July Sales Engineering Braintrust

Trusted Advisors, the second half of 2026 is here, and the pace of change isn’t slowing down. Every customer conversation is another opportunity to reinforce your value and strengthen your position as indispensable. Stay ahead with fresh updates from the AVANT Sales Engineering team, including our exclusive partnership with Google Cloud CCaaS by UJET, upcoming Q2 New Vendor Webinar, Pathfinder tools, and more.

Covered in this edition:

• Google Cloud CCaaS by UJET

• Sales Engineering Updates

• Pathfinder Updates

• New Vendors
  

• Trusted Advisor Testimonials

• Engineering Spotlight

Google Cloud CCaaS by UJET

UJET is bringing Google Cloud CCaaS by UJET exclusively through AVANT, giving Trusted Advisors a faster, simpler way to deliver AI-first customer experience solutions to SMB and mid-market customers.

They can now offer enterprise-grade capabilities including Google Cloud CCaaS, Gemini Enterprise for CX, Agent Assist, CX Agent Studio, conversational insights, omni-channel engagement, analytics, and more without the complexity of traditional enterprise agreements or significant cloud spend. The result? Customers can confidently adopt agentic AI and modernize their contact centers with greater speed and flexibility.

Ready to bring Google Cloud CCaaS by UJET to your customers? Connect with your CM/CD or learn more in Pathfinder.

Sales Engineering Updates

AVANT Q2 New Vendor Webinar: Join AVANT’s Niko O’Hara and John Paullin on July 29 at 1 PM CT as they introduce the newest additions to the our provider portfolio: Broadvoice, Front, LeapXpert, Mobile Mentor, and Weave. Discover each provider’s unique offerings, ideal customer profiles, key differentiators, and practical ways to position their solutions in customer conversations. You’ll also gain valuable resources and insights you can apply to your opportunities right away. Expand your portfolio and confidence in positioning the latest technologies. Register for the webinar today!

Pathfinder Updates 

Updated SASE Matrix: Developed by Sarah Arnstein and Niko O’Hara, the updated SASE Matrix brings together the latest view of the SASE landscape, including SD-WAN and SSE to map competitive offerings across the market so Trusted Advisors can quickly identify the right-fit solution for each customer environment. It helps TAs streamline conversations, compare providers with confidence, and guide customers toward solutions that secure and optimize their network and security stack.

New Vendors

Balto

Solution Type: CX AI

Geographic Coverage: United States

What does Balto offer? Balto is an AI workforce platform for contact centers that combines voice agents, agent assist, QA, compliance, coaching, notes, and insights in a single platform. It helps teams improve performance and customer conversations at scale.

Key Differentiators: 

• Fully LLM-driven real-time guidance agent delivering live, in-conversation support without reliance on playbooks or manual scripting
• Prompt engineering included with every license, with a dedicated team building custom prompts and layouts to accelerate onboarding and drive adoption
• Multi-language support for 20+ languages enabling global contact center coverage
• Omnichannel support across voice, text, chat, and email in a single unified platform view
• All-inclusive pricing for customers, including white-glove onboarding, dedicated customer success, ongoing support, unlimited usage and admin access

What kind of client is best fit for this provider?

• Industries such as insurance, banking and credit unions, brick-and-mortar healthcare, home services, and debt collection and relief
• Organizations ranging from 10 to 1000+ agents
• Integration with 60+ softphone systems, including all major CCaaS platforms
• Supports both formal and informal contact center environments
• Built for North America and UK/EU markets, with support via regional servers

 Learn more about Balto here. 

Content Guru

Solution Type: CCaaS, UCaaS

Geographic Coverage: United States

What does Content Guru offer? Content Guru is a leading global cloud Customer Experience (CX) technology provider. Its storm® platform and brain® AI Orchestration Layer brings together AI, communications, systems of record and IoT technologies in one secure environment.

Key Differentiators: 

• Unmatched enterprise-scale reliability and availability
• 100% private cloud architecture
• Best-in-class security and data sovereignty
• Real-world AI orchestration across the entire platform
• Proven customer satisfaction and market validation

What kind of client is best fit for this provider?

• Large enterprise and public sector organizations
• Global, multi-site deployments at enterprise scale
• Mission-critical environments requiring high availability
• Regulated industries with strict security and compliance needs
• Complex integrations and enterprise-grade workflows

 Learn more about Content Guru here. 

Explore our full vendor portfolio including their offerings and key differentiators by logging into Pathfinder today!

Trusted Advisor Testimonials

What are your peers saying about their experience working with AVANT Sales Engineers? 

“AVANT has had a fast response to Operational requests. The Engineers have been helpful, supportive and extremely pleasant to work with.” – Blake Gunn, Cortexa IO

“Fantastic support as always. Helped the client and vendor to align on where the greatest opportunities lie” – George Botwright, Prime Tel Ltd.

Engineering Spotlight

This month, we’re spotlighting Tom Croft, Director of Solution Engineering for AVANT’s EMEA region.

Tom has had several diverse experiences at AVANT, from decoding complex customer problems to shaping seamless user experiences. While his focus is UCaaS and CCaaS, he is also well-versed in connectivity, SD-WAN/SASE, and security.

Here’s a bit more about Tom, in his own words! 

Tell us about something you do for AVANT that Trusted Advisors may not know.  

I have the privilege of continuing to scale AVANT’s engineering presence outside North America. At the moment, it’s a team of one… so if you’ve ever wondered who covers “Not America” for anything engineering, the answer is simply “Start with Tom” (for now).

My superpower is being AVANT’s resident “generalist” Sales Engineer. Rather than specialising in one technology, I support our Trusted Advisors across the entire international portfolio whether it’s UCaaS, CCaaS, Connectivity, Security or anything in between. When the opportunity requires a level deeper in some areas, I then wheel in adult supervision from my American colleagues.

I’m also the host of AVANT’s “Conversations With…” series, where I sit down with many of our fantastic vendors to discuss their solutions from a European perspective. It’s been a great way to shine a light on the technologies and people helping our partners solve real customer challenges this side of the pond.

Where are you located?

Surrey, United Kingdom

What do you think your younger self would be most proud of today?

Younger Tom would definitely be impressed by my three wonderful and talented children that my lovely wife and I have. But if I’m honest, he’d be even more amazed that I found someone willing to put up with my nonsense… and then voluntarily decide that having children with me was a good idea.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

I’ve got to credit an old boss of mine. Back in the early 2000s, when working from home was something you did because you had chickenpox or the servers in the basement had exploded, he said:

“Work is an activity. It’s not a time or a place. As long as the activity is complete, I couldn’t care less where you were or what time you did it.”

Looking back, the man was about 20 years ahead of everyone else but I still use this phrase and mantra today.

Ready to level up your sales game with expert guidance? Our Engineers have your back and are available for you to bring them into your opportunities! Connect with them and get started by filling out an IQA on Pathfinder!