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 our 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. We have nothing on the shelf, so the recommendation is just the recommendation.
- No inventory, no quota
- We don't carry 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. Ask us about it 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.
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.
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.
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.
Selection
Structured demos against your requirements, reference calls with comparable organizations, pricing normalized so the quotes are actually comparable, and contract terms read closely.
Implementation oversight
Through provisioning, porting, configuration and go-live. The provider does the work; we make sure what was sold is what gets built.
Good fit
Where we 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 we're 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
Twenty-five years, on every side of the table.
Stratis Edge Partners was founded by Tyler Smith. The short version of why that matters: he has been paid by the carrier, the reseller, the distributor, the platform vendor and the consultancy — so he knows exactly how each one gets compensated, and what that does to the advice they give you.
The foundation is Cisco voice. CCIE Voice, CCNP, CCVP, CCDA, MCSE — earned building a Cisco voice practice from the ground up at a regional partner, splitting time between pre-sales design and post-sales implementation, and sitting tier 4 between Cisco support and the customer when things broke.
Then the carrier side, designing voice, data and wireless services at Qwest and CenturyLink — first as a senior pre-sales engineer, then leading the pre-sales engineering team, then carrying a direct quota and finishing 2012 at 114% of objective. Knowing how a carrier prices a circuit is not something you learn from the outside.
Then distribution. At Telarus, one of the largest technology solutions distributors in North America, he started the sales engineering function from nothing and grew it into a team while the business tripled — supporting WAN, internet, telco, storage, contact center and security across a portfolio of hundreds of providers. That is where channel economics stopped being theory.
Then the platform itself. Four years at Vonage across UCaaS, CCaaS and communications APIs, as senior solutions engineer and then manager of solutions engineering, supporting both the direct and channel routes to market and contributing to some of the largest deals the company had closed. After that, contact center work in the Salesforce and Amazon Connect ecosystems, where he was a key part of selling $13 million in consulting services — and most recently, leading customer experience strategy at a Zoom UCaaS and CCaaS reseller.
Which brings us here. When we say a recommendation isn't steered, it is not a marketing line. It is someone who has done the steering from four different chairs telling you what it looks like.
Based in Roy, Utah. Most engagements run along the Wasatch Front, though the work travels.
Start with a conversation.
No charge for the first one, and no deck. Tell us what's breaking, or what contract is coming up, and we'll tell you honestly whether it's work we can help with.