Sentrian is an Australian IT managed services provider founded in 1992 and has grown into a recognised cloud services partner to businesses in Australia, New Zealand and beyond.

Sentrian was named in the top ten best places to work in Australia (under 100 employees) for 2019-20 and has been certified as a ‘great place to work’ by Great Place to Work Australia New Zealand for three years running.

The company prides itself on always seeking better ways to do things for the benefit of its clients. We spoke to Robert Wilkinson, Business Development Manager at Sentrian, to discover how Sentrian has started to use Telstra Wholesale Number Hosting Call Termination Service (Wholesale CTS) to meet the changing IT demands of small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).

Accelerating the transition to IP telephony

Over the past three years, Sentrian has increased its telephony capabilities to complement its infrastructure services and cloud expertise after it identified an opportunity to grow its offerings and expand its addressable market.

“Our traditional focus was on infrastructure but a few years ago we identified telephony as an opportunity. We could see the long transition from legacy telephony to IP telephony hosted and managed elsewhere, as businesses sought to simplify their operations,” Robert said.
 

“In a world where businesses increasingly consume core applications on a subscription model, few businesses want to manage an on-premise PBX (private branch exchange) if they don’t have to,” Robert said.

This transition accelerated as COVID-19 lockdowns radically reshaped the nature of work and boosted adoption of collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Teams. Sentrian is a Microsoft Tier One cloud solution provider and has been supporting SMB adoption of Teams. Meanwhile, the need for telephony remains strong.

“Teams adoption among our clients soared during last year but every business still depends on the telephone too. What we are focusing on is helping our clients integrate telephony and Teams into a single, flexible solution, while removing the need for a PBX,” Rob said.

Supporting IP telephony with Wholesale CTS

Building an integrated collaboration solution with integrated IP telephony requires a robust telephony service. Sentrian experienced problems with its previous CTS provider and transitioned to Wholesale CTS when it launched in 2020.

“Our clients need a reliable service and, with our previous partner, there were times when our service would go down at the drop of a hat,” Robert said.

“We were already partners with Telstra Wholesale for Ethernet services, and they have an excellent reputation for making telephony work. We worked closely with the team to implement the solution, and we now have a system that is much more reliable than before.”
 

Wholesale CTS is a hosted number service with both-way call termination service delivered over Session Initiation Protocol Trunk (SIP Trunk) technology, connecting Sentrian’s SIP-based calling platform to Telstra’s BroadWorks IP telephony calling platform.

Wholesale CTS allows for voice calls to be made and received by IP telephony equipment to and from Telstra‘s domestic and international fixed and mobile services, as well as those of other carriers.

This new-found improvement in reliability made significant differences to Sentrian’s customer experience and account management.

“Our service desk was very vocal about the shortcomings of the previous carrier and our account managers were having tough conversations with clients. Now the service problems have gone and customers are happier, we can be more confident in retaining our valued clients,” Robert said.

Driving growth for years to come

The transition to Wholesale CTS has helped Sentrian take advantage of the demand for integrated collaboration and calling services to deliver a solution that ticks all the boxes for its clients.

“It’s a great time to be involved in Teams calling and there’s a massive opportunity to convince people to ditch on-prem solutions,” Robert explained. “It is an untapped market for us. Every business in Australia uses a telephone and IP telephony dovetails nicely with our relationship with Microsoft as a tier one CSP.”

According to Robert, the quality and flexibility offered by Wholesale CTS enables this growth.
 

“The flexibility is the key: now you only use what you need. It makes excellent commercial sense and it resonates with our clients, particularly at the smaller end of the market. Now we can economically bring on a single user company in a way that makes sense for us and our customer."

"And as a fully customisable solution, it ensures businesses can upscale and build a package which supports their individual business needs whilst remaining cost-effective.”

It’s no surprise that Sentrian is excited about the opportunities for growth.

“IP telephony, built around CTS, is one of our key drivers of growth for the next few years,” Rob concluded.

For more on information on Sentrian, go to https://www.sentrian.com.au/.