of smartphones in certain parts of the world.

YouTube was America’s’ favorite mobile app in 2018.

(Source: Statista)

Smartphone usage statistics define Youtube as the most used app with 81.9%, followed by Facebook with 75.7%. Next in line are Google search, FB messenger, Google maps, Gmail, and Google Play.

Well over half of American households are now wireless when it comes to phone service.  Of the other households, most of those have both wireless phones and landlines.   There are only a few – approximately 5% – who have a landline only.

History of the Smartphone:  On October 13, 1983, Ameritech Mobile Communications became the first company to launch a 1G phone network in the US, starting with Chicago. On March 13, 1984, the 2 pound Motorola DynaTAC 8000x went on sale—for $3,995.

But the true smartphone revolution didn’t start until Macworld 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the first iPhone.  Previous phones relied on keypads and could only navigate a watered-down version of the internet. The iPhone’s large touchscreen could flip through websites just like a desktop computer, all while looking sleeker than anything consumers had ever seen before.

In 2018, there were around 1.56 billion smartphones sales worldwide.

(Source: Statista)

With the world’s population at over 7.691 billion, these smartphone numbers show approximately 20% of all people got a new smartphone last year.

There are 2.71 billion smartphone users in the world today (2019).

(Source: Statista)

Almost every third person worldwide owns a smartphone.

Over 50% of smartphone users are addicted to their phones.

(Source: TechJury)

Depending on how you define addicted this stat is a little scary.   But in any case smart phones have only been around in a big way since early 2000’s but it is clear that they are here to stay.