This week, I attended the 2014 Integra Telecom Tech Expo. Keynote was Mitel Vice President of Sales Engineering, Joshua Haslett talking about the new role of CIOs as the "front-edge source of product innovation and customer engagement for businesses." Speakers from Metaswitch, Polycom, ADTRAN and Ciena addressed topics, including networking for the hybrid cloud, network virtualization as it relates to Wi-Fi deployment, and security with hosted exchange. Happy to go into detail about any of these topics. If you're interested give me a call or leave a comment. But here's what you really need to know about the latest trends in business telecom:

Information that comes from telecom carrier representatives is highly biased.

At the expo, if you listened to the cloud services representatives you might think the whole world is moving to the cloud and that you're crazy not to move to the cloud yourself.

We've really been heads-down busy at Caisson of late, so it's nice to look up and see news coverage of the work we do to help our customers. Today, I'm excited to share coverage of our work to help Affinity Home Care Services select, install and manage a brand new hosted phone service from Comcast Business called Business VoiceEdge™. Caisson was one of the first independent telecom consultants in Washington State to be certified to sell this new business hosted voice service. 

The work we did with Affinity Home Care Services was featured in many media outlets, including The News Tribune in Tacoma, HeraldNet in Everett, The Olympian and The Bellingham Herald, as well as in publications in other Pacific Northwest states.

This case study is really helpful for any small to mid-size business in need of a new phone system, or that is experiencing call-quality, call flow and voicemail issues with an existing system. 

Here's what appeared in The News Tribune:

Caisson Technologies Helps Affinity Home Care Services Deploy the Latest in Business Hosted Voice

Seattle Washington (PRWEB) September 29, 2014 - Affinity Home Care Services, a Puget Sound-based provider of in-home care solutions for older adults, hired Seattle-based telecommunication consultancy, Caisson Technology to help it select and purchase a new business phone system this month. One of the first independent sales agencies in the northwest to sell Business VoiceEdge™ (BVE), a hosted voice service from Comcast, Caisson Technologies used its agency to get the service installation expedited and correctly managed on its client's behalf.

This month, The Global Standard for Digital Transaction Management™ DocuSign® selected northwest-based business phone and Internet service provider, Integra Telecom for its voice, data and cloud connectivity needs.

This is big news for Caisson customers of every size and industry. It means Integra continues to be a valid, large player in the business telecom marketplace. Many businesses don't realize this because Integra started as a small service provider delivering POTS lines and DSL. That was years ago, however. Since then, they acquired ELI (also years ago) and now have the high bandwidth infrastructure to support large, growing organizations regionally and around the world.

Integra is one of over 40 telecom service providers that we work with at Caisson. We've been a valued agent of Integra since our inception in 2005. We're proud to work with its management, engineering teams and provisioners to deliver connectivity and bandwidth to customers via Integra Voice Communications services, IP/MPLS VPN and Ethernet services. Contact us.

Here are more details about the DocuSign announcement as represented in a press release from Integra:

Northwest-based telecom carrier, Integra Telecom has lowered the prices of its popular Business Connect Bundle service.The 10Mb integrated EoC (ethernet over copper) used to be selling for $599 per month and included 4 to 8 voice channels. Now that 10 Mb EoC service sells for $449 with 10 voice channels. Integra Telecom's Broadband Bundle Service has been very popular with downtown Seattle small businesses.

Here are some more details regarding this new Integra Telecom EoC promotion: