Tomas Gorny

Selling UCaaS Isn’t Enough Anymore—Here’s How to Stand Out The UCaaS market has never been this crowded. If your pitch stops at "we offer UCaaS," you're blending in—𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁. Your customers expect more: seamless integrations, meaningful analytics, frictionless onboarding, and solutions that directly impact their bottom line. Choosing the right UCaaS platform isn't just about meeting client demands—it's about positioning yourself strategically, enhancing profitability, and creating lasting competitive differentiation. Stop selling features. Start selling strategic outcomes. Check out our YouTube channel to learn how you can start standing out in a saturated market: https://lnkd.in/dwsS_yQ2 #UCaaS #MSPStrategy #TelecomLeadership

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“A CRM is too expensive.” Let’s do the math. A typical Channel Manager in the TSD channel is at $120k base costs ($130k/year after federal employer taxes and fees) plus MDF, phone/devices, training, and support. That’s over $11k+/month all in. A CRM is $40–$150/month per user, depending on which one, integrations and features. If configured correctly to do what a CRM is supposed to do, track leading indicators to ensure activities and tasks are happening and creating traction with Trusted Advisors, it gives you visibility into an additional pipeline (not just the deal pipeline, but a Trusted Advisor pipeline). That way, after your Channel Manager has been working for 9+ months, you can see whether traction is happening. Too often, suppliers wait 9+ months before they start questioning performance when a CRM is not configured to watch leading indicators. From there, one of four things typically happens: 1. The Channel Manager never built a pipeline, and 9 months of salary is wasted. 2. The Channel Manager is let go too soon; Trusted Advisors who were close to bringing you deals lose confidence and the relationship stalls, again expensive and stagnant. 3. The supplier waits another 6–9 months hoping deals start to flow before they are let go. 4. The supplier waits another 6–9 months and revenue finally starts to come in, resulting in holding your breath every month, hoping it’s repeatable. It doesn’t have to be this way. You can structure your CRM so that, from day one, you can see the progress your Channel Manager is making with Trusted Advisors and what’s happening in your channel before revenue shows up. Don’t let $11,000/month be wasted because you won’t pay $40–$150/month for visibility into your channel. The Channel Advisors University offers a webinar series on structuring your CRM to use the Channel 2.0 Methodology, so you can reinforce the right channel behaviors without worrying your money is being wasted. If you’re interested in a free CRM assessment, please reach out to The Channel Advisors today.

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📍 Behind the Connection: What Makes a Location On-Net? (And How On-Net is On-Net) Ever been burned quoting a location that was “on-net”… only to find out it wasn’t? You’re not alone—and it’s costing providers and buyers time, money, and trust. Let’s break it down 👇 In the connectivity world, few terms are used more often—or more loosely—than “on-net.” At first glance, it seems simple: a location where a provider has built infrastructure and can deliver services directly as Connectbase defines the term for our ecosystem with best practices shared to suppliers. But here’s what often gets missed: 🔹 There are degrees of on-net. Some locations are fully lit and ready to activate within minutes or hours. Others have fiber to the basement, but still require splicing, risers, equipment, or building access negotiations. Some providers are inside a building serving only one tenant under exclusive rights but not rights to serve others, and others call a site “on-net” where they lease access without owning the infrastructure or equipment and therefore can serve up to a point of capacity. 🔹 Providers sometimes defines “on-net” differently. One might label a location on-net if it’s within 300 or x ft of fiber (aka what Connectbase defines as NearNet)... Another may define OnNet if fiber is termined on property, but not already live in the building. 🔹 The business stakes are real. ✔️ Faster delivery ✔️ Lower cost ✔️ Better expectations …only if it’s truly on-net. Otherwise: 🚫 Quoting delays 🚫 Construction fallout 🚫 Lost trust 🔹 That’s why data—and definition—matters. At Connectbase, we bring Location Truth to the connectivity ecosystem. We validate infrastructure, normalize serviceability, and enable partners and providers to quote with precision and confidence. So next time someone says “on-net,” ask the follow-up: 👉 How on-net is that on-net? Because in this industry, details drive dollars—and precision builds trust. #BehindTheConnection #OnNet #ConnectivityEcosystem #Serviceability #FiberInfrastructure #ConnectedWorld #QuotingAutomation #Connectbase #DigitalInfrastructure #LocationTruth #BeFound #ecoystemledgrowth

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🤔 Build vs. Buy? One UCaaS provider chose partnership—and unlocked a whole new revenue stream with UponAI I see this question all the time: Should you invest years building your own AI, or plug in something ready to go? One of our UCaaS partners faced this exact fork in the road. Their team debated—do we pour resources into internal R&D, or do we fast-track by integrating UponAI’s platform? (The clock ticks fast in tech.) → They picked partnership. → We plugged UponAI’s AI Voice into their white-labeled solutions. → They hit the market with new AI features in 60 days. → (Yes, 60. Not 2 years.) The result? • They captured new clients who wanted AI now. • ARR jumped $120,000 in the first quarter after launch. • Their team kept focus on what they do best—serving customers, not reinventing the AI wheel. I love seeing these wins. It’s not always about building from scratch. Sometimes, teaming up opens the door to faster growth and new revenue. If you can imagine AI in your phone system, you can deliver it. That’s the spirit behind UponAI. Curious if partnership could help you reach your goals faster? Or have you faced the build vs. buy crossroads yourself? Let’s discuss! #AIVoice #UCaaS #CCaaS #CloudCommunications #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalTransformation #Partnerships #BusinessGrowth #PhoneBill ☎️

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The fundamentals of successful Voice AI? Flawless contact center availability and voice quality. The best TTS, LLM, STT and prompting won't help if your phone connection sucks. You can measure tons and tons of metrics with Sipfront, from the SIP signaling to the RTP metrics, up to audio metrics and the actual content and inten. Now, we distilled the fundamentals and created nice little widgets for internal monitoring and SLA monitoring as a basis for your contact center and PBX operations.

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The industry is shifting faster than anyone wants to admit. Buckle up! When UC Today asked me about the future of CPaaS, I didn’t want to repeat the same safe talking points we’ve all heard a hundred times. “AI will change everything.” “CPaaS is growing.” “Customer experience is important.” Yes… we know. But the real story — the one I shared in the interview — is that we’re quietly crossing a line right now. A line where communications becomes less about channels and more about intelligence. Less about “adding a feature” and more about understanding why we engage in the first place. And honestly? I don’t think the industry is prepared for how big this shift really is. Because intelligent engagement isn’t a product. It’s not a category. It’s a mindset — and it forces uncomfortable questions: Who owns the conversation when an AI listens, summarises and decides? What does “consent” mean when machines negotiate on our behalf? Is CPaaS still CPaaS when the intelligence lives at the edge and not in the cloud? We’re already seeing the early signs: AI note-takers becoming team members. Voice tech making interactions accessible to people who were previously excluded. Enterprises experimenting with tiny, very specific use cases that deliver big impact. This is where the real disruption is hiding — not in the press releases. 2026 is going to be the year we stop talking about “AI features” and start talking about AI behaviour. And that’s exactly where CPaaS, AI, and edge computing converge into something more powerful: Intelligent Engagement. If you’re curious about where this is all heading, UC Today captured the conversation nicely. 👉 Read the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/eEzrK_iC And if you’re building the future of engagement — telco, enterprise, startup, CPaaS — we should probably talk. #CPaaS #IntelligentEngagement #AI #CustomerExperience #Telco #DigitalTransformation #AgenticAI #CPaaSAA UC Today Kieran Devlin Rob Scott🎙️ CPaaS Acceleration Alliance The Next Cloud

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A few months ago, we sat down with a growing mid-size company that thought their tech was “fine.” Nothing major was broken, and day-to-day work was getting done. But after running our Technology Health Scorecard, a different picture came into focus. We found Wi-Fi gaps that slowed down certain teams, security settings that left them exposed, and integrations that weren’t actually talking to each other — all quietly chipping away at performance. The Scorecard isn’t about selling you something. It’s about giving you a clear, honest look at your IT and communications environment so you can make smart decisions. We check everything from secure communications and Wi-Fi coverage to remote worker support, integrations, and security — cyber, physical, video, and network. Because sometimes, the difference between “fine” and “future-ready” is just knowing where to look. https://hubs.ly/Q03D0cKN0 #BetterConnected #ITLeadership #TechStrategy #CyberSecurity #BusinessContinuity #DigitalTransformation #UniversalConnectivity

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"Technology, when leveraged properly, is the great equalizer—it allows small businesses to scale, compete, and win." – Mark Cuban At Cleod9 Voice, we believe communication is the cornerstone of that competitive edge. When small businesses have access to AI-powered communication tools that were once only available to enterprise companies, they don't just level the playing field—they can dominate it. Our platform puts Fortune 500-level business communication capabilities in the hands of growing businesses, helping them: ✅ Streamline customer interactions ✅ Automate routine communications ✅ Scale personalized outreach ✅ Compete with confidence Because when technology meets smart communication strategy, small businesses don't just survive—they thrive. #SmallBusiness #BusinessCommunications #AI #Technology #Entrepreneurship #MarkCuban #BusinessGrowth

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The thing that broke in Meta's demo wasn't the wifi. It was their voice agent. What happened here? Well despite what many salespeople say, getting voice agents that work in production is hard. Whats so hard about it? Lets breakdown what ACTUALLY went wrong in this demo: 1. The voice agent didn't respond to the first question This could have been because of any of the following reasons: a) the meta LLM had high latency (most likely) b) the Voice Activity Detector (VAD) missed an endpoint c) The transcription was incorrect d) Realtime pipelines, like vision and voice use Frames to pass information two and from the real world to the computer. In just a second there are hundreds of thoisands of frames moving through your pipeline. It very possible that one of these was blocked somewhere due to CPU spikes or other issues. 2. The Voice Agent didn't respond with the users question This is a LLM problem. If I had to guess they are using some sort of multi-agent framework under the hood to process text, speech and images. I bet, that in this case, the AI agent called the wrong function, or entered into another agent that was a few stages ahead of where the demo actually was (likely due to an interruption issue). This is a SUPER hard problem to solve and took us over a year to get right. 3. The AI said the same thing twice (we call this stacking) This happens when two duplicate frames come out together, there are a bunch of reasons that this can happen. Likely, they didn't clear the pipeline, and ask the model to generate another response. (should be a somewhat easy fix) We see all the time organizations getting burned by poorly designed voice agents that just fall flat in production. There is SO MUCH that goes on under the hood of building voice agents that actually work. Even when building on top of open source frameworks or voice API tools, your work is far from done, you need to hire a team of engineers that can solve frontier problems like these for the first time. This is not easy, nor worth it to do for most businesses. If you want to have your phone lines run better then Meta demo, then check us out: Phonely.ai Or don't and we'll see you in 6 months :)

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Sometimes you come across a solution that’s so good, you can’t stop talking about it - or in our case, you buy it. I’m thrilled to share that NNNCo (National Narrowband Network Co), an nxzen company, now owns PowerPilot, an AI-enabled network monitoring and visibility solution we’ve been working with for a while. We’ve seen first-hand how it helps Distribution Network Providers improve safety, reliability and performance in a really cost-effective way. PowerPilot joins the NNNCo Smart Energy portfolio so that we can take this proven technology to utilities around the world and scale its impact. After years in IoT, it’s still inspiring to see how far we’ve come, and how solutions like PowerPilot continue to show the power of LoRaWAN and its ability to solve real-world challenges. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/gF_2uHAB

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You've probably seen the posts: "RIP salespeople. AI is going to take your jobs." My take? I love technology. It’s the core of what we do at Adler Advisors. But I think something gets missed when people say sales are about to be fully automated. Sales is still human. It’s about building trust. It’s doing the hard work of getting in front of people and building real relationships. AI can help with research. It can help with follow-ups. It can help with efficiency. But nothing I’m seeing suggests it replaces the human side of selling, particularly when we're talking about B2B services or products that are $1000/month or more. People still buy from people. And that part of sales still matters... maybe more than ever.

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The AGs on the Robocall Task Force are back, starting up Robocall Roundup Phase 2. This time, though, it's not 37 no-name carriers they're targeting. Instead, they have send warning letters to the biggest: Lumen, Inteliquent, Bandwidth, Peerless. They've detailed the number of tracebacks they've received: 24k between the 4 of them over the past 6 years. They've detailed the illegal calls they believe these carriers are responsible for: nearly 1b Amazon/Apple imposters and 3b SSA/IRS imposter calls, over the past 3-4 years. Those volumes are just some of the worst-of-the-worst fraud calls - leaving out financial impersonators, for example. It's not clear what the potential liability is for these calls, but it's clear that the AGs are unhappy and want real action. https://lnkd.in/gJTCJFrT

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Colorado’s startup world is changing in real time. If you’re close to it, you can feel it. If you’re not, you might miss what’s happening right under our feet. This week on The Bear Roars, I sat down with David Prichard, the CEO of Denver Ventures. David has one of the more unconventional paths you’ll hear from a venture leader — from skipping out on college and going into sales to running a statewide investment platform. David and I talked about what’s really happening inside this ecosystem today. Investors are recalibrating after a turbulent few years, and Colorado is surfacing as a hub for opportunities in hard tech, quantum, AI. The people building here are starting to reshape what Colorado can become. The level of ambition here is rising, and the companies emerging from this ecosystem are beginning to reflect that shift. Spending time with David reinforced just how far Colorado has come — and how far it can still go. Listen wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gMMqrCzH Apple: https://lnkd.in/gunRWYEH Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gBzY_fHR Amazon Music: https://lnkd.in/gkwEvPaY #TheBearRoars #ColoradoTech #Startups #VentureCapital

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My latest Substack #6 looks at the companies that are taking voice and data to places without coverage. It looks at where this is happening, how it's done and whether the process can be accelerated.

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