At Alicart Restaurant Group, the dining rooms went quiet before the telephone did. Pandemic restrictions had emptied the places where its restaurants made their living. The group kept selected kitchens open near residential customers. Dinner still needed ordering. The question was who would answer.
Alicart put three or four employees at home on a Fusion Connect call-center application. They took orders and payments, then entered orders into a web-based point-of-sale interface that sent them to the kitchen. A restaurant employee no longer had to juggle every incoming call beside the food. A queue distributed the work.
- What it sells: managed internet, networks, business calling and collaboration.
- Who buys: organizations with scattered locations and too many systems to coordinate.
- The proposition: one provider handles more of the technical work and ongoing support.
Phil Dixon, Alicart’s IT director, explained the appeal: “But hospitality is a people business.” The cloud system preserved the conversation while changing where it happened. Fusion deployed and maintained the platform. Alicart supplied the people who knew the menu. That division of labor is a useful introduction to the company.
A phone call has a supply chain
Fusion Connect occupies the untidy middle between a software subscription and a telecommunications carrier. Its customers need internet access, reliable networks, telephone numbers, collaboration tools and security. Each can come from a different supplier. When a call sounds terrible, identifying the responsible supplier becomes its own project.
The company bundles those responsibilities. It supplies business internet and managed WiFi, manages SD-WAN connections between sites, and offers hosted voice, Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams calling. Contact-center services add routing and customer-service workflows. Microsoft licensing brings another recurring administrative task into the same relationship.
Consider Teams. Employees may already use it for meetings and messages. Fusion’s Operator Connect service adds external telephone calling, with number provisioning and administration. Direct Routing is another option. The attraction is familiar software supported by someone who understands telephony. Microsoft still operates its platform; Fusion handles the operator side.
Shared implementation. Ongoing support.
This is recurring B2B services revenue: connections, seats, licenses and managed support under contracts, sold directly and through partners. Fusion’s commercial distinction is the breadth of work it takes on. For a stretched IT department, fewer handoffs can matter as much as another calling feature.
The alternatives depend on which responsibility a buyer wants to keep. RingCentral and Zoom Phone compete for cloud-calling budgets. A Teams customer can buy Microsoft Calling Plans or use another certified operator. A business with its own experienced network team may prefer separate suppliers. Fusion is more compelling when the customer wants help coordinating those layers. Consolidation deserves a comparison of total operating work, alongside the quoted monthly bill.
The difficult part was the rollout
Wireless Vision supplies the larger-scale example. The retailer’s case study describes a small IT team serving roughly 700 stores. Its project required more than 800 circuits and proactive monitoring in over 400 locations. The awkward detail was the equipment: older technology had to coexist with newer systems.
Fusion worked with Fortinet on that configuration. Wireless Vision reported moving from two to nine implementations a day and achieving 50% cost savings. Those are vendor-published customer results, not a forecast for the next buyer. Still, they explain what expertise means here: engineers, sequencing and project management, applied repeatedly.
Customer-specific results from the company’s published case study.
The lesson is practical. Inventory what you already own before replacing everything. Identify the bottleneck, establish a repeatable installation process, and track completion. Alicart changed who answered calls; Wireless Vision changed how sites were deployed. In each account, the useful change concerned the workflow around the technology.
The balance sheet needed its own repair
Fusion’s history complicates the reassuring sales pitch. Founded in 1997 by Marvin Rosen and Philip Turits, the business eventually entered Chapter 11 in June 2019. It emerged in January 2020 after eliminating approximately $400 million in debt, supported by a $115 million exit-financing loan.
Another recapitalization followed in 2022: $55 million of preferred equity and a refinanced $60 million credit facility. The company reported reducing debt by more than 80%. Funds associated with Morgan Stanley Private Credit, Ellington and Investcorp participated. The sequence makes capital structure part of the story, alongside products and customer service.
In May 2025, Fusion announced an $85 million term loan from Hark Capital for operating capital, repayment of existing debt and strategic investments. Borrowing is financing, not sales. These announcements should not be stacked into a pretend growth chart: an exit loan, preferred shares and refinancing describe different financial events.
Read the promise all the way through
Fusion promotes a 100% uptime guarantee. The important words concern scope and remedy. Covered failures on its underlying infrastructure lead to service credits. Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex have their own platform agreements. For SD-WAN and Advanced Edge Security, the guarantee requires a high-availability configuration, including dual circuits and Fusion-provided equipment.
A useful buying question: who owns each failure, and what happens next?
That makes deployment design a buying decision. A business unwilling to fund redundant connectivity should not assume it receives the same protection. Nor does a consolidated provider remove every dependency. A small office needing only a basic phone subscription may find less value in the broader managed relationship.
Now the invoice is part of the product
Fusion’s August 2026 contact-center announcement addresses another coordination headache: AI costs. Agent assistance and analytics use monthly per-seat pricing. Higher-volume automation and AI routing use monthly packages based on anticipated call volume. The distinction matters. Predictability comes from choosing a package that fits the workload, rather than treating every capability as unlimited.
September brought SASE Standard and Advanced packages, joining networking with cloud-delivered security. In October, the board appointed Brian McClintock CEO. The portfolio keeps expanding, but the test remains pleasantly concrete: can the customer spend less time administering communications and more time doing the work those communications are supposed to support?