Robert Harrison, CCO "The world is our oyster.”- There was a hint of pride and exuberance as Robert Harrison, CCO of Pulsar360, touched upon the diverse products and solutions his company doles out to meet various needs of its pertaining to telecommunications. Harrison draws on his more than three decades of leadership experience in the realm of telecommunications, VoIP and hosted service to lead his team at Pulsar360, bringing comprehensive voice, data, and cloud-based solutions to organizations. As a telecommunication solutions provider to small and mid-size organizations, Pulsar360 specializes in delivering VoIP/digital phone service across the US and Canada, and is committed to expanding and improving its portfolio of products and services through partnerships and acquisitions.
“We provide telecom services to E911 call centers, which is almost unheard of, in a hosted world. In doing so, we combine a hybrid solution with our premise-based technology and high availability architecture, as well as with failover to the cloud. This is a unique vertical that we participate in,” says Harrison. Apart from E911 call centers, the company also works closely with school districts, municipalities, and car dealerships. Pulsar360 was recently approached by a large Denver-based law firm, with 80 partners in its team, which was unable to control the repeated disclosure of its lawyers’ personal cell numbers to clients. Due to the absence of a competent technology, the partners could not hide their contact numbers while responding to inquiries and calls from both the existing and potential clients. By exposing their direct contact details, the lawyers were understandably perturbed. As a result, the law firms were in search of a solution that would help the lawyers maintain their professional responsibility without sacrificing their personal space.
This is where Pulsar360 stepped in to empower the client with its mobility application called Zulu that enabled the lawyers to achieve total anonymity. Despite making calls from their own cell phones, the lawyers were now assured that the app would display their business numbers to the clients. Naturally, they could breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Though unique, this anonymity feature of manipulating the caller ID sketches only a partial image of the Zulu app and its capabilities. The app also comes with other enhancements like enabling users to chat via iOS and Android devices and access screen share, consequently alleviating their monthly recurring expenses on other audio and video conferencing apps. According to Harrison, Zulu was born to cater to the rising demands of the millennials for a unified communications (UCaaS) system. “Mobility apps are gaining traction because millennials are getting rid of computers or separate phones on their desk,” he says, before adding that mobility apps also help businesses from a CapEx perspective.
We are a channel-centric company; we distribute our products and services through over 450 channel partners in North America
Besides bringing in Zulu—both on-premise and hosted VoIP—Pulsar360 uniqueness stems from its full suite of telecom products and services, which includes carrier services, business disaster recovery products, P360 Faxing a HIPPA-compliant faxing platform, and more. However, the company’s way of functioning works as its most significant differentiator.
Harrison says, “We are a channel-centric company; we distribute our products and services through over 450 channel partners in North America.” Pulsar360 equips its partners with full access to sell of their products and deliver its services to the end-users. This is a far cry from the way its competitors operate, per Harrison, “The top three players in our industry provide services through a ‘pay and pray’ model, where one can order the system from their website and access their service—if it works it’s a good luck, if not, the users are locked into a three year contract. Unlike them, we provide a white glove, high-touch deployment service.” Puslar360’s channel partners physically hand over their equipment/phones to end customers, train them, and ensure that the prerequisite infrastructure is properly designed. “Not just that, our partners ensure the quality of service (QOS) firewall router is properly deployed,” adds Harrison.
This tried-and-tested deployment process has frequently paved the path for Pulsar360 to enter larger contracts. In fact, Pulsar360’s services are currently catering to the communication needs of an entire municipality and various school districts that have over 1,200 phones. In 2016, Pulsar360 had won a contract with a partner for providing its services to the entire state of Connecticut. Currently working on the renewed contract, Pulsar360 expects to tap thousands of phones by 2022. In addition, Pulsar360 was recently awarded a contract for a large hospital in the Northeast region.
Pulsar360 has gained the trust of its users by meticulously following a three-legged model of deploying the services. The company’s partners strictly ensure the balancing of three factors: the user’s broadband quality, the infrastructure, and QOS firewall router on the network. Harrison elaborates, “We want the quality of voice on VoIP to be pristine, and naturally we don’t sell our services to the partners if any one of these three aspects are not identified and addressed. This is why our annualized attrition rate is less than six percent.”
Having grown by over 400 percent in the last five years, Pulsar360 is primed for more success. Besides vying for a new project that entails the development of 33,000 sites for a hosted platform, Pulsar360 plans to continue its penetration in the copier market and will soon work on a national account program. In fact, it has already signed a contract with a partner who has a $300 million copier company as its client and operates in 55 locations with 450 sales representatives. “Due to our massive support network and ability to deploy products successfully, we are geared to emerge as one of the top three players in our market over the next 12 months,” concludes Harrison.
