STRATIS EDGE
PARTNERS

Technology advice from someone who doesn't carry inventory.

Connectivity, contact center, and applied AI for credit unions and mid-market enterprise. I run the discovery, shortlist the market, and stay through go-live — without a quota pointing at one vendor's product line.

Start a conversation How engagements work

Practice areas

Three places where the wrong decision is expensive.

Each of these gets sold as a product. Each of them is actually an operational problem that a product may or may not solve.

Contact Center & CX

Where most of my time goes. Queue design, routing, workforce management, and the reporting layer that tells you whether any of it worked.

  • Discovery against real call data
  • Omnichannel and routing design
  • WFM and QA tooling
  • CCaaS platform selection
  • Migration from on-premise ACD

Connectivity & Voice

The layer underneath everything else. Usually the first thing to break and the last thing anyone documents.

  • UCaaS platform selection
  • SIP trunking and number porting
  • SD-WAN and circuit sourcing
  • Multi-site and branch design
  • Legacy PBX end-of-life planning

Applied AI

Specifically: which deployments survive contact with a live queue, and which become shelfware six months after the press release.

  • Intelligent virtual agents
  • Agent assist and real-time guidance
  • Conversation intelligence and QA
  • Containment modeling before purchase
  • Honest scoping of what won't work

The difference

A reseller recommends what they carry. I have nothing on the shelf, so the recommendation is just the recommendation.
No inventory, no quota
I'm not carrying a vendor's number. If the right answer is the platform you already own, that's the answer you get.
Paid by the supplier, not by you
Advisory work costs you nothing directly — compensation comes from the provider you select, at the same rate regardless of which one that is. You should ask me about this on the first call.
Through go-live, not through the order
Plenty of brokers disappear once the paperwork is signed. Implementation oversight is part of the engagement.

Engagements

How the work actually runs.

Five stages, in order. Most engagements run three to nine months depending on contract timing and how much of the current state is documented.

01

Discovery

Current state against real numbers — call volumes, handle time, first-contact resolution, abandon rate, seat counts, contract end dates. Most organizations have never had these laid out in one place.

02

Requirements

What the business needs, written down before anyone sees a demo. This is the step that prevents buying a feature list instead of a solution.

03

Market scan

A shortlist drawn from the full provider set rather than a single vendor's catalog, with the trade-offs stated plainly — including where a given platform is genuinely weak.

04

Selection

Structured demos against your requirements, reference calls with comparable organizations, pricing normalized so the quotes are actually comparable, and contract terms read closely.

05

Implementation oversight

Through provisioning, porting, configuration and go-live. The provider does the work; I make sure what was sold is what gets built.

Good fit

Where I do useful work

  • Credit unions and community financial institutions
  • Mid-market enterprise, roughly 50 to 500 contact center agents
  • Organizations with an on-premise system reaching end of support
  • Multi-site operations where routing and branch connectivity interact
  • Teams evaluating AI in the contact center who want a candid read

Poor fit

Where I'm not the right call

  • You need a managed service provider to run it day to day
  • You've already selected a platform and want an order taker
  • Under about 25 seats — the economics don't justify an advisor
  • You need on-site field engineering or structured cabling

Background

About

I'm Tyler Smith. For the past several years I led customer experience strategy at a Zoom UCaaS and CCaaS reseller, running contact center discovery engagements for credit unions and enterprise accounts and carrying responsibility for how those deals were scoped, sold and delivered.

That work built a specific kind of knowledge: what a contact center evaluation looks like when it's done properly, which platform claims hold up under load, and how the channel actually prices things. Stratis Edge Partners exists to apply that without a single vendor's catalog constraining the answer.

Based in Roy, Utah. Most engagements are along the Wasatch Front, though the work travels.

Focus
Contact center, UCaaS, connectivity, applied AI
Verticals
Credit unions, mid-market enterprise
Depth
Zoom UC, Contact Center and IVA portfolio
Based
Roy, Utah — Wasatch Front

Start with a conversation.

No charge for the first one, and no deck. Tell me what's breaking, or what contract is coming up, and I'll tell you honestly whether this is work I can help with.

Email tyler@stratisedgepartners.com
Phone 801-428-9317