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As we come to the close of 2021, I find it helpful to reflect on the past year as well as start thinking about the new year to come. This past year for me has been an interesting one to say the least, and it hasn’t turned out much at all like I had envisioned it at the beginning of the year. We all knew there would be some uncertainties going into 2021 as we dealt with the aftermath of the pandemic. But it wasn’t clear exactly how that would take shape.

The largest issue that we’ve faced this past year has surrounded supply chain issues. As the year progressed, timelines for shipping product continued to get longer and longer. We knew that would happen as we went into this year, but I don’t think any of us realized how bad it might get. As we moved into this fourth quarter, we’ve got millions of dollars of client orders with shipping dates in the 6-8 month range. This is unheard of. Prior to 2022, if we had an order take longer than 3 months, we were pounding our fists. Everything we hear tells us that we must continue to expect this through 2022, and that we won’t see any relief until 2023. This is very unfortunate as it makes it difficult to get things done and is very frustrating for all of us.

At Telcion, we saw several interesting shifts take place.

Security
We started the year doubling down on our security practice. We know that security issues continue to plague organizations the world over, and we wanted to make sure we were well positioned to provide security services and solutions to our clients. We developed a few solution packages for our clients with a desire to help people put the pieces in place to protect themselves from various security threats. What’s been interesting is that many of our clients understand the need for security, but don’t want to invest in it, until it’s too late. I don’t think a single month went by that we didn’t have a client get hit with some kind of ransomware event. Some of our clients were prepared. They had good security measures in place to keep it from spreading, and they had good clean backups that enabled them to restore back quickly without much data loss. And then we had other clients that hadn’t made the necessary investments and were caught flat footed with poor backups and months of lost data. We can only recommend solutions. You have to create the urgency within your organization to implement those solutions and be proactive. Our hope is that in 2022 more companies see the need to protect themselves. It’s no fun getting a phone call from a client desperate for help and not being able to do anything to help them except rebuild things from scratch. One thing that we have noticed is that our clients are recognizing that a single security solution is not enough in today’s world. It takes many types of products to create a multi-layered approach to provide the most protection. People are seeing the value in having more than just a firewall, but also implementing endpoint protection, DNS Cloud security, email security, etc. We are also seeing our clients have more willingness to outsource the management of their security solutions instead of trying to manage it all themselves. We expect this trend to continue.

Cloud Calling
This last year we continued to see the migration to cloud calling services. Increasingly, our clients are making the transition from on-premise to cloud calling capabilities. What’s been most intriguing in all of this is that on the collaboration side of things, over 90% of our clients have implemented or are implementing Microsoft Teams. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that this same majority have migrated to Office365 and using Teams is part of the package. As a result of this, Telcion has been working hard to provide support for these environments, as well as learning the best way to integrate Cisco calling platforms (on-prem and in the cloud) with MS Teams. We expect that in 2022 the transition to cloud calling will continue, and that our clients will further the trend of integrating their calling with MS teams. Telcion is ready for it. Nearly every Cisco calling proposal we send out these days has a MS Teams integration component.

Cisco DNA and Cisco ISE
We also noticed a significant increase in our clients deploying Cisco DNA and Cisco ISE this past year. Cisco DNA is maturing and is becoming the single pane of glass management tool for your network infrastructure – wired or wireless. Cisco ISE has become even more relevant as our clients look to deploy more security in their network infrastructure with authentication, policies, profiling, and posturing. Everyone wants to know who is on their network and have more granular control over what they have access to. ISE is the middleman that handles those requests and keeps unwanted users and devices off the network. We expect in 2022 for this trend to continue--either with the first deployments of these applications, or the continued expansion of the advanced features within these products.

Cloud Contact Centers
This next year we expect to see a larger migration of on-premise contact centers to the cloud. As our clients look at upgrading existing contact centers to garner more advanced features or making them more available for hybrid workers, the idea of putting this in the cloud has become very appealing. Contact centers are a valuable part of any organization and are often the front-line to your customers. Migrating to the cloud creates a service that can be more quickly adapted to deal with changes in calling demand.

The general trend to cloud services continues. Just don’t forget the added demand this puts on your internet infrastructure and the added need for resiliency this creates.

We wish all our clients the very best during this holiday season and we look forward to working with you to solve your business challenges in 2022!