The telecom market was once said to be a great predictor of recessions – in fact it’s been said in the industry that back when all phones were wired, the first companies to know bad times were coming were the RBOCs or regional Bell operating companies such as Pacific Bell, etc. I couldn’t help but think of this when I spoke with Russell P. Markman, President – Business Services at Fusion. Especially in light of “economic downgrades from the IMF.

Fusion has a broad range of products and services from fax to conferencing and SIP while they target carriers, call centers and businesses with their various offerings. So they aren’t exactly like an RBOC as they don’t do huge residential business but Russell just told me a few weeks back that his company is seeing better credit from customers. This is a good sign as although the real unemployment rate in the US is low, nearly 95 million people aren’t working… A near record low participation rate.

So perhaps Fusion’s credit checks will restore some much needed optimism to the economy.

In the interview I conducted, he told me, Fusion 360 offers a full view of the communications solutions your company needs to succeed… The stability of a traditional PBX phone system and advanced unified communications features. In addition, it offers cloud, SIP trunking, contact center, collaboration and comprehensive access, connectivity and equipment options delivered in a one-stop, end-to-end managed solution.

Russell emphasized the company’s superior Salesforce integration – much tighter than an adapter he boasted. He went on to say many accounts asked for this level of integration.

He added that the company’s contact center solutions are all cloud based and are able to scale up and down as needed. They were once premise-based and more resource intensive he explained.

The other good news is their network has expanded to 18 POPS as well as 75 NNIs – they can further work with most major and minor carriers which means they can inexpensively get QoS connections virtually any US desktop. This is yet another advantage over the OTT players (no pun intended ).

They can also embed full UC capabilities into their SIP solutions – allow 4 digit dialing from and too various PBXs, host voicemail, reroute traffic to cell phones, etc.

He exclaimed, “We have the industry’s leading trunk routing portal. Any of our customers can go online any time, DID level, IP address, trunk route, time of day, day of week, on the fly.”

This leads into what excited him most, company’s shareable voice channels which allow a company to follow the sun with their voice needs. The way this works is you can take a pool of voice paths and share them with offices as the peak demand shifts. Instead of buying 400 paths for example, a company buys 200 and moves them as needed. The service allows bursting up to 100% meaning you can get to 400 if you need to for peak demand.

In other news, VDI is coming soon. You heard it here first. What I like about Fusion is their breadth of solutions and how they help the channel with a broad range of solutions with single vendor support. Perhaps this is the reason they attract customers with good credit – or perhaps the economy really is better than the IMF says. Time will certainly tell.