Here's a 1-step way to upgrade and save money on your business technology before the end of the year: Switch from GoToMeeting or WebEx to SmartMeeting. It's half price.

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.

Two wonderful companies are going to become one big awesome company. Colorado-based Level 3 Communications, Inc. and tw telecom, also based in CO, announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement, intended to qualify as a tax-free reorganization, whereby Level 3 will acquire tw telecom in a stock-and-cash transaction valued at $40.86 per share based on market close as of June 13, 2014.

From their joint press release:

"The combination leverages the highly complementary strengths of the two companies to create a stronger, more nimble, customer service-oriented competitor to meet customers’ increasingly complex local, national and global communications needs."

I'm an agent in good standing with both companies. Have been for years. I have clients with services from both companies. For my small business clients, tw telecom offers better customer service. While Level 3 is a strong, good company, they are known for just showing up and doing their job and not for add-on services and customer service. For this reason, I hope the acquisition generates a gigantic tw telecom and not a faceless Level 3.

tw telecom CEO says the following in the press release:

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:

My company, Caisson Technologies is an authorized agent of Comcast Business. Have been for 7 years. During that time, the mega company has definitely been a leader in expanding access to high-speed Internet and data to more businesses in our region, now including commercial areas in the Kent Valley. Here is the announcement from Comcast Business:

Comcast Business announced the expansion of its commercial fiber network, capable of bandwidth up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps), to underserved commercial areas in Kent, Washington, the sixth largest city in the state.

The network build out will bring Comcast Business Ethernet services to more than 150 local businesses for the first time, providing a cost-effective solution to increase speed, scale bandwidth, or connect multiple office locations on one dedicated network.