Most communication vendors will tell you their platform is the right one. I spent a decade learning why that’s rarely true.

I started my career on the carrier side, at Level 3 and Zayo Group, where I learned how enterprise telecommunications infrastructure actually works under the hood. Not the demo version. The real version: how calls get routed, where systems break down, and what “enterprise-grade” actually means when a thousand employees are depending on it.

Then I joined Zoom, where I watched the cloud communication revolution happen from the inside. I saw which platforms delivered on their promises, which ones looked great in a proof of concept and fell apart at implementation, and which vendors were genuinely building something better versus riding a marketing wave.

What I kept seeing, regardless of the company or the platform, was the same problem: businesses were managing too many vendors, paying too many bills, and working with salespeople who were more focused on closing a deal than on finding the right fit.