BullsEye Telecom is extending the SD-WAN envelope again with a use case that serves their community. The company donates temporary fundraising call centers, powered by VMware SD-WAN, so charities can take calls and raise money anywhere.
Clayton Banka, Product Engineer at BullsEye Telecom, was impressed by the usability of VMware SD-WAN from the first proof of concept. When the company was first testing SD-WAN technology, they set up a lab space for products from different vendors. “Other companies flew in a sales engineer with their boxes,” said Banka. “VMware just set up a 30-minute phone call. I remember thinking, there’s no way we can go through everything in 30 minutes. But all they needed to say was, here’s the initial login, here’s the Orchestrator, here’s how you activate it.”
Banka discovered that the 30-minute phone call was plenty of time to get acquainted with the product. He said, “After that, there was no way I was going through a two-week test process with other companies. I never even had to call VMware tech support.”
“VMware SD-WAN not only had the best quality numbers but was the easiest to use.”
Clayton Banka, Product Engineer, BullsEye Telecom
Deploying SD-WAN to clients and the community
BullsEye Telecom believes that VMware SD-WAN’s usability, security, and cloud readiness benefit many of their clients. They also use their field experience to donate call centers to local and national charities for fundraisers. The charities, including Mitch Albom’s SAY Detroit, the Salvation Army, and Detroit Dog Rescue, partner with local media to raise awareness and money with radiothons. These events often take place at malls, event spaces, radio stations, or other areas where it’s difficult to organize a 20- to 50-person phone bank.
“We use VMware SD-WAN to set up cloud-based VoIP call centers on a temporary basis at these sites,” said Banka. “We can’t disrupt business at the places that are nice enough to lend us their facilities for these radiothons, so we come in the day before and build the call center from scratch. VMware SD-WAN makes that easy, we just plug in the boxes and they’re ready to go.”
“I want to say a special thank you to all the great people at BullsEye Telecom … They put together our call center in 24 hours, overnight. Remember, a telethon or radiothon is kind of useless if your phones don’t work, and our phones worked fantastically.”
Mitch Albom, author, and founder of SAY Detroit, in a video
SD-WAN provides data protection, enforces business policies, aggregates bandwidth from a variety of circuits, and supports guest Wi-Fi at the fundraisers. Banka noted that VMware SD-WAN impressed one local engineer by providing better bandwidth for an IP radio stream over the temporary system than the engineer got from his own station. “I convinced him to plug directly into the VMware Edge. I said, if you don’t like it, just unplug. Later he showed me a graph of the connection quality and said he’s never seen it so clean.”
