by Deron Pearson
Nexus President

It is no secret that the economy has slowed down. In many industries, sales are either growing slightly or are flat compared to previous years. Many companies have resorted to cost-cutting measures to protect their profits.

At Nexus, we believe that in order for us to succeed in the near as well long-term, we needed to invest heavily in our organization. In the last year, Nexus has invested over $5 million dollars to increase the productivity and effectiveness of our associates, while also reducing excessive costs. Some of these investments include:

• Addition of over 60 resources in the Sales, Engineering, Project Management, Service and Implementation teams.
• Spent over $1.5 million on Production network and system upgrades to leverage the very same productivity tools we sell.
• Spent over $1 million on Nexus associate training to upgrade our capabilities for our customers.
• Spent over $250K on our internal tools (software, internal departments) to provide a higher level of customer satisfaction.
• Tripled our Marketing budget to provide more events for our clients to learn about advanced technologies.

Additional Resources – allows us to provide more of a “local touch” and faster response times to our customers.

• Added 40 Sales and Pre-Sales Engineering resources to increase our “feet on the street” and complete our statewide market segmentation.
• Pre-Sales dedicated ASE to SE ratios are at an industry best 2.5 to 1.
• Added a PSS organization to have specialized focus on every Advanced Technology • Added two Project Management Offices with a total of 20 associates to ensure all client projects are handled locally.
• Added 10 deployment engineering resources.
• Added 5 resources to the Nexus Technical Assistance Center (NTAC).
• Added a Quality Assurance Supervisor to the NTAC.
• Added personnel to our Arizona, and Pacific Northwest locations.
• Opened a new office in Las Vegas, NV

Network Upgrade – provides our associates the most advanced hardware and applications to become more productive and efficient. Also allows us to provide world-class demonstration facilities to our customers.

• Spent $1.5 million in a fully functional production network available for demonstration purposes
• Upgraded LAN/WAN with a complete deployed secure model
• Unified Communications 6.0 with CUPC – Presence and Mobility
• TelePresence at four offices (Valencia [HQ], Tustin, San Diego, and Pleasanton)
• Digital Media System (DMS) in most offices
• Unified Communications demo kits for all nine offices

Upgraded Tools for Customer Satisfaction and Delivery – ensures that you are receiving a variety of communication mediums about our service.   

• Netformx
• Active Docs to be used for Statements of Work and Proposal Templates
• Re-built NOC
• Customer Advocacy Department
• Initiated Customer Satisfactions Surveys at the completion of Service Orders

Increased Marketing Budget – provides you opportunities to gain insight about the latest technologies through our client events, website, and blog.

• Tripled the number of Client Events to an industry-leading 10 per month including
  •  
    • Bi-yearly Technology Showcase (Open House) events
    • Off-site Lunch and Learns
    • Webinars
    • Re-branded company slogan to “Connect Collaborate Create
    • Redesigned the Nexus website (www.nexusis.com)

Increased Nexus Associate Training Budget – guarantees that our associates have knowledge of the latest advanced technologies and how to apply them to benefit your organization.

• Nexus has spent over $1 million dollars in training for our associates. 
  • New classes and learning aids for Cisco new releases for Cisco Certified Networking Associate, and Cisco Sales Expert were implemented, these alone exceeding costs of $275,000.
  • Nexus invested extensively in demo labs which aided our talent in developing and honing their technical knowledge. Specifically, Nexus spent over $700,000 in demo labs for the Company and our employees.
  • Cisco CQS, CSE, and over two dozen specialized Cisco classes for the sales team.

We have the most qualified team of experts in the industry. We are extremely pleased that our partners see the value of our organization. We are proud of our recent accomplishments including being the recipient of the Cisco Master Unified Communications Specialization as well as the three awards received at the recent Cisco Partner Summit. In the past four years, we have received nine awards, putting us in elite company worldwide.

We are considered the go-to partner for sales and deployment of Cisco TelePresence worldwide. We have purchased and installed our own units in four of our locations: Valencia, Tustin, San Diego, and Pleasanton. We are consistently using these units, while cutting down significantly on our travel costs.

Through all the investments and accomplishments Nexus has made, we are well positioned to take care of our most important asset, our joint customers. Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Our customers constantly provide feedback, both positive and negative, that we take seriously. We use this feedback to help shape our organization, take corrective action when necessary and most importantly, resolve issues quickly and diligently

Thank you for considering Nexus. We hope to connect, collaborate, and create with you soon.

In the recent June 2008 edition, VARBusiness polled a variety of solution providers on their expectation for the upcoming year. The networking survey results show that solution providers expect to see the greatest revenue growth in VoIP, unified messaging and IP videoconferencing. With more than 40 percent of solution providers offering VoIP solutions, the future looks bright for those who incorporate these popular technologies.

In addition to the survey results, VARBusiness listed the top 100 networking companies. This list was based on the original VARBusiness 500 list published earlier this month in which Nexus ranked number 230. Below is the link to the list.

Nexus is listed on page 5. http://www.crn.com/networking/208700184;jsessionid=NO3EZ05ZFZ1MYQSNDLOSKH0CJUNN2JVN

To view the articles on the technologies, see the links below:

State Of Technology: Networking Growth In VoIP, Video

Networking – VoIP

Networking – Video

Networking – Wireless

Networking – Network Management

Networking – Wired

Networking – Services

Recently, two of our dearest employees recently found out they had cancer; one with breast cancer and the other with cervical cancer.

Besides providing awareness of women’s cancers to our associates, it allowed us to team up and come up with a way to contribute to defeating this disease. The company set a goal of raising $2,000 to two organizations:

• Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation
• National Cervical Cancer Coalition

If that goal were met, four of our associates volunteered to have their heads shaved.

We are happy to report that we met the goal…in the first day! As of May 15, we have raised over $6,000 and contributions are still going strong.

If you would like contribute, please visit http://cms.komen.org/komen/Donations/index.htm or http://www.nccc-online.org.

Your organization doesn’t stand still, and neither do threats to your network. You need to make sure that your security capabilities can keep up with both. So far, your Cisco PIX solution has provided a reliable shield against intrusion, but it could be time for your business to move to the next generation of VPN and security solutions: the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance.

In addition to the firewall defense you currently receive with your existing Cisco PIX appliance, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series gives you VPN, intrusion prevention, and content security. These security features are integrated on a single platform that looks and feels like the Cisco PIX interface, making the ASA 5500 Series appliance easy to install, configure, and manage. With this next-generation security solution, we can help you:

• Protect sensitive information from evolving security threats
• Provide anywhere, anytime access while keeping costs low
• Increase performance and network availability while simplifying management

Now is the perfect time to build up your network security. Please contact your local Nexus Account Manager or call 800-536-2400 for more information.

Have you ever walked away from your desk for a few minutes, come back, and find that the call you have been waiting for came, and went to voicemail? Have you ever been on that important conference call that is running long, and you have to leave for your next appointment? Do you ever sit on your cell phone, in the office, completing the remaining 45 minutes of the conference call you are on just so you don’t interrupt the call by hanging up and dialing back in? We at Nexus used to, until we deployed Mobility and Single Number Reach.

Over the past few months, Nexus has been enabling the field sales force with new productivity tools and enhancements that were gained as a result of the investment Nexus made to refresh our internal systems.

Mobility
The Mobility feature provides the ability for a user to transition telephone calls from desk phone to cell phone, and from cell phone to desk phone, without interruption or disconnection. Providing this feature allows our users to move more freely in and out of the business.  “The best part about single number reach for me is not having to disconnect from a conference call when I leave the office. I just hit my mobility button; send the call to my cell phone, and no one knows that I am headed out,” commented Dave Elsner, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Nexus.

Single Number Reach
Single number reach enables system users to publish a single phone number to clients, partners and others, and build a find me list that can simultaneously ring multiple phones, such as a cell phone, home office phone, or any other phone. For our sales organization, this means that customers can more often connect with them rather than voicemail, resulting in better customer response time, leading to overall better customer satisfaction.

Some of the financial benefits Nexus is gaining as a result: reduced cell phone plan usage as a result of users being able to transparently take the call they are on back to their desk phone. This significantly minimizes the number of users sitting on cell phones in the office. We are also experiencing fewer calls to voicemail, which not only reduces the number of callers ending up in voicemail, but also reduces email storage capacity impact.

To learn more about how your business can save money and increase productivity with features such as Single Number Reach and Mobility, contact your account team.

The Partner Operations Advisory Board (POAB) meets live approximately twice a year and holds regularly scheduled conference calls between meetings. The agendas include numerous topics which open and maintain active communications between Cisco’s operational management teams and high-level operational leaders from select companies within Cisco’s partner community. Nexus has taken an active role in POAB including contributing our best practices and early adoption to various initiatives and new processes.

The Cisco Partner Operations Advisory Board provides a great opportunity to gather and share ideas and best practices for improving existing tools and processes when working with Cisco. The Partner Operations Advisory Board Provides a conduit for information exchange between Cisco and their Partners allowing Partners to give specific feedback on matters that impact our businesses as well as our performance to our mutual customers, and make recommendations for improvements.  The combined team shares best practices and works together to improve existing practices wherever possible.   The board works together with the common goal to assure improved accuracy and quality in the delivery between Cisco and their partners, resulting in improved overall performance delivery to our mutual clients with the highest level of client satisfaction.

We are pleased to have Dale Hardy, Nexus Vice President of Professional Services, representing Nexus on the Partner Operations Advisory Board. Please feel free to reach out to him directly (dale.hardy@nexusis.com) if you have any questions or thoughts pertaining to issues that you believe should presented to the board.

Nexus, a three-time Cisco partner summit award winner this year, will soon be offering a brand new “green” IT technology. based on Cisco’s new AXP platform and Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFax, it will cater to enterprise requirements in branch office survivability, network virtualization, and reduced hardware footprint.

Sagem-Interstar Inc., the global leader in advanced fax solutions for IPnetworks, today announced that it is teaming up with Nexus, a California-based provider of advanced technologies for enterprises, to offer the benefits of its ip fax solution as part of an integrated Unified Communications (UC) strategy. Nexus, a holder of a Cisco Masters Certification in Unified Communications, will offer the recently announced Cisco Application eXtension Platform (axp), which natively provides IP fax for the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR).

The new AXP platform, recently unveiled at the Cisco Partner Summit in Hawaii on April 10, comprises Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFax Fax over IP (FoIP) solution. XMediusFax is the industry’s only IP fax server solution to run inside a Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR), thereby further extending the value of some 4 million Cisco ISRs deployed globally in enterprises today.

“We are really excited about the environmental and ROI benefits that the Cisco AXP platform offers. It is yet another environmentally-friendly Cisco technology model that we can add to our extensive portfolio of green technology solutions that help organizations connect, collaborate, and create,” said Dave Elsner, Nexus Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “The Cisco AXP-XMediusFax IP fax solution will also play a paramount role in empowering enterprise branch offices with secure and consolidated fax communications, as well as reduced tco and optimized branch IT footprint.”

Nexus, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, already supports Sagem-Interstar’s complete suite of XMediusFax products (Enterprise, Express, SP).

“Our partnership with Nexus, a progressive and respected network solution provider, will help fulfill the increased market demand for innovative solutions that address the corporate need for secure document communication as part of a complete UC initiative” said Christian Larocque, Sagem-Interstar’s Director of Sales. “The Cisco AXP-XMediusFax solution improves document workflow and critical business processes. It also cuts operating expenses significantly by streamlining application deployment and maintenance. Enterprises will diminish their overall environmental footprint since the Cisco AXP-XMediusFax solution reduces hardware footprint, power consumption and overall printing (toner and paper). XMediusFax is a field-proven solution that improves collaboration and presence. It delivers rapid ROI, improved productivity and enhanced customer relationships.”

NEC Unified Solutions designs products and services to fulfill the needs of organizations while maintaining the basic requirement to make money. The versatility of NEC products meets the needs of organizations as they grow, protecting their investment as they migrate to new technologies.

NEC is known for its long-standing reputation of developing technology that can be easily upgraded. With the expertise of Nexus, we can help you incorporate this new technology without a complete system redesign – so you can preserve your original communications investment. NEC’s technology set includes:

• Enterprise Communications Platforms
• SMB Communications Platforms
• Unified Communications
• Voicemail and Unified Messaging
• Contact Center
• Data Networking
• Application Development – CTI
• Mobility

Nexus is dedicated to helping organizations solve problems through advanced technologies. NEC Unified Solutions is committed to creating products and technologies to make the Internet more useful and dynamic. Together, our partnership focuses on helping your organization succeed. Just tell us where you want to take your organization – your goals and your challenges – and we will work with you to develop powerful solutions to help you achieve your objectives.

Nexus, a leading provider of advanced technology and network integration, has been recognized by Everything Channel’s VARBusiness magazine as one of North America’s top technology integrators.  Nexus placed number 230 in the 14th annual VARBusiness 500 ranking.

The VAR 500 list details the leading revenue producers among technology integrators and technology solution provider organizations in North America. The list’s ranking is based on gross worldwide revenue of hardware and software sales, as well as earnings from professional and managed information technology (IT) services.

“The indirect sales channel for technology products and services drives two-thirds of all technology sales in the U.S., and the solution providers who make up the channel are the primary influencers of business technology decision making. This is why the VAR 500 is such an important list, because these are the top solution providers in the industry, and we salute each of them for their stellar performance,” said Robert C. Demarzo, Senior Vice President and Editorial Director, Everything Channel. 

The 2008 VARBusiness 500 list includes 113 new companies with 10.6 percent of them in the top 100 of the list.  In addition, the starting point of the list – the revenue of company number 500 – rose to $33.4 million, up 35.2 percent, from $24.7 million in 2007. This increase reflects the strength and robust growth of the technology reseller channel.

“We are extremely pleased to make the VARBusiness 500 list again this year,” said Deron Pearson, Nexus President and Chief Operating Officer. “Since nexus was launched in 2004, we have expanded to nearly 350 professionals and our 2007 revenues exceeded $140 million on organic sales growth that has exceeded 30% each year since inception. As part of our commitment to our customers and our employees, we continue to plan for long-term growth by continuing to invest in the business. We look forward to connecting with our clients on their organizational goals, collaborating with them to determine the best route to make those goals, and creating a solution that will make them even more successful.”

The complete listing of the VARBusiness 500 is published in the May 26, 2008 issue of the business magazine that provides strategic insight for technology integrators.

To complete the 2008 ranking of the 500 largest North American solution providers, system integrators, VARs and IT consultants, companies were asked to complete an online questionnaire to determine prequalification.  In February 2008, VARBusiness conducted extensive research and analyzed the data. Independent data sourcing (e.g., SEC filings, annual reports, etc.) also was conducted.  finalists were ranked according to their fiscal year 2007 revenue, based only on their reseller-related services business.

To view the latest Nexus news, visit: www.nexusis.com/news_events.