QuantumShift News

Learn all about what our QuantumShift Team is diligently tackling in order to provide more value in IT Spend Management.

Q3 2022 Newsletter

Letter from the GM

Steve Hannel

My team and I talk about the importance of having a why, because it’s our why that inspires us. My why is caring for my family and showing my children that kindness, love, hard work, and courage will allow them to create a life where they feel fulfilled, empowered, and inspired.

Every individual needs a why, and so does every business. So, what is QuantumShift^TMby vCom’s why?

Previous Issues

Our why is that we want to simplify the IT process for our customers. We want to make your life easier by reducing the pain and friction that comes with managing spend in this rapidly transforming IT landscape. We want to create a clean, streamlined experience that allows you to focus on your business.

You know our why. So why should you choose QuantumShift by vCom?

As you make difficult decisions, assess partnerships, evaluate IT Spend, and figure out how to leverage technology and software while controlling costs and dealing with strained resources, QuantumShift by vCom can help.

Sourcing through QuantumShift saves you time and money, reduces the strain on your IT department, and provides a wealth of additional benefits including (but is not limited to):

Full integration with our best of breed IT Spend Management platform, vManager, providing technical details on every asset, live shopping and buying of commodity IT services, full access to digital workflows (think service order approvals), on-demand call records (CDRs), drillable invoice details, and complete IT asset inventory and tracking.

Clean, simple, consolidated invoices with normalized, easy-to-read nomenclature. We can take the complexity of processing hundreds or thousands of invoices, and turn it into the convenience of processing only one, which is fully integrated with our platform.

Aggregated buying power by leveraging our entire customer base and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on IT. We source for you, we negotiate for you, contract for you, take on the credit risk for you, manage bill disputes for you, and do everything we can to keep your team focused on the internal projects you want them working on.

Those are just some of the benefits of QuantumShift and how we put our why to work for you. Read on for even more ways in which we can help.

Best,

Steve Hannel

What you should know about the copper plain old telephone services (POTS)

According to the FCC, U.S. telecom companies can decommission outdated copper POTS lines. For context, about 35 million POTS lines exist today, and beginning in August 2022, carriers will no longer have to support these services. (You can read the FCC Order 19-72A1 in more detail here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-72A1.docx)

Carriers have handled this in a multitude of ways. Some are moving forward with decommissioning services (ex. TPx). Some are raising pricing like crazy (ex. AT&T [see sample chart below from CA], CenturyLink, Zipply, Frontier). Some are selling their copper assets off (ex. Verizon.)

What does this mean for you?

Not doing anything to address your POTS landscape can be very harmful. First, you’ll continue to be billed for services that are unsupported, and that means your rate on POTS lines could increase by triple digits every few months. POTS costs have been ballooning for years, so that’s on top of an already high charge. Can you imagine! Keeping POTS in place means your organization will fall further behind in best practices. With technology improving at a torrid pace, it becomes increasingly more important to stay up-to-date.

What should you do?

1. First, make sure you have a clear picture of your current POTS services with all your U.S. carriers by performing an audit.

2. Double check your invoices and make sure you’re not paying for eliminated services.

3. Make sure you understand the impact these POTS services have on your overall telecom strategy, both from a provider and contracting perspective.

4. Determine the requirements of each line in order to develop alternative solutions.

5. Select the best solution and/or provider and contract new fees, terms & conditions.

6. Make sure you have an expert support your need to migrate the old to the new.

QuantumShift can help!

QuantumShift can help with all the above, guiding your organization to provide a clear POTS migration path. We eliminate the complexity of managing multiple POTS providers and invoices, and provide a portfolio of solutions, including:

• Traditional POTS with nationwide coverage (where we can keep traditional POTS) and heavily discounted pricing

• LTE Local Lines from multiple providers & manufacturers

• VoIP lines from multiple providers including cable company bundles

• Fax solutions from eFax

• Cloud-based RCF

We can help optimize your POTS spend. Leave the mundane work to us.

Ag-gre-gate: To collect or gather into a whole.

Contributed by Jenna Brown

We’ve all heard the term aggregate, but what does it really mean?

At QuantumShift, it simply means we have a vast array of wholesale purchasing power with our network of 100+ vendors, carriers, and partners. That purchasing power begins with the integrity of the contract, but not all contracts are rooted in great beginnings. We take aggregation a step further with the objective of normalizing a set of terms and conditions that provide our Buyers’ Club customers with the greatest amount of flexibility. Some of the key conditions we always strive to negotiate to end with a great partner agreement include:

Portability Options: Where possible, this allows us to move or replace a service without or with minimal early termination liabilities when a customer faces an unexpected location move. At times, this also enables us to move that spend across customers and/or locations with no penalty, which is something that a single customer couldn’t do on their own. No Early Termination Liability (ETL) = happy customer!
Evergreen Clauses: While it’s fine for the underlying agreement to be evergreen (meaning, it renews after the initial term), we always try to ensure that the services governed by the agreement do not automatically renew for a subsequent term. This benefits customers in multiple ways; as both technology and pricing evolve, we want to be able to extend the flexibility of exploring options at the end of a service term without being tied to a service for multiple years. Customers can then make the choice between replacing the existing technology, reterming the existing technology (possibly at a lower price) or having the flexibility of a Month-to-Month term for a modest increase.
Flexibility with ETLs: For large opportunities, we have successfully worked with some service providers and negotiated a reduced percentage after the first year of service is fulfilled. This negotiating power translates to savings for a customer in the event of unforeseen service discontinuance and is something most customers wouldn’t be able to secure on their own.

These are just three great examples of aggregated terms and conditions feeding into our aggregated purchasing power, which translates into greater flexibility and options for our customers. We work behind the scenes on contracts so our customers don’t have to, and this gives them back their valuable time and money.

QS Mobile Update

Contributed by Mike Machi

Mobile services have become the lifeblood of today’s diverse workforce, and QuantumShift’s product portfolio continues to expand and mature to help meet the unique needs of today’s business.

The QuantumShift product team has spent the last few months updating our agreements with AT&T and Verizon to ensure we have a wide breadth of solutions with the most aggressive rates. By leveraging our own data, along with competitive intelligence from other organizations, we were able to negotiate from a place of strength. The result: aggressive rates that can provide more savings to customers.

Our robust Mobile portfolio includes multiple carrier solutions across a wide range of use cases:

Services

Domestic and International services from AT&T, Verizon, and Webbing
Basic and Smartphone plans aligned with our varied customer requirements
Data-only services for tablets, laptops, and Wi-Fi Hotspots
Mobile Broadband and Backup solutions integrated into network, SD-WAN, and SASE environments
CradlePoint, Cisco Meraki, VMware SASE, and more!

Hardware

Flexibility for customers looking to leverage existing equipment investments, obtain new equipment, or mix and match to meet the specific customer’s needs
CAPEX or OPEX options to align with customer budget requirements

The Value to You

In addition to aggressive pricing, a robust product portfolio, flexible hardware and financing options, coupled with QuantumShift’s legendary customer service, customers also gain unique values not typically available via the providers themselves, or other aggregators, including but not limited to:

No minimum or annual contracts
- Service providers require minimum volume commitments or multi-year contracts in order to offer competitive pricing. QuantumShift by vCom leverages the buying power of all our customers to negotiate the best rates, and extends those competitive rates onto customers.
Mix and match of any provider and solution
- In order to get the best pricing, customers often put all their eggs in one provider’s basket. QuantumShift customers on the other hand afford customers the flexibility to select the solution and provider of their choice and based on their needs!
Optimized plans
- QuantumShift’s integration with a Spend Management Organization and platform means that all your spend is optimized regularly by our software platform, vManager, and our subject matter experts in our analytics team.

Success Story: GardaWorld

GardaWorld is a longtime vCom client that has been able to consolidate the majority of its U.S. IT spend across multiple categories of spend, under QuantumShift. Prior to engaging with QuantumShift, Garda received more than 200 invoices per month across its national footprint. By moving to QuantumShift, they were able to reallocate one FTE to a different role, ensure the accuracy of their billing, and gain the benefits of information at their fingertips.

In 2020, Garda began migrating their retail mobile accounts to QuantumShift to reduce the cost of their monthly mobile charges.The project began with approximately 2,500 devices. Now, we manage about 5,000 devices and mobile plans which amounts to about $326,000 per month of mobile spend.

In addition, GardaWorld is able to access QuantumShift’s unique and robust integration with vManager to gain visibility and control over their entire mobile environment, including:

Robotic process automation (RPA) that pulls inventory and usage data from the major carriers proactively, and eliminates most waste, including international overages.
A bill import engine that automatically identifies opportunities for plan optimization.
Comprehensive operations management, including all MACD orders, robust asset management, and trouble ticketing.
A fully automated monthly GL coding, cost allocation, and AP posting solution for all invoices.

With the mobility initiatives the Garda team set in place, the bottom-line results were astounding:

The organization saved an average of $35,000 p/month or $420,000 annually on their mobility costs. With a PE ratio of 15.57, that translates to more than $6.5 million in shareholder value annualized.

Garda has asked QuantumShift to help replicate this success for its Canadian IT spend.

QuantumShift News

Q3 2022 Newsletter

Letter from the GM

What you should know about the copper plain old telephone services (POTS)

Ag-gre-gate: To collect or gather into a whole.

QS Mobile Update

Success Story: GardaWorld

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