Learn all about what our QuantumShift Team is diligently tackling in order to provide more value in IT Spend Management.
Steve Hannel
Welcome to the very first edition of our QuantumShift™ by vCom newsletter!
A division of vCom Solutions, QuantumShift by vCom has been expanding rapidly, adding new vendors, new partners, new fulfillment options, new technologies, new leadership, and hundreds of new customers. QuantumShift by vCom plays a critical role in helping businesses manage all their IT assets and activity. Our newsletter is one way to keep everyone up to date on the amazing value we can deliver to your business.
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Everyone on the vCom and QuantumShift teams are true believers that what they do matters. I believe in what this company does to support and help businesses manage their IT environment and I believe in the people that work within this company.
Why does that matter? Because it’s 2022, there’s a shortage of IT talent, and businesses need QuantumShift more than ever. Strategic planning requires time and skill and the “do it yourself” approach is simply getting too hard. You need people you can trust to bridge the gap. We have the experts…we have the assets…we have the platform…we can play a central role by managing your IT spend and delivering IT services, support, and strategy so your business can focus on what it does best.
Personally, I look forward to working with all of you.
STEVE HANNEL
VP & GM, QUANTUMSHIFT BY vCOM
When you think about what QuantumShift by vCom can deliver to your organization, here’s what we suggest:
QuantumShift by vCom is 100% vendor and technology agnostic. Customers are in the driver’s seat; they can choose any provider or technology to build a best-of-breed IT environment, with no minimums, industry-leading terms, month-to-month contracts, and cross-provider optimization—all from a single partner, with full transparency.
QuantumShift by vCom provides four distinct benefits that enable you to:
| 1. Aggregate—Leverage the buying power of our customers to provide superior discounts on hundreds of IT vendors and technologies across all 6 primary categories of IT spend: Network, Mobile, Hardware, Collaboration, SaaS, and Cloud. |
 | 2. Consolidate—Group multiple vendors, technologies, and charges on a single invoice under QuantumShift management and gain singular clarity and a simplified vendor ecosystem. |
 | 3. Normalize—Eliminate invoice and bill payment confusion with consistent, understandable language that eliminates inventory confusion and enables accurate cost tracking. |
 | 4. Integration – Powering every tool and interaction through deep integration with vCom’s spend management platform, vManager. Shop, compare, and buy IT solutions; track orders, assets, and tickets with real time updates; view and pay consolidated invoices; automate cost allocation of IT charges; and leverage hundreds of reports from a single platform. |
Let’s talk about traditional phone lines, aka POTS or “Plain Old Telephone Service”. I know this isn’t the most exciting topic, but it’s a fact that most companies still have some reliance on this longstanding technology. Additionally, many may not have the time or resources to identify/implement the newer technologies necessary to avoid service interruption when these copper-based services are decommissioned by the Local Exchange Carriers. While digital voice service alternatives such as SIP and UCaaS have been available and trusted for years, the same cannot be said when it comes to key applications such as fire and security alarms, elevators, legacy fax machines, or even those pesky dial-up modems that may still be in place in your organization.
This is where QuantumShift by vCom can help. We pride ourselves on our ability to curate a depth of options to meet your unique needs, and POTS solutions are no different. Solution providers have begun to establish turnkey Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions that allow you to maintain your legacy applications while also meeting key regulatory requirements including integrated battery backup. These solutions leverage purpose-built voice gateways that replicate required analog signaling, allowing you to use your existing analog devices and life safety services like the 
aforementioned fire, security, and elevator applications. What’s more, these solutions often include resiliency through redundant network paths including imbedded cellular/LTE backup!
Through QuantumShift’s subject matter experts and extensive vendor partnerships, we have multiple options available to provide you the power of choice. Together we can identify alternate solutions such as eFax, SIP, and UCaaS, as well as advanced POTS solutions, from vendors including AT&T, Comcast, and Granite as well specialty vendors like MIX Networks. Our order management experts help coordinate implementation so you don’t have to. If you have limited visibility into your legacy analog services or you simply don’t have the time, resources, or budget to address the 
long-term requirements, we can still help by migrating your existing solutions under our management via billing conversion with your current provider without service interruption. Once this inventory is managed within vManager, we’ll be able to use the power of information to develop a long-term plan based on data.
Whether you wish to keep traditional POTS lines but need to reduce your cost, want to migrate to an LTE-enabled or VoIP Local Line technology, or need to arm your remote employees with an eFax solution, our subject matter experts are ready to help design a proactive plan that meets your short- and long-term requirements, and gives you the time to manage your other priorities!
Did you know that QuantumShift by vCom is auditing your bills for you? We know our customers don’t have the resources or expertise to manage carrier disputes, which is why we have dedicated Cost Assurance team experts in carrier dispute management and negotiation working on your behalf.
As part of our bill aggregation benefit, QuantumShift is verifying that every carrier is billing for each service accurately; whether it be the bill start/end date, service rate, or other errors. If the carrier happens to bill incorrectly (which happens more than you’d think), we dispute the charges on your behalf and continue to bill you correctly on your single aggregated invoice.
While disputing, we shield our customers from the added costs and stress from managing disputes. That means if a service is billed incorrectly, QuantumShift absorbs the costs and does not pass it onto you while researching and disputing with the carrier.
Here are a few real-life examples:
• A customer ordered a $2,000/month MRC circuit. The carrier billed $48,000/month MRC for the circuit for several months. QuantumShift absorbed this on the customer’s behalf, continued to bill the customer correctly, and successfully fought the carrier to fix the price and credit the difference in arrears.
• A customer recently returned two routers to a carrier, valued at $2,311 each, after terminating service at two closed locations. The carrier billed for these routers as unreturned. We did not bill the customer for the routers while we proved to the carrier that they were in fact were returned, and successfully disputed the fees.
• A customer cancelled a circuit that was no longer in term. The carrier billed a $8,878 early termination fee in error due to conflicting contract end dates. We did not bill the customer any ETF fees and successfully disputed the contract end dates and associated ETFs.
In addition to shielding our clients from these types of issues, the Cost Assurance team automatically files disputes with our vendors when they are not meeting our service level agreements. If you have an extended outage due to the carrier’s network failing, we request credits on your behalf and pass these credits on to you.
The Cost Assurance team files hundreds of disputes every year, resulting in billing error credits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Without QuantumShift, customers would be left to review multiple invoices for billing errors, spend time fighting carriers for disputes, and overpaying for disputed invoices before the problem has been solved.
It’s just one of the ways QuantumShift has your back, and we’re happy to provide this service and ensure that our customers are billed correctly.
Less than a year before the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, U.S. Ski & Snowboard (USSS) came to QuantumShift by vCom with a unique set of challenges. Chief among them: ensuring that 120 athletes, coaches, and support staff had full, private, affordable mobile telecom and data access during their training and events across the various Olympic venues in China in February 2022.
When USSS’s IT project leader departed the association two months prior to the start of the games, the project took on added urgency. Although the original plan had called for sending temporary devices and numbers with athletes and staff, the teams, managers, and support staff wanted to keep their own devices and numbers. Having previously moved all USSS devices to T-Mobile or Sprint, QS implemented a BYOD strategy for the games that enabled everyone to retain their current number on those networks as well as maintain a second active phone number temporarily with service in China.
The goal was a frictionless plan rollout that made all parties—athletes, coaches, staff, and personnel—comfortable.
Instead of new devices, pre-programmed SIM cards were sent to the team and all they had to do was switch out their cards. In addition, QuantumShift deployed 55 K5 Webbing hotspot devices pre-installed with a webbing SIM (which works with 650 global carriers) to enable Internet connectivity anywhere in China. The portable mobile hotspot was given to half the team, enabling the athletes instant access in a country where it’s hard to find secure connectivity.
Because of QuantumShift’s integration with vCom’s vManager platform, USSS was able to leverage mobile resources to address any questions or concerns, handle support tickets, keep an eye on rate plans to prevent costly overages, and quickly resolve any issues despite the distance.
The results were so successful that USSS is adopting the methodology for all of their international events.
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