After more than 15 years of integrating and installing advanced VoIP and UCaaS systems, Charlie Slaughter discovered Bigleaf Networks during the pandemic.
“I had all my kids back home and we were all quarantining in the same household,” he explained. “Everybody was on Zoom for school and meetings, and I couldn’t even make a phone call.”
Charlie set up Bigleaf in his home, “and the rest is history,” he said. Ever since then, Charlie, the founder and CEO of San Antonio, TX-based Kinect Communications, has added Bigleaf to every customer quote.
“I’m a huge believer,” he continued. “I add it for all my customers because they need it. Whether they know it or not, they need it.”
Charlie credits Bigleaf, along with an LTE cellphone router solution, for a 42% increase in Kinect’s monthly recurring revenue.
“Bigleaf is phenomenal,” Charlie asserted. “It’s selling like hotcakes, because it works.”
Charlie’s enthusiastic advocacy led to recognition as a 2022 Top Performer in Bigleaf’s managed service provider (MSP) channel.
Worry-free failover
Bigleaf’s Same-IP Failover has saved time, money, and aggravation for Kinect and its customers. In one example, Kinect’s website displays praise from a happy customer, a police department technology manager in the Gulf Coast resort town of Aransas Pass. Thanks to Kinect and Bigleaf, his department’s internet-based services kept running during a major outage that took out network and cell connections.
“Yesterday, a major fiber line was cut. This took out our primary internet connection along with one of the cell carriers. If it was not for our backup fiber and the SD-WAN solution, we would have lost most of our services. Instead, employees had no idea we had lost our primary connection until they got home and found the internet to be out citywide.”
– David Offalter, Technology Manager, Aransas Pass Police Department
Easy to integrate and manage
As an integrator, Charlie appreciates Bigleaf’s ease of installation and autonomous operation. “There’s very little hands-on. That’s important to me because I don’t have a big staff,” Charlie explained. “So, it’s a huge blessing for me to be able to ship a product [to the customer], plug it in, and it just pulls down that configuration file.”
Bigleaf’s Dynamic QoS is another key feature that prevents headaches for Charlie and his team at Kinect. It works in concert with Bigleaf’s circuit monitoring and intelligent load balancing to identify and prioritize network traffic automatically, routing each type of traffic to the optimal circuit based on its capability and availability. There’s no need for manual policies, so Kinect can rely on Bigleaf to deliver reliable internet and cloud application performance.
According to Charlie, his company is held responsible for the customers’ network performance: “Quality of service is a direct reflection on me, whether it’s my problem or not,” he said. “So it’s extremely important to me.”
Charlie also benefits from Bigleaf’s monthly performance reports, where he can review any outstanding issues across all customer locations.
“I don’t go through every one of those reports. But the ones that I need are there at my fingertips,” he said. “The report shows up in my inbox, and I don’t have to think about it. It’s nice and convenient.”
“Phenomenal” product and service
“The customer service team at Bigleaf really has been phenomenal,” Charlie enthused.
“When I call, someone answers the phone any time of the day or night. And that means everything to me,” he explained. “Because there are days I wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and I need to talk to somebody about something that I couldn’t necessarily get to the previous day, an upcoming installation or something.
Charlie recommends Bigleaf to MSPs, systems integrators, solution providers, and other value-added resellers, to support their customers’ VoIP, UCaaS, and other cloud-based applications and services.
“Honestly, if you’re looking for a phenomenal product that requires very little effort other than to go out and install it and sell it, this is the SD-WAN solution that I would recommend to anybody,” he said. “And I have, actually, to be quite frank.”
– Charlie Slaughter, CEO, Kinect Communications, San Antonio, TX
To learn more about delivering reliable, resilient network performance, schedule a free demo today.