I think I say this every year, but I can’t believe another year has gone by. At the end of the year, I like to reflect back and make some observations about what we are seeing in our business and across the industry as a whole:

• Our backlog quadrupled over the course of the year. Many companies began ordering farther ahead for projects to deal with ongoing supply chain issues.

• Lot’s of talk about a recession looming, but no evidence of that in our sales pipeline yet.

• Most of our clients have initiated a move to the cloud for voice and collaboration services. Some have made the move, others are in the planning stages, but most have committed to the move.

• Nearly all our clients are running MS Teams and are now looking for more ways to integrate this with their Cisco calling platform.

• Cisco has made huge strides in providing seamless integration options for both voice and video with MS Teams.

• Ransomware continued to be rampant this past year with several of our clients getting hit. Using a multi-layered security approach proves to be very effective. Those that have not made the investment paid a high price.

• Our contact center clients are now making the move to cloud, through the use of Webex Contact Center.

• We have noticed a significant decline across the country in the availability of Sr. Voice/Collaboration engineers. We have also noticed that our clients are no longer trying to employ dedicated voice engineers but prefer to outsource this function. Some thought that voice has become easy to deploy and maintain, but don’t realize the complexity that comes with integration of multiple vendors and cloud platforms. They also don't realize what is required to allow users to have seamless and productive collaboration meetings. Every call now is video based, which means every call is a meeting and collaboration with someone else. Reports show that 98% of meetings have at least one participant that is remote. The experience has to be good. Many engineers have shifted focus to other technologies, leaving a giant hole to fill in the voice/collab marketplace. We anticipate this will continue for several years.

• The location of our employees continues to shift. At Telcion, we’ve been promoting remote workers since our inception. Not only have we had people choose to move out of the area, the new people we are hiring are also likely to live out of the area. We are truly becoming a virtual company.

• What’s changed recently is the mindset of our clients and their expectation of onsite work during projects. We are now completing large projects without ever coming onsite. We can still accommodate this where needed, but it’s allowing us to pursue a more diverse geographic workforce, with no regard to location. Additionally, it is allowing us to pursue opportunities on a national scale, with little concern for onsite deployment hours. This has opened the door up for our business to scale upwards.

As we look ahead to this next year, we anticipate the following:

• The supply chain issues will finally ease and become more predictable.

• Cisco will start gaining ground in collaboration deployments. Clients will start to see the value of the Cisco portfolio and the ease of which it integrates with MS Teams.

• Many employees will want access to hybrid work hours and will transition to other companies that offer this flexibility.

• With so many hybrid workers, finding new ways to have face time will become a higher priority. We may even see less money being spent on rent and more money spent on travel as we bring people together to be in person.

• Customers will continue to slowly adopt additional security measures, but will not give it the full attention that it deserves.

Technology is a tricky business. It changes constantly, sometimes different and with little improvement. It requires constant attention to keep it current and safe. And we all have to be regularly investing in training to keep pace. It doesn’t stop.

The one word of advice I have for our clients is to make the necessary investments in security. The penalty for not making the investment is very high, and it’s just a matter of time before you get hacked. For some businesses, this is an unrecoverable event. This next year, make security your highest priority!

From all your friends at Telcion, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

This post was contributed by Lance Reid, our CEO. Lance has worked in the technology industry for over 25 years. He became a Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) in Collaboration in 2005 and has been serving on Cisco's SMB Advisory Board since 2013.

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