A passion for problem-solving helps clients reach challenging goals

As long as she can remember, Kenya Shuler has had a thirst for knowledge and a curiosity about how things work. Always one to dive headfirst into learning about a new topic, she doesn’t stop until she has a deep understanding of the subject at hand, often using her newfound knowledge to find a better way to accomplish a goal.

This approach has become a hallmark of Kenya’s career at Spectrum Business, where she has been using her expertise and desire to “find a better way” to help clients achieve their business goals for almost a decade. She started as a field engineer, providing installation support, before moving to network engineering. She then transitioned into her current role as a sales engineer, in which she helps clients identify and design technology solutions that solve their business challenges.

Kenya sat down with us to discuss technology trends and how she is helping companies tackle their biggest challenges.

Why did you decide to become a sales engineer?

Although I loved being a network engineer, the sales engineer position really appealed to me because rather than being behind the scenes, I wanted to meet with our clients, face-to-face, and talk about how Spectrum Business could help solve their problems. I had a strong desire to “get in front of it all” by really listening to the client’s needs, addressing their concerns and providing amazing solutions.
 

From those conversations with clients, what key technology trends are you seeing now?

A lot of clients are excited about SD-WAN. It gives them the flexibility to apply different types of connectivity throughout their network to meet the unique needs of each location. One big advantage of SD-WAN, especially during these times, is that organizations can adapt their WANs to improve flexibility. And clients want a connectivity solution that is up for anything.

I’m also seeing an increasing trend of “storage in the cloud” as more people transfer the responsibility of physical hardware and network management and maintenance to cloud service providers. Clients that use our Ethernet services have been showing more interest in our Cloud Connect service lately, which allows them to securely access information stored with Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

At the end of the day, our clients need many solutions to achieve their goals, and ultimately, they want one reliable partner to provide them. This way, the complexity of managing multiple solutions is much simpler.
 

What’s an example of how you’ve helped a client who needed multiple solutions?

A financial institution with nine locations had multiple technology providers for their connectivity and voice services. They came to us saying, “Look, when we have a problem, we don’t know who to call.” They wanted to simplify things by working with a single partner.

We ended up installing a dedicated fiber Ethernet network, Managed Router Service and Managed Security Service. Now, all sites can communicate and transfer data between each other using a private connection, which was very important to them since they’re a financial institution and have very stringent security standards. It was a challenging project because all their sites had different bandwidth requirements.

We also provided a cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) solution, so that while every location has its own set of phones, the IT team can configure and control the routing and call flow for all the offices from one centralized portal. We manage both this and the Ethernet service, so they can focus on other things.

Having one partner who handles just about everything for them including upgrades, maintenance and support has made their jobs a lot easier.