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- Hello everyone.
I'm Brian Hyrek VoIP expert here at VoIP Supply.
And thank you for tuning in to another episode
of sip chats.
Today, we're going to do things a little differently,
and we're very excited to have some of the folks
from Grandstream on with us today.
And we're going to do a brief panel discussion.
I do have Chris, Phil and Hieu on there somewhere.
And do you guys want to tell us a little bit about
Grandstream to kick us off here?
- Yeah, absolutely.
First of all, Brian, thanks for having us.
We're super excited to be here and love this little sip chat
that you guys do.
So, yeah, I mean, Grandstream has a pretty cool story that
I think a lot of people
aren't fully aware of.
So we were actually,
Grandstream has been around for about 20 years now,
founded in 2002, but found in an apartment
on Harvard street, in the Brighton area of Boston,
which is where we're still headquartered.
And bout 20 years later, you know,
we've grown from being the,
basically a one in two line IP phone manufacturer
and ATA's which is pretty much what we started out with
into a really a full business communication
solutions provider.
We have over 600 employees across the globe,
a huge distribution partner or a huge distribution network.
We're in over 150 countries across the world.
And really the thing that, you know,
I mentioned earlier, we started with IP phones and ATAs,
and I think, you know, specifically the IP phones,
it's definitely what we're best known for probably,
but really what we've done over the last 10 years
is really try to, like I mentioned earlier,
be that full solutions provider.
We want to be able to offer a one-stop shop for every type
of business communication solution that anyone's
gonna need all from one brand under one manufacturer,
everything optimized to working together.
And obviously also everything available
from one partner such as yourself.
So it's, you know, we've really kind of, you know,
started as a smaller company and now grown into, I guess,
depending on who you talk to a third or fourth largest
endpoint manufacturer in the world.
So it's, it's a pretty cool story.
You know, many of us have been with the company for a while,
so we've got a great team we've, you know,
came from humble beginnings
and have really grown the company into, you know,
what we'd like to call it, I guess,
a world force at this point in time.
- That's awesome, I had no idea too.
I've been with VoIP Supply 14 years.
I had no idea that Grandstream started in an apartment.
That's really awesome to see how far you guys have come,
what you've done and now to see how large
your catalog is as well.
You know. - Absolutely.
- Having everything from IP phones to PBX and beyond.
Over the past year, the face of the workplaces
of course changed and drastically too.
Does anyone want to speak about what Grandstream's doing
and how Grandstream fits into the face of the new workplace?
- For sure, I think this pandemic really
speeded up, what we were doing already behind the scenes,
we were already investing pretty heavily into wifi solutions
before the pandemic started with
the work from home transition.
We were kind of at a good spot, I hate to say it.
To naturally have products ready to sell
for those types of environments,
a big one being on the IP phone side and having
wifi enabled desk phones, wifi enabled cordless phones,
but also going a step further with access points,
some of the physical security stuff,
if they needed to rig their home office with cameras
and all that good stuff.
So we were well-positioned from the get-go and
our top growing products over the last 12 16 months
are those wifi products, especially on the IP phone side.
So it enabled quick adoption.
We were able to kind of continue selling without a hitch
and it shows what some of the products that we've
seen growth in, you know, like I said,
over the last 16 months or so.
- Awesome, awesome.
Yeah, VoIP Supply, we've definitely seen a huge influx
in uptick and wifi devices and
all sorts of units
to work from home, of course, wireless headsets as well,
but wifi phones mainly in dongles for phones to be wifi.
I know that there's also some other tools as well,
that Grandstream has created and is working on
that can really assist even our partners,
do their installs and management of those remote devices.
Hieu, do you want to touch upon that?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And I just kind of reiterate what Chris just said.
We hate to say it, but the timing kind of worked out for us
cause we launched our GDMS ecosystem
and the UCM6300 ecosystem kind of right before
the pandemic happened.
And you know, these tools have been invaluable
in the last 12 to 16 months.
And it really helped with the changing work environment.
You know, there's a Forbes article that
just recently came out, that they did a survey
with all these businesses throughout the country
and it said, 79% of businesses are plan
to continue with some form of work from home,
even after the pandemic ended.
And it, that kind of, you know, it goes,
goes right in line with what we're able to offer
with the GDMS and now with the UCM6300 ecosystem, you know,
it really helps everyone securely deploy remote workers,
remote extensions, and it makes it super easy too,
you know, it, anyone can do it,
you don't have to worry about firewall rules.
You don't have to be a security expert,
you know all of that security stuff that's built right
into the platform.
So it makes it super easy to currently work from home
and to continue working remotely.
- Absolutely, now, is there a cost to the GDMS, as well?
Or can you tell us a little bit more about their product
and really what what's the play with that?
- Absolutely, you know, GDMS is completely free
and will continue to be - wow.
- completely free.
You know, it, for every account, we allow you to manage
anywhere from one to 1 million devices per account.
And the play is that it's just a cloud-based platform
for you to not only manage your devices, but also provision,
deploy and monitor them.
And we have built in troubleshooting tools where
you can capture SIS logs and Wireshark traces
from anywhere that you have an internet connection.
I know our IT team
was dreading the fact of having all
of these remote phones all over the world,
especially all over the US with, with some of the employees
that are probably less technical and, you know,
being that every network environment is different, you know,
Chris's network at home is probably different than mine
with the different service providers.
The IT team was able to successfully deploy
all of our extensions.
Anytime there was an issue, they were able to remotely
issued it and fix any issues that did come up.
That's kind of what we're looking to do.
Just making that a whole deployment scenario
super easy for everyone.
- That's awesome.
Well they do say that victory
is when preparation meets opportunity.
And I would say that Grandstream certainly positioned
themselves to be victorious in these current times,
speaking of which due to COVID, of course,
we're seeing a huge shortage of chipsets
and really in the supply chain of a lot of
manufacturers as well.
Can Grandstream tell us what your current position is?
- Sure, I mean, it changes every day.
That's not me taking the easy way out
on answering the question.
It just, that is what it is.
From what I've been told right now, IP phones in particular,
which again is really our bread and butter, worldwide.
IP phones in particular, we're in a pretty good spot.
We're still manufacturing our new GRP phones,
both the lower end models, as well as
the carrier grade models, so we're good there.
Some of the other popular items like ATA's,
we're still in pretty decent shape on,
we're still producing many of them.
Lead times are a little bit more when we're talking
some of the major projects that we're doing
across the globe, but we're still able
to get the chipsets and produce.
Some of the products that we are kind of seeing
a little bit of a hit on, are gateways and some of
the WiFi6 newer stuff that we had in the works
for launch in Q1.
Some of those launches have been pushed out a little bit,
just really due to the WiFi6 chipsets
and getting those in stock.
We're still planning on launching our GWN7660,
which is our upcoming WiFi6 access point.
It's just going to be more along the lines of a Q3 timeframe
instead of the late Q1, early Q2.
So overall we're in pretty good shape.
We do have some stuff that sit more than others,
but you know, we're progressing.
And the bad thing, if you want to call it that,
or the catch 22 is demand is way up right now.
So it's, it's not affecting business,
just timelines to a certain extent.
- Awesome, Chris, thank you for being so forthcoming
about the supply chain and letting everyone know
what's going on.
Hieu, thank you for the knowledge.
Thank you for the knowledge Phil as well
in the introduction.
If there's nothing else I would like to again,
thank Grandstream so much for your time.
Thanks to all of our viewers for tuning in
and watching another episode video of sip chats
by VoIP supply.
Again, I'm Brian Hyrek VoIP expert here at VoIP supply.
And please don't forget to mash that like button below
and click subscribe.
We'd hope to see you soon.
Take care.
- Thanks
- Thanks everyone. - See ya.
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