In this week’s Partner Spotlight, we talk to Mike Grady from Gracon Services.
Gracon has been providing technology solutions to businesses for nearly 40 years with a goal to improve customer business performance and provide successful technology platforms based upon customer requirements. They strive to help technology managers develop a solid foundation and business strategy to ensure success. Gracon focuses on improving productivity, organization, and technology budgeting.
Gracon values customer partnerships, some of which have spanned for nearly 20 years.
Q: Can you please give us a brief overview of your business?
A: Gracon Services, Incorporated is a Michigan corporation established in 1982. We provide technical support and IT consulting to public sector and commercial customers throughout the state of Michigan. We have been providing managed services, and we provide support for customers with hybrid cloud environments.
Q: What impact has the growth of Microsoft Teams and Teams Voice had on your business?
A: The growth and evolution of Microsoft Teams and Teams Voice have “opened more doors” for us to provide solutions for our customers. It has also expanded our market opportunities. We introduce the Microsoft Voice and UC options for later migration phases from on-premise to the M365 “cloud” platform.
Q: How have Altigen’s solutions enabled you to address the Teams market opportunity?
A: Since many customers are public sector, local, and County government facilities, they operate with Microsoft Government Cloud Computing (GCC) tenancy. Microsoft’s GCC platform addresses security and compliance requirements for those customers. We implement Microsoft Teams Voice with Altigen solution set because Altigen is one of the few vendors operating in the GCC “space.” We have been able to provide a Microsoft Teams and Team Voice UC solution to our GCC clientele.
Q: How were you introduced to Altigen? What made Altigen stand out from other options from a partner perspective?
A: We were introduced to Altigen by one of our leading distributors, Synnex Corporation. We have “interviewed” no less than six other UCC vendors claiming that they could operate and interface with Microsoft Teams in the GCC platform to find out that they could not at all. Altigen proved very quickly that they could address and provide a UC solution in the GCC “space.” With Altigen’s solution, we can provide a Microsoft Teams solution and expand what our customers have already invested. It simplifies our customer’s environment in a variety of ways. It is easy to provision, implement and maintain with the Altigen solution.
Q: How would you rate your experience in working with Altigen?
A: Our experience with Altigen is ‘refreshing and encouraging.” We spent over six months trying to find a vendor that could provide a Microsoft Teams integration solution for UC and Calling Center requirements in the public sector marketplace. Altigen proved they could provide the solution by providing a “proof-of-concept” in a concise time frame. The speed at which Altigen executes is impressive. We can take our customers from “proof-of-concept” to being in production in a few short weeks. We expected the migration to take months. Our sales cycle is compressed and our customers are impressed.
Q: What have been the primary benefits of working with Altigen?
A: Prior to finding Altigen we didn’t have an integrated Teams Voice solution. We were looking at adding a third-party “snap-on” solution. We did not proceed with the third-party solutions that were offered. Altigen’s solution has allowed Gracon Services to shorten our sales cycle, provide a quality UC solution, cut implementation time, and in many cases reduce our customer’s telephony costs.
Q: Can you talk about how some of Gracon migrations to Altigen projects have gone?
A: We continue to be impressed by the speed at which Altigen’s implementations team allows us to migrate our customers from legacy phone systems to a Microsoft Teams and Voice solution. What usually takes months has been done in weeks. Altigen’s support is refreshing, their product training library in many cases has closed deals for us.
Q: What advice might you have for a Microsoft partner or customer regarding Altigen’s Teams solutions?
A: Based upon our experience of working with Altigen, I would recommend Microsoft partners look no further than Altigen. Other vendors claim they can provide a UC solution that integrates with Microsoft’s Voice but they do not. Altigen’s solutions are truly native Teams applications deployed in Azure, which is really what Microsoft partners and customers want. You can rely on Altigen’s support to mitigate issues with Microsoft in a timely fashion.
Want to find out more about Gracon Services? Head to their website, here! Alternatively, find out more about our CoreInteract Solution, here!
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