ListenUp! 2010, Volume 3

In this issue:
    Three Keys to Ensuring Business Continuity
Hello, and welcome to the October 2010 edition of ListenUp!, your source for the latest news and expert advice about the world of business communications and data solutions.

In this issue, we'll feature an article called "Three Keys to Ensuring Business Continuity," which highlights the importance of keeping key components of your business communications up and running, including your phone systems, internet connectivity and bandwidth. Though this article was featured in September's eBulletin, the response from readers was so great, we felt the need to share it with you again in case it missed you the first time around.

This edition's articles:
Three Keys to Ensuring Business Continuity
ETA Wins Best Places to Work Award
Solution Spotlight: Hosted PBX
ETA Employees Volunteer with Philabundance to Help Fight Hunger
ETA Rides City to Shore to Help Fight MS
Event Corner: Upcoming Events and More...
ETA's Genesis Program Draws Attention
Mitel Recognizes ETA as Platinum Level Partner
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Three Keys to Ensuring Business Continuity
Network outages, viruses, power failures and other barriers to effective business communication happen. Not only do they impact your productivity and profit, but they are so sporadic and spontaneous that you can’t predict and prevent them all. But what you can do is prepare.

Three critical points of contact that are important to prepare and protect include your business phone system, internet connectivity and bandwidth capacity. Without these, current and potential customers, partners and other outside contacts can’t reach you and, even worse, you have no control over how they react.

Given that these touch points are so important to how your business communicates, here are a few ways to ensure that you’re never left without them:

Phone System
Though many tend to rely on email nowadays, telephone use is far from dead. It’s still considered one of the lifelines of business, which is why we all use it.

One of the ways to keep this lifeline running when an outage occurs is to utilize a data center/co-location facility, a fortress of sorts that has various internet connections and back-up power sources.

There are two ways you can utilize such a facility: either by putting your hardware solely at the facility, or at both the facility and your location, which is known as co-location.

By putting at least part of your phone system’s physical hardware at an off-site location, you’re using that center’s redundancy to ensure your mission-critical functions in the event that your office experiences a power outage, network failure, or other disaster.  Read more...

Internet Connectivity
Not only are remote workers and email dependant on Internet, but, with voice now being delivered over the Internet (VoIP), ensuring continuous uptime is more critical than ever.

To prevent you from ever losing connectivity, ETA has developed Internet Uptime PoweredUp!TM, which keeps your Internet connection up and running by transparently combining multiple Internet links (T1, DSL, Cable, 3G Wireless, etc.) to aggregate bandwidth, load balance and provide automatic failover across all connections for both outbound and inbound traffic. Read more...

 Bandwidth Capacity
Just as having Internet connectivity is important, so is the amount of data you can transfer over it. One way to ensure your bandwidth capacity is with SIP Trunking.

The benefit of SIP Trunking is not just that you can replace traditional PSTN lines with an IP phone system or that you can enjoy significant cost savings because of dynamic scalability and compatibility with existing telephone systems. The benefit also lies in the fact that SIP Trunking drastically simplifies your network with a single connection for voice and data, causing you to only have to back up one system, rather than two. Read more...

Of course these aren’t the only ways to ensure your business continuity, but they’re important to consider when designing a complete solution.At ETA, that's exactly what we do. We work with you to thoroughly understand your technology needs and business objectives to design customized solution. Just contact us today to see how these solutions can help improve your business.

ETA Wins Philadelphia Business Journal's Best Places to Work Award!

ETA is a winner in the Philadelphia Business Journal’s 2010 “Best Places to Work” contest! The competition, now in its seventh year, ranks the top employers in the Delaware Valley according to scores given to the companies by their own workers.

Of the five company categories, — Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, and Headquartered-Elsewhere — ETA was awarded a winner of the medium-sized company group, ranking fifth out of the category’s fifteen winning companies.

The Best Places to Work award is based on employees' answers to an anonymous online questionnaire that's administered by an independent third party and ranks companies on several different criteria, including trust with coworkers, trust in senior leaders and people practices.

To even advance in the competition, a statistically significant number of workers must respond to the questionnaire, which means that this award would not have been possible without ETA's great employees, who create and foster a "Best Places to Work" environment every day. So a big thank you to all of our employees and to all of our customers and partners, who inspire us every day.

Event Corner: Your Guide to ETA's Exciting (and Free!) Events

 Upcoming Events:

  • Cloud Collaboration Breakfast Seminar - Tuesday, November 16, from 8:30-10:15am  - This joint event between Strongcity Technology Solutions and ETA will discuss how migrating email, intranet and online collaborations tools to Microsoft's hosted Business Productivity Suite can help manufacturing companies gain a competitive advantage. To read more about this event or register, click here.
  • Webinar Series - Starting this fall, we're beginning a series of regular webinars on the in-depth specs of the industry's hottest topics. The webinars will feature a third party expert, customer point-of-view and brief word from a sponsor. Stay tuned for the date and time of the first in this series!

The Mitel Simply Communicating Tour Bus Wows Audiences
In August, the Mitel Simply Communicating Tour Bus made its way to ETA's headquarters in Plymouth Meeting, PA, for the second time. Everyone from financial services companies and manufacturers to academic institutions took time out to tour the 40' business communications technology demonstration station.


Attendees got the chance to get up close and personal with Mitel productivity, collaboration, mobility, call center and enterprise management solutions. The tour delivered an in depth look at technologies such as Telecollaboration, Dynamic Mobility, Unified Communications, Desktop Collaboration, Virtualized Communications environments, Contact Center solutions and more, allowing for questions along the way.

We don't yet know when the Mitel Simply Communicating Tour Bus will be back, but as soon as we know, so will you!

The Virtualized Voice Lunch & Learn Opens New Opportunities
On September 21, ETA and Mitel, a leading multinational communications solutions provider, hosted a free Lunch & Learn on the power of Virtualized Voice. Companies and organizations ranging from workplace environment specialists to universities and consulting firms learned how Virtualized Voice can cut hardware and operational costs, maximize the efficiency of IT resources and staff and reduce ongoing operating expenses.

If you didn't get a chance to join us for the Lunch & Learn and would like to find out more about Virtualized voice, click here. Or, simply contact us today.

Make sure to stay tuned for more information on our next Lunch & Learn!

ETA's Genesis Program Draws Attention


 

 

 

In August, ETA introduced the Genesis Program, a new hiring initiative designed to match smart, self-motivated, hard-working business development professionals with careers within our culture of accomplishment. Since then, between two open houses and hundreds of resumes, ETA has been amazed at the level of interest generated by the Genesis Program.

As we continue this search for driven, career-minded sales professionals, we encourage qualified individuals to email their resumes to hr@expertta.com. In addition to ETA’s website, information about the dynamic opportunities is also available on TheLadders.com, 6FigureJobs.com and SalesJobs.com.

Mitel Recognizes ETA as Platinum Level Partner

In addition to receiving the Best Places to Work award, ETA has also been recognized as one of Mitel’s Platinum Level Award winners for the ninth consecutive year.

Out of 900 partners, there are only nine distinct companies that attained a higher level then ETA, showing that we continue to be one of Mitel’s top performers.

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