Vertical Communications
Communication Solutions for Today's Needs

Peter Bailey, CEO

Take us through the inception of the company and its unique value proposition in the market space.

Vertical Communications was founded to help companies through the remarkable technology revolutions in the telecommunications space. We combined advanced in-house technology initiatives with acquisitions of best-of-breed companies in the marketplace to deliver compelling communications solutions to our customers. The result is a company that can offer the best products from vendors like Mitel combined with managed carrier services offerings, world-class solution design, professional project management, and our national implementation and support organization. The result is an end-to-end solution for the customer with everything provided by Vertical.

Whether our customer is a large enterprise, government entity, or a small or medium business, they can count on our decades of experience and scope of our service organization to make sure they get VIP service from sales, through design and implementation, and on into support and lifecycle maintenance. Vertical builds customer relationships for life.

Can you elaborate on your partnership with Mitel?

Vertical has a long and deep relationship with Mitel. Many of our leadership, sales, and technical personnel worked at Mitel and we’ve been a Platinum partner for many years. Vertical’s relationship came out of one of our acquisitions to expand our reach and service. We acquired Fulton Communications in 2014 which was already a leading Mitel solution and service provider. Fulton offered us a robust network of Mitel offices across the country with experienced service techs, solution engineers, and sales people. Our service team has over 975 combined years of experience implementing and servicing Mitel systems. Whether the customer is interested in support for legacy products, Mitel cloud products, or needs help deciding on the right new solution for them, Vertical has the extensive expertise to help.

The primary goal is to understand the need to switch from a world of traditional solutions—premise-based, telephone systems—to a place where solutions can be delivered through the cloud and the financial model changes from a CapEx model to an OpEx model. Understanding how to transition to new models while preserving the value of their extensive investment in legacy technologies and infrastructure is a key challenge. Determining the best way to make that change while also considering privacy concerns, regulatory compliance, and future-proofing the solution is where Vertical can lend our extensive experience. Finally, there are the unique communications solutions that differentiate a company’s business. From IVRs, to contact centers, to web integration it can be daunting figuring out how to upgrade all of these services. That’s where Mitel comes in. Their broad portfolio of solutions on one platform can make this process simple.

Could you please cite case studies on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes with your innovative array of solutions?

Our client, Sloan Implement is one of the largest John Deere dealers in the world with locations throughout Wisconsin and Illinois. Sloan needed a comprehensive communications system to connect all their locations into a single system and mobility support for Sloan’s 230 field engineers. We worked closely with Sloan Implement to determine their exact needs and designed a custom solution to meet them. The result was a solution that includes custom integration to Sloan’s CRM, CustomerTRAX as well as local survivability for each branch to guarantee operation, even in the face of a severe disaster.

Another client, American Academy was unhappy with the product features and ongoing support of their existing communication system. It was expensive to scale, hard to manage, and getting outside support was difficult. Vertical designed a highly redundant Mitel 3300 for reliability and scalability. It resulted in substantial savings alongside ease of self-administration for tactical future growth.

What is the envisioned roadmap for the company?

We have a national footprint, and that is why we are always looking for the next best thing for us to go into and to work in, and what other acquisition would make sense. We have acquired many direct solution providers like Fulton Communications, Voice Systems, and others. We have also acquired a number of solution manufacturers like Comdial, Artisoft, and Vodavi which built our strong solution development team. Continuing to acquire the right strategic partners to grow our footprint and better service our customers is the plan at Vertical. Today, we service the entire continental US, but we will provide more depth in key markets in the years to come by expansion and acquisition.

One of the things that has changed over the last few years is that we have moved from office-centric premises, where we had physical offices all over the country to more remote worker capability, where our technicians and our salespeople work from home. This has reduced our real-estate costs while allowing us to expand our service organization to serve our customers, all due to the technology that we provide. We deliver a full-featured unified communication capability that allows people to work from home.

We have reached a point where 97 percent of our customer tickets on ongoing support issues are solved by an engineer working remotely. This increases time to resolution and allows us to offer unlimited remote support service contracts. We are efficient in not only providing the service but also on the delivery. Our customers get better, faster installations thanks to our world-class implementation team.