A Word From Our CEO
Since our last newsletter, PAETEC has seen many milestones, all in the interest of better serving you and businesses like yours. In May, we opened our first Northern California office, serving San Francisco,
Oakland, Sacramento, and San Jose. The new expansion means we now operate in 83 of the largest 100 MSAs in the nation. In July, we’ll officially open a new state-of-the-art data center in Bethlehem, PA, which
provides industry-leading diversity and colocation options. We reported solid financials for the first quarter of 2009 amid this economic downturn with our 25th consecutive quarter of generating free cash flow.
And earlier this week, we closed on a bond deal which raised $350 million to refinance some long term debt due in 2013. Since we’ve announced our debt restructuring, I’ve been asked by many why we’re refinancing now, four years early. Our board and management team saw an opportunity to take advantage of the current lending environment, prepare for the long term, and insulate the company from the macroeconomic uncertainty. Given our expansions and financial stability, I believe we’re now in a stronger position than ever before.
But how does our strength relate to your business? June marked the beginning of hurricane season. Over the past year, we’ve seen forest fires in the Los Angeles area, major flooding in Iowa, a devastating hurricane in Houston, and blizzards in Denver. In many ways, the rules have changed. An interruption in data services which would have been a nuisance a decade ago can now be debilitating to an organization.
Our employees have heard me repeatedly say that the future of PAETEC is directly related to the success of our customers. Because of the importance of business continuity, I’ve instructed our sales teams to ensure that our customers have considered business continuity plans, even if it means having a portion of the telecommunications with a diverse carrier. This is just that important.
To ensure customers can continue to operate and mitigate downtime, we offer a portfolio of business continuity solutions. For instance, you could host a server in our new data center, managed and monitored 24 hours per day. Or in addition to terrestrial circuits, our Fixed Wireless transport may be used as a primary or diverse connection between your campus buildings or as a local loop back to our Central Office. Or perhaps it’s simply using our Direct Trunk Overflow service which will route vital calls to a POTS line or cell phone should there be any interruption in your T-1 circuit.
Today, we rely on communications more than ever before, and you can always rely on the professionals at PAETEC. We’re constantly reinventing ourselves to be a valuable partner to your business. As always, thank you for your trust and your business.
Take care,
Arunas A. Chesonis
Chairman and CEO
Educational Series
PAETEC's Educational Series is designed to provide valuable information to our customers in the most convenient manner.
Watch our Business Continuity Webcasts to learn why your business needs effective tools for disaster preparedness and planning up to and throughout the recovery process now, more than ever. It’s simpler than you may think.
PAETEC’s Data Center Webcast shows how a secure, redundant colocation space enables you to virtually extend your IT and security staff.
Click here to view all the topics within the Webcast collection.
Top Five Pain Points for IT Managers
Have you ever experienced a data or network disaster that has temporarily brought your company to its knees? The potential loss of business can be enormous. These tools can help protect your organization against a potential outage and see you through the recovery process should an outage occur.
1. Data Loss: The high capital cost of preserving the integrity of your data can be daunting. Electronically store your most critical data in PAETEC’s Data Centers with our Data Backup and Recovery (DB&R) solutions. Point-and-click recovery, ease-of-use scheduling, and our redundant design ensure your most critical data is always secure and available. You can reduce the strain on your IT staff immediately by implementing this safety net system.
2. E-mail Spamming: Employee productivity is significantly reduced by the distraction of e-mail spam. Don’t take on the costs of hosting an e-mail security platform in-house when you can have someone else manage it for a fraction of the cost. Our Hosted E-mail and Web Security services save and secure your e-mail by spooling incoming messages, so if there is an outage, those messages will not be lost, simply held until your business is back up and running.
3. Service Outages: The effects of a service interruption can be devastating to your organization. PAETEC’s Direct Trunk Overflow (DTO) provides you with redundancy and the ability to transfer inbound terminating calls to an alternate path. Based on your unique business needs, PAETEC will automatically reroute all incoming calls to a predetermined number (i.e. POTS lines, backup trunks, an answering service, cell phone, etc.), allowing you to continue business-critical operations. PAETEC can ensure that your voice services are instantly rerouted in the event of maximum trunk capacity or a circuit interruption.
4. Toll-Free Call Routing: You strive to ensure that your customers are satisfied. PAETEC can help you achieve this goal. Our Domestic and International Toll-Free services are a convenient way for your customers to reach you, while our flexible routing features enable you to manage traffic based on your business needs.
PAETEC’s Advanced Toll-Free service gives you the ability to route toll-free calls away from an impaired site in real-time.
5. Increasing Workplace Mobility: Business travel and working from home is at an all-time high. Make sure your employees are making a secure connection to your network. With Remote Access VPN, PAETEC can create a secure tunnel across the Internet so your employees have access to everything on the corporate network from anywhere, anytime, as if they were at the office.
Free Yourself from Data Disaster with Fixed Wireless
In their main New Jersey location, a small college operates a campus on each side of the Jersey River with campuses 1.5 miles apart. Each campus contains classrooms, administrative buildings, and residence halls. All of the college’s Internet services are delivered to the Tech Center on the East Campus, so the college provisions a point-to-point fiber circuit to provide the West Campus with data service. The fiber runs across the river via the local bridge. When there is construction on the bridge, the college experiences frequent outages on the point-to-point circuit. The college asked PAETEC to engineer and install a wireless transport circuit that directly links the East and West campuses. After using PAETEC’s Equipment for Services (EFS) program to finance the equipment purchase, the college now owns an additional 1Gbps of bandwidth between campuses that will not be affected by any local construction projects.
Do you have a similar need for physical layer diversity in your organization’s network infrastructure? If so, contact your local PAETEC representative today. Let us help you protect your network from serious outages.
Cost Efficiency with MPLS VPN
"To state it simply, the people at PAETEC know communications," remarked Jim Clancy, VP of IT at the Cornerstone Group. By using PAETEC’s MPLS VPN, and other products and services, Cornerstone has the latest technology, which helps keep them ahead of the curve in their industry. "PAETEC has helped us work more effectively and utilize our bandwidth more efficiently, plus save on communications costs," said Clancy.
PAETEC's MPLS VPN with Quality of Service (QoS) solution allows you to connect your business locations with a secure, high-performance data connection using a state-of-the-art IP over SONET network. PAETEC’s MPLS VPN will provide you with the ability to:
- Transfer data over our secure, reliable, private IP network
- Prioritize time-sensitive, mission-critical applications with QoS
- Maximize bandwidth for data, voice, and video with limited expenditures
- Guarantee packet throughput and minimal latency with a Service Level
Agreement (SLA)
The beauty of this platform is it allows you to add other services on to your existing package, such as Dynamic IP (SIP Trunking) or Hosted Firewall as your needs grow. You too can have the chance to enjoy similar cost and security benefits like Jim Clancy does. Converging your voice and data networks onto a single, redundant MPLS network can save you money and protect your business with increased redundancy. Contact your PAETEC representative to create a customized migration plan.
PAETEC Enters San Francisco Bay Area Market
On May 6, 2009, PAETEC announced the expansion of its communication service offerings to Northern California including San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento. Additionally, the company marked the opening of a new sales office in Walnut Creek with a ribbon cutting ceremony by Chairman and CEO, Arunas A. Chesonis. The new market expansion created 20 jobs in sales, back-office support, and operations, and could represent more new positions in the future. "We are excited to bring PAETEC's brand of personalized telecommunications services throughout the San Francisco Bay Area," said Reginald Scales, PAETEC's West Region President. "Since every business is unique, we tailor our solution to meet the individual needs of our customer. This level of attention, combined with our national network reach, breadth of products and quality of service, has made PAETEC the premier alternative to incumbent local phone companies."
With the expansion, PAETEC now offers its full suite of communication solutions in 83 of the top 100 MSAs. Many large Bay-Area organizations, including major universities and government agencies, have been PAETEC customers for several years through their use of PINNACLE, PAETEC's telecom software application suite.
Exclusive Business Downtime Calculator
PAETEC customers now have access to this exclusive tool which uses your real business information to drive IT investment decisions. You can define your own applications, number of employees, and salaries, as inputs. The integrity of the results is preserved as the results are based solely on your personal data. Try it today by clicking here - you may be surprised to discover the cost of downtime to you and your company.
PAETEC-Sponsored U.S. Sled Hockey Team Takes Home the Gold
With just 11 seconds remaining in the game in the Gold Medal game in the Czech Republic, Andy Yohe of Iowa scored the winning goal bringing the Team USA the first world title in the
2009 International Paralympic Committee Ice Sled Hockey World Championship. In 2008, PAETEC became the primary corporate sponsor of the U.S. Sled Hockey team. Sled Hockey is a highly competitive sport with much of the typical hockey rules, except the athletes are sitting on sleds and both propel themselves and handle the puck using only their arms.
"It's a great feeling," said Ray Maluta, head coach for Team USA. "The players showed tremendous poise, character and determination for being so young. They really pulled together as a group and were never outworked."
To learn more about USA Sled Hockey, click here.
Unmatched Service Center
If you have ever experienced a service interruption, you know that every single minute matters. That’s why PAETEC has built its business on providing unmatched service and support for every customer, every day. PAETEC’s Network Operations has increased the amount of dedicated resources supporting your calls, streamlining the customer care process. This initiative, when combined with extensive training of top industry talent, leads to increasing First Call Resolution for our customers. In addition, online trouble ticketing was made available to many of our customers in the Eastern United States and Southern California on June 19 to enable them to open their own trouble tickets and view their up-to-the-minute status. It is anticipated that Western United States customers will be able to enjoy these benefits during 2010.
Our customers aren't the only ones who've noticed the support from Network Operations. Earlier in 2009, PAETEC's Network Operations Center (NOC) was named the Back-Office Customer Service Department of the Year at the third annual Stevie’s Awards Ceremony held in Las Vegas, NV. And most recently, the NOC was a finalist in the American Business Awards "Customer Service Team of the Year" category. PAETEC has three diverse NOCs located in Rochester, NY; Charlotte, NC; and Cedar Rapids, IA, which supports nearly 50,000 customers nationwide.
What can we at PAETEC do to make your customer service experience even better? Increase the frequency of contact between you and your Account Manager? Improve the billing process? Even change the hold music? Click here to share your candid feedback. Your response will help us continue to improve our service to you.
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