Yorktel: Making Unified Communications & Collaboration Simple

To address the objectives and needs of clients as well as employees, both inside and outside its network, an organization needs the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. Adoption of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) becomes more ubiquitous with smart devices supporting clientless UC applications, a greater density of commodity video and a trend toward cloud services or cloud/premise hybrids.
For more than 30 years, Yorktel has removed complexity from video and UC&C, and executed its operational mandate to deliver products and services that increase usability and agility for today’s multi-national enterprise.
Beyond Traditional Services
Yorktel’s Professional Services division offers an end-to-end suite of advisory services that help Fortune 1000 businesses and government agencies develop, deploy and maximize unified video communications and collaboration solutions. By employing best practices for video and an ITIL-based service design methodology, coupled with its vendor-agnostic approach, Yorktel delivers communications strategies that support usage models for on premise or cloud, self-service or managed service, and integrate seamlessly with IT practices.
Yorktel goes beyond traditional UC&C with Univago, a breakthrough video collaboration platform as-a-service. Introduced in 2015, Univago solves interoperability and quality of service (QoS) problems common to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and remote collaboration, and with legacy equipment connections and upgrades.
Developed in response to the glaring absence of an enterprise-grade, video collaboration platform that offers more than just a ‘bridge in the cloud,’ Univago supports a variety of deployment architectures and drastically reduces bandwidth consumption and bottlenecking that result from large-scale video usage forced to use the Internet. In addition, as a self-service, subscription-based offering, Univago is flexible and simple to adjust over time, allowing customers to control costs and scale with future growth, while eliminating the need for capital expenditures in hardware that will soon be obsolete.
Unique to Univago is Yorktel’s Enterprise Gateway, which eliminates interoperability issues that often plague users trying to connect between their Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business deployments and existing SIP or H.323 conference rooms and infrastructure. The Enterprise Gateway enables Univago to natively facilitate communication between existing conference rooms and the most widely used telecommunications platforms, including the aforementioned SIP and H.323 protocols, Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business, WebRTC and the public telephone network. Native support for disparate technologies makes the Enterprise Gateway a powerful yet simple solution.
Ron Gaboury, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was promoted from Chief Financial Officer to CEO in 2011. His leadership has been characterized by executive management, financial and technical acumen. From 2012 – 2014, Yorktel acquired three companies, First Connections, Expedite VCS and MultiSense, which facilitated global expansion into EMEA and its entry into Telehealth and other new markets.
Recognizing a worldwide exodus from Capex-intensive Tech/Telecom infrastructure, Ron successfully positioned Yorktel at the forefront of the cloud and managed services revolution. In 2014, Frost & Sullivan ranked Yorktel as the 3^rd largest managed video conferencing services provider in North America.
Yorktel has achieved numerous milestones, industry honors and distinctions during Ron’s tenure as CEO, including, in January of 2016, Ron was appointed Chairman of the Board for the New Jersey Tech Council, the state’s leading industry association. As a frequent speaker at events and years of active participation, Ron was selected to this post for his track record and insightful leadership.
Education and thought leadership have become a hallmark of Yorktel communications and marketing. While labor-intensive, case studies, whitepapers, speaking engagements, and other efforts provide a valuable service to the market. Recent papers on the Next Generation Workplace, UC&C Productivity, Telehealth, and Webcasting provide insight on proven best practices, and guidance for a marketplace in constant flux.
Team is the Strength
To Yorktel, “collaboration” refers to more than products and services. As the company evolved over the past 30 years, what has not changed is their belief that each client relationship is a partnership. Companies with a “vendor” mindset focus only on sales and their own agendas. Their mentality is that they are an extension of their customer’s team; they approach each engagement with a conviction that success will be defined by long term gains in productivity, marketshare and other quantitative returns.
Contrary to most, they know that the relationship doesn’t stop once the contract is signed. From the initial assessment and roadmap development, to deployment, user training and ongoing management, Yorktel provides the high-touch support to execute from end to end.