President’s Piece

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10 Year Company Anniversary!

I am very happy to report that this May 2019 will be our 10th year in business. It is with tremendous pride that I can say that the great people we have at First American Business, and those within our partner network, have made it possible for us to not only grow but to prosper in the very competitive telecom landscape. We have had year after year of increasing sales due to our teams quality and reliable service to the customers we serve.

I want to thank our customers for their dedication and for trusting us to manage and evolve their networks. We have many small and large customers but to us they are all important and we look forward to serving them as their businesses evolve and continue to grow.

president's piece

As we embark on the start of our second decade I see huge opportunities as we expand our portfolio to Cloud and other technologies.

Trade Shows

2019 has started much like prior years with our participation in various partner trade shows. For the first half of the year we attended, or will soon be attending, the following amazing events:

  • Avaya Engage Users Group – Jan
  • Converge1 Sales Conference – Feb
  • Enterprise Connect conference – March
  • Ribbon Sales Conference – Apr
  • Alliance-IT Sales Conference – June

We had a booth at C1 and Avaya Engage and are active participants in the others.

Ticketing System

The launch of our newly designed First American Business Ticketing System! 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.

Staff Expansion

At First American we continue to attract top talent.  I’m proud to announce the addition of another new full time Avaya Engineer on staff.

Team Retreat

Our second team retreat will be held this year in Clearwater Florida May 7th-May 9th. With a virtual structured business model many of our team members talk daily on the phone but never have a chance to meet their colleagues face to face. Last years team retreat was a huge success, we look forward to our second team session. The team retreat consists of team introductions, success stories, new opportunities, new business strategies and the state of the business plus a little team building exercise.

Thanks to you, our customers– we look forward to supporting you in 2019 and for the next 10 years!

Sincerely,

Mark

Owner, Managing Partner

mark.morningstar@firstamericanbusiness.com

FABCloudUC™ Hosted Voice

FABCloudUC™ Hosted Voice

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First American Business has an exciting new Voice and Contact Center cloud service!

  • FABCloudUC™delivers carrier-class cloud PBX and hosted business phone services with all the features organizations expect from a traditional phone system — plus unified communications. Services such as instant messaging, mobile apps, video conferencing and more.

Get Quote

  • FABCloudUC™takes all of the guesswork away by offering a cost- effective, pay-as-you-grow, service. It is a reliable service with all the features you expect carrier-class phone and UC system. Innovations and updates are built in – you never have to worry about future updates – ever. We do that.

The Value of FABCloudUC™
Traditional phone systems and PBXs are expensive to maintain and require a large capital investment to update or replace.

  • FABCloudUC™removes capital expenditures and long-term operating costs for hardware, maintenance and installation.
  • FABCloudUC™ does not require organizations to have dedicated systems engineers and support staff to keep their phone system up and running.
  • FABCloudUC’s™ pay-as-you-go pricing lets organizations pay for what they use and add more services when needed.
  • FABCloudUC™ can integrate with an organization’s existing phone system, helping protect their existing investments while layering on new services and features.

Key Benefits

Flexibility
Time – it’s you and your team’s most important resource. FABCloudUC™ is designed to make users more productive wherever they need to work. In the office, in a home office, a hotel room, an airport or a coffee shop, FABCloudUC™ keeps users connected.

Mobility
Imagine a unified communications solutions that allows one phone number to follow users wherever they go— accessible from their desk, their smartphone, their tablet, or on their laptop; from anywhere with an Internet connection. This is FABCloudUC™ – your mobile office.

Expandability
With traditional on-premises solutions, you often have to plan and pay for future growth long before you even need it. FABCloudUC™ lets you pay for what you need; adding, changing, moving users as needed. With FABCloudUC™ Cloud UC, there are no hidden one-time product or upgrade costs.

Why Choose First American Business Cloud?

  • Enterprise Level Security
  • Global Footprint
  • High Availability data center design
  • Disaster Recovery
  • SLAs
  • Flexible Support Options – choose the support tier you need!
First American Business Wins UCaaS Hosted PBX Cloud Deal

First American Business Wins UCaaS “Hosted PBX Cloud” Deal

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Organizations of all sizes are moving their business-critical applications, including Phone systems, to the cloud because of it flexibility and cost-effectiveness.  Customers are choosing First American Business!  First American Business takes all the worry out of offering cloud-based voice services.   We handle implementation and on-going support including working with your existing carriers and suppliers. We support our clients 7×24 for complete offer.   Here is only one of our many customers:

First American Business Wins UCaaS Hosted PBX Cloud Deal

Hello Destination Management are “Meeting experts” charged with a myriad of responsibilities when planning meetings in far-away places. Ultimately, Hello provides outstanding experiences for their guests. At Hello! Destination Management, their purpose is to deliver outstanding guest experiences. “Outstanding” may be exciting, inspirational, educational or just serene. Their formula for success is simple; extraordinary people with local expertise and a passion for designing and delivering superior events. And they like to have fun along the way!

First American Business Wins UCaaS Hosted PBX Cloud Deal

Offering a fully hosted SIP base phone service, First American Business provides Voice Plus level of support which includes phone service with over 200 features including unlimited long distances services.   Hello! Destination’s San Francisco office was up and running in a matter of weeks!   Their workers had a choice of hard phones or softphones or mobile phones – any option to meet their needs.   No pbx hardware on-site and no unnecessary upgrades and maintenance.   First American Business all of that in our geo redundant Cloud.   Working with our partner Ribbon Communications, First American Business delivers full Unified Communications to the employees and Hello! Destination Management.

5G is here (Almost)

5G is here (Almost)

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It has been nearly a decade in the making, but 5G is finally becoming a reality. Carriers started rolling out fixed 5G to select cities in 2018

5G, which stands for “fifth generation,” is an upcoming standard for mobile telecommunications service that promises to be significantly faster than today’s 4G technology. It will allow users to browse the internet, upload or download videos, and use data-intensive apps much more quickly than is possible now.

Latency, or the time it takes devices to communicate with each other wireless networks, will also drastically decrease.

5G technology

When it arrives, 5G technology will utilize a higher-frequency band of the wireless spectrum that allows data to be transferred much more rapidly than the lower-frequency bands today. The downside is that 5G wave signals don’t travel as far: The new 5G networks will require many more antennas spaced closer together than previous wireless generations.

Some industry analysts estimate there will be over 15 billion internet-connected devices by the year 2020, more than three times as many as there were in 2016. That figure include phones, tablets, computers – and the Internet of Things.

How much better?

According to Gizmodo, 5G networks will have the capacity for transfer speeds 10 times those of 4G networks.   But a lot is unknown right now so the speeds could be faster or slower.

One big reason for those discrepancies is that 5G hardware standards haven’t yet been agreed upon by the telecommunications industry. The carriers are still developing several versions of the technology.

When will it be available?

Most likely mid-2020. Both AT&T and Verizon have already begun testing their 5G technologies, but in very limited trials.  This is an upgrade that will require a big infrastructure deployment, plus new technology inside your phone, so it’s expected to be several years before 5G becomes widely available to consumers.

The five generations of mobile technology:

  • The first generation (1G) is the original cellular networks in the early 1990s.
  • The second generation (2G) began with text messaging being added.
  • The third generation (3G) added the ability to access the internet on mobile devices.
  • The fourth generation (4G) was mainly increased speed.

5G Uses:

Improved broadband

Carriers are running out of 4G LTE capacity in many major metropolitan areas. In some cities, users are already experiencing slowdowns during busy times of the day. 5G adds huge amounts of spectrum in bands that have not been used for commercial broadband traffic.

Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are likely to rise at the same rate that 5G is deployed across the U.S. In the future, your vehicle will be able to communicate with other vehicles on the road, provide information to other cars about road conditions, and provide performance information to drivers and automakers.

Public safety and infrastructure

5G will allow cities and other municipalities to operate more efficiently. Utility companies will be able to track usage remotely, sensors can notify public works departments when drains flood or street lights go out.

Remote device control

Since 5G has remarkably low latency, remote control of heavy machinery will become a reality. While the primary aim is to reduce risk in hazardous environments, it will also allow technicians with specialized skills to control machinery from anywhere.

IoT – Internet of Things

One of the most exciting and crucial aspects of 5G is its effect on the Internet of Things. While we currently have sensors that can communicate with each other, they tend to require a lot of resources and are quickly depleting LTE data capacity.

With 5G speeds and low latencies, the IoT will be powered by communications among sensors and smart devices. Compared to current smart devices on the market, these newer devices will require fewer resources, since large numbers of devices can connect to a single base station, making them much more efficient.

Ring Central on the Move

Ring Central on the Move

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Ring Central on the Move

Ring Central is a cloud phone system company that has seen steady growth over the past several years as they make inroads into the traditional PBX market.

Stock Price:   Currently it is in the low $80’s which is up from its 1 year low of $40.35.    Not a bad return given the S&P 500 is up less than 10% this year. 

Market Cap:  $6 Billion.   How can a company that doesn’t report a profit have a market cap so high?   Answer is growth.    Check out these sales figure for the past 4 years.

Revenue:

2017 – $501 M

2016 – $379 M

2015 – $296 M

2014 – $219 M

Ring Central is still not profitable but that growth curve is unmistakable and is driving a high Market Cap

RingCentral’s flagship product is RingCentral Office. The company also offers RingCentral Professional, and RingCentral Fax.

RingCentral provides a cloud business phone system. It offers standard PBX features such as multiple extensions and web conferencing; fax; auto-receptionist; call logs; and rule-based call routing and answering as well. Generally Customers do not require capital investment or maintenance contracts, which has the potential to lowers overall customer costs and provide a solid ROI.

RingCentral Office

RingCentral Office is a cloud-based PBX system for businesses.  RingCentral Office features include call auto-attendant, company directory, call forwarding and handling, multiple extensions, a mobile app for iPhone and Android, Business SMS, and video conferencing.

RingCentral Professional

RingCentral Professional is a suite that provides a universal telephone number, voice mail, dial-by-name directory, call-forwarding, and other features through a smartphone app on iPhone and Android devices.

RingCentral Fax

RingCentral Fax allows users to send and receive faxes through the Internet without a fax machine.

RingCentral Meetings, Webinar and Rooms

  • RingCentral Meetings is a web conferencing product
  • RingCentral Webinar allows companies to host HD-ready virtual events with up to 3000 attendees.
  • RingCentral Rooms is to manage web conferences.

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A Family of Companies

First American Business – A Family of Companies

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Company Bulletin Notice:

Significant changes are in the works at First American Business and we wanted to share the exciting highlights with you in this Company Bulletin Notice:

New Name:   We have simplified our name to First American Business.   Because of our rapid growth in both the government sector and the commercial market, we had aligned our staff and processes to support both lines of business under First American Business Solutions (First ABS) and First American Business Enterprise (First ABE).   While we do still have that focus to drive performance and results based on the needs of both markets we realized that it has caused some confusion with our customers and we want to make doing business with us easier!   Hence the new, simplified name “First American Business”.

Single Web Landing Page:  Effective August 1, we have a new single web site landing page:   www.firstamericanbusinss.com

Users of this site can access the First ABS and ABE specific information but only need to bookmark a single site to get all the news and updates regarding First American Business.

Single Collaboration System:  Effective August 8th, the First American Business team is migrating to our new collaboration platform on Office 365. As we have continued to grow in the project line of business, it was determined that more functionality and consistency was needed. Office 365 gives us the ability to use Outlook calendars, share calendars, have access to Skype for Business, back up our work on OneDrive Storage, and much more!

We are moving forward with our email migration to MS 365 Exchange.

Following the migration all of our employees’ companywide will have a single email address utilizing “@firstamericanbusiness.com”

Our new email addresses will look like: Lauren.Thompson@firstamericanbusiness.com.

Other key company email addresses will be:

New Ticketing System:  Starting in October, First American Business will officially be on our new Intelligent Service Management (Ticketing) System.    This new system will allow us to serve our customers better through a single portal for Problem Management, Incident management and reporting.

Supporting Features for our new system include:

  • Manage Invoices, Orders and Quotes
  • Support Tickets entry
  • SMS Messaging (Text Messages) (Single, Automatic, Multiple)
  • Suppliers tracking
  • Knowledgebase for customers as well as internal employees
  • Purchase Orders (all aspects of assigning a PO # and tracking o Transaction readouts for customers’ accounts as well as administrative transaction logs
  • Advanced reporting for company administrators to use
  • HMS (Human Resources Management System) for tracking employees and payroll
  • Customer online payment and account crediting. Invoices can be created from Quotes by 1 button push.
  • Quotes can be approved online by the customer via 1 button push.
  • Orders can be done by the built in Point of Sale (POS) system or done online orders. Customers can shop for products, services and parts. Orders have inventory management
  • Support tickets created in any status (Open, Closed, Awaiting Part, On Hold, Etc.)
  • The entire system is responsive meaning that it will display correctly on any device! (Tablet, Smartphones, Laptop, Desktop)

At First American Business we are excited about all these new changes and the enhanced value they will provide to our end customers.   Everything we do is built around customers and customer satisfaction and we believe these changes are an example of our commitment to provide quality support.

As always, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

Thank you – First American Business

The Cloud: Everyone is saying you need to move to the cloud. But should you?

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Think of the Cloud like a Restaurant. You can buy the ingredients, prepare the food and eat at home. Or you can outsource all those tasks and go to a restaurant. So what is better…, running your own IT department (i.e. eating at home) or letting someone else do everything for you and move to the cloud (i.e. a restaurant).

Let’s evaluate the 10 reason why you should move to the cloud…. Or should you?

Every business is under pressure to perform, grow and maximize the return on investment to sustain and survive the ever-increasing competition. IT departments in today’s businesses are no different and have been looking for ways to improve the bottom line while not sacrificing quality. As a result, they are looking at Cloud computing to achieve their goals.

Cloud computing offers several advantages but it has disadvantages too. In this two-part post, let’s first look at the “top 10 advantages” offered by the Cloud:

So as we can see there are pros and cons to moving to the cloud. Cloud clearly offers some advantages such as Data Recovery and Sharing but on the downside it is almost always more expensive and less secure.

The Cloud: Everyone is saying you need to move to the cloud. But should you?

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Think of the Cloud like a Restaurant. You can buy the ingredients, prepare the food and eat at home. Or you can outsource all those tasks and go to a restaurant. So what is better…, running your own IT department (i.e. eating at home) or letting someone else do everything for you and move to the cloud (i.e. a restaurant).

Let’s evaluate the 10 reason why you should move to the cloud…. Or should you? Every business is under pressure to perform, grow and maximize the return on investment to sustain and survive the ever-increasing competition. IT departments in today’s businesses are no different and have been looking for ways to improve the bottom line while not sacrificing quality. As a result, they are looking at Cloud computing to achieve their goals.

Cloud computing offers several advantages but it has disadvantages too. In this two-part post, let’s first look at the “top 10 advantages” offered by the Cloud:

So as we can see there are pros and cons to moving to the cloud. Cloud clearly offers some advantages such as Data Recovery and Sharing but on the downside it is almost always more expensive and less secure.

What is PCI and why is it important to Telecom?

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Q1: What is PCI?

A: The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to ensure that ALL companies that accept, process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) was launched in 2006 to manage the ongoing evolution of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standards with a focus on improving payment account security throughout the transaction process. The PCI DSS is administered and managed by the PCI SSC (www.pcisecuritystandards.org), an independent body that was created by the major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and JCB.). It is important to note that the payment brands and acquirers are responsible for enforcing compliance, not the PCI council.

Q2: To whom does the PCI DSS apply?

A: The PCI DSS applies to ANY organization, regardless of size or number of transactions, that accepts, transmits or stores any cardholder data.

Q3: Why is PCI important to Telecom?

A: For a company to be PCI compliant it needs to pass strict standards regarding its People, Processes and Technology.   For “People”, PCI standards look at such things as the background of the employee a company hires within their call center.   For “Processes”, PCI standards looks at how those people document and handle the credit card information they are given.  For “Technology” that is where telecom comes into play:   Many times credit card information is given out over the phone to a call center agent on the receiving end.   Even though the information is verbally spoken, a call center has the ability to record and store all conversations.   So where is that voice recording stored? Who has access to it? how many years is it stored?   All these questions need to be weighed carefully when evaluating PCI compliancy.

Other telecom related PCI compliance issues include things like patching the voice network frequently.  System Configurations and Network security are a factor – there needs to be safe firewalls to guard against hacks.   It is extremely important to update and monitor the anti-virus software on PCs and servers that are tied to the telecom equipment.

Any company, small or large, must be aware of PCI if they are handling credit card data in any way.   Hiring a telecom service provider that is aware of the issues and knowledgeable about the PCI compliancy rules is a critical first step to managing your telecom infrastructure. 

Jive Communications

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First ABE | February 11, 2018

LogMeIn buys Jive Communications

LogMeIn, Inc. (Nasdaq:LOGM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jive Communications, a leading provider of cloud-based phone systems and Unified Communications services and one of the fastest growing players in the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) space.  LogMeIn (“Log Me In”) the company that offers conferencing services like GoToMeeting and join.me as well other online services to businesses, announced that it would acquire Jive Communications for $342 million in cash.  The deal also includes up to $15 million based on reaching specific milestones.

This announcement underscores how the telecom market continues to see a lot of consolidation.  This is a solid offer for Jive Communications, a Utah-based startup that had raised only around $31 million since it was founded in 2006.

The deal will add a suite of unified communications services that will complement and expand on LogMeIn’s existing collaboration products. Jive has 20,000 customers globally, LogMeIn said. Its primary focus is on VoIP for enterprises, and specifically hosted VoIP.  In the enterprise market the big shift has been from legacy phone services to VoIP so players like Jive are making a lot of inroads as a result. Other competitors to Jive include services like UberConference, Zoom and WebEx.

“Jive’s success in UCaaS is a testament to its modern cloud-based platform, its deliberate focus on customer satisfaction, and its renowned culture of innovation. We believe the combination of Jive’s award-winning voice, video, contact center and mobile applications with our leading collaboration products, GoToMeeting and join.me, will give LogMeIn one of the best and most comprehensive UCC offerings in the market,” said Bill Wagner, President and CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “The result is a deal that will accelerate our overall growth, set a new standard in the UCC market, and provide us with a foundation upon which we’ll build the next generation of LogMeIn’s UCC portfolio.”

This deal will give Jive a lot more scale to grow its business. LogMeIn is significantly bigger in terms of market footprint with 25 million users, clocking seven million meetings, and over 900 million conferencing minutes each month.

The deal is expected to close in Q2 of this year.

LogMeIn has been looking for more ways to expand the types of services that it’s providing to its existing user base, as a way to expand its overall revenues. Last summer, the company acquired an Israeli startup called Nanorep, which makes chatbots and other AI-based tools, for about $50 million.