Scott Strochak and the business of staying on the line

Scott Strochak had been on hold for fifteen minutes. He needed the service address for a couple of analog telephone trunks, an unglamorous request with a perfectly useful answer. AT&T had supplied the hold music. Strochak supplied the joke: perhaps the wait could become the name of a podcast. A communications entrepreneur was having the sort of communications experience that gives communications entrepreneurs something to do.

The episode has a pleasing circularity. AT&T was where his telecom career began. In 1997, he left to launch a business of his own. Years later, having built Xtelesis and served as chief technology officer at ProTelesis, he was still encountering the small gap between a system’s capabilities and a customer’s ability to get help. That gap runs through his working life. The equipment changes. The question of responsibility keeps its place.

Philadelphia, Tokyo, then the telephone

Strochak’s route into the industry included a substantial detour. A Philadelphia native, he graduated from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and spent the next four years living and working in Tokyo. He then returned to the United States, settled in San Francisco and joined AT&T. The itinerary carried him from a Pennsylvania university town to Japan before the Bay Area became his professional base.

During the mid-1990s, he saw an opening in communications integration for mid-market enterprises. He wanted a company committed to providing the full service. Leaving AT&T in 1997, he launched Xtel Networks, the predecessor of Xtelesis Corporation. It was a specific proposition: businesses needed help bringing communications together. A sale could supply the components; integration would have to make them useful together.

The founding decision gives the later career a clear starting point. Strochak entered a marketplace already busy with telecom and networking suppliers. His opportunity concerned the work between their offerings. That is a demanding place to build a business, because a customer can experience several separate products as a single problem. Someone has to understand the connections well enough to take the call.

The network underneath the promise

Xtelesis’s work reached beyond the handset. In discussing Cisco’s PIX firewalls, Strochak concentrated on what customers could do with their networks: extend virtual private network capabilities while maintaining performance, and increase bandwidth without necessarily buying larger firewalls. The concern was practical. An upgrade should preserve the usefulness of an existing investment while making room for more work.

That distinction matters in a career built around integration. A device’s features occupy one column of the decision. The customer’s network, existing equipment and future requirements occupy the others. Strochak’s comments addressed those surrounding conditions. He was describing how a product would behave inside an organization that already had systems to maintain.

By 2015, Xtelesis was authorized to resell AT&T Advanced Services. The former employee’s business had become a route to his former employer’s offerings. The arrangement let Xtelesis bundle AT&T’s network services with its own applications. There is a neat symmetry in that return: entrepreneurship did not require leaving the larger telecom ecosystem behind. It required deciding how to work within it on the customer’s behalf.

Utah brought people as well as customers

In March 2014, Xtelesis announced an agreement to acquire TecCon, based in Salt Lake City. Strochak described a fragmented ShoreTel reseller market, with a few large businesses and many regional partners. The proposed combination offered a wider customer base and a group of experienced colleagues. It also connected capabilities that could travel in both directions.

Xtelesis could bring services such as video and cloud-based SIP trunking to TecCon customers. TecCon’s managed IT practices could serve Xtelesis customers in California. The announcement put the combined workforce at 49 and anticipated support for more than 600 ShoreTel customers, alongside another 1,000 customers of other services. These were figures for the proposed combination, whose closing remained subject to customary conditions.

The exchange of capabilities is the telling detail. Customers were part of the deal, but so were the things each team knew how to do. For a service business, an acquisition’s practical value depends on that knowledge becoming available across the enlarged organization. The announcement described expansion as a way to make existing relationships more useful.

What arrived after the installation

Xtelesis added hosted communications while continuing to serve customers with equipment on their own premises. CoreDial’s historical account of the partnership reported growth from no UCaaS residual income to $500,000 over four years. It also described hosted services growing 30 to 40 percent annually over the preceding three years. Those measures belong to that period and that offering; they are not a statement of company revenue today.

The commercial change involved work continuing after installation. A recurring service gives the provider an ongoing relationship to maintain. Strochak’s company could set bundles and pricing while using a partner’s platform to deliver and manage the offering. Building every underlying component itself was unnecessary. Taking care of the customer relationship remained part of the job.

His verdict on the partnership was straightforward: “It’s been a great relationship for us.” That restrained ending is useful. The interest lies in what the arrangement let the company offer and keep supporting. A recurring payment brings a recurring expectation of service.

Giving collaboration a place beside the phone

In September 2015, Xtelesis became one of the inaugural partners in Redbooth’s unified communications channel program, alongside Comworx. Redbooth brought collaboration and communications into a platform for teams. Strochak described the addition as a way to deepen customer relationships and make a material difference to their organizations.

The partnership widened what a communications provider could discuss with a customer. Calls happen in the middle of work: a project, a shared task, a decision that several people need to make. A collaboration offering places those activities beside the conversation. For Xtelesis, joining the program meant another route into that working environment.

Strochak also discussed the shift from referrals toward an authorized channel program. The business relationship between provider and vendor mattered alongside the product. Support, commercial terms and the ability to serve customers all formed part of the decision. It was another example of a partnership changing both the offering and the responsibilities around it.

One unusually productive round of golf

On October 5, 2018, Strochak attended his first Channel Connect event and played the Pacific Grove Links course. At the seventeenth hole, he hit a hole-in-one. It was the first successful shot in the event’s hole-in-one competition. IntelePeer, the sponsor, had offered a Lexus as the prize. Most conference souvenirs demand less garage space.

The outing brought together more than 150 sales and supplier partners with the Intelisys and ScanSource teams. It was a gathering for renewing relationships and making new ones. Strochak’s shot supplied the day with a more concrete talking point. A working life usually measured in installations, accounts and service agreements had acquired a memorable single stroke.

Blue and orange, under one roof

In March 2019, Protel Communications and Xtelesis announced terms for a merger. Protel’s Michael Promotico described the transaction as part of the company’s growth plans. David Krietzberg joined as chief financial officer. Xtelesis brought offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City, along with a broader set of technology services.

Strochak emphasized the combination of the Mitel Blue and Mitel Orange businesses and the commitment to supporting legacy ShoreTel, InterTel and Mitel customers. His point was continuity alongside expansion: customers with existing systems would have access to a wider offering. He described the ambition to “provide a full suite of data and cloud offerings.”

The combined business became ProTelesis. Strochak later served as its CTO. The founder’s work had moved into a larger organization, while the integration question remained recognizable. Supporting a legacy installation and introducing another service both require attention to what the customer already uses. A new corporate name does little for a business whose existing equipment still needs to work tomorrow morning.

The customer’s working day gets larger

By October 2021, Strochak was speaking as ProTelesis CTO about Infiot’s remote-access technology. He focused on combining security with application optimization to simplify work from anywhere. The customer’s environment now extended beyond the office. Access and performance had to make sense together.

“Our job, as a full-service technology integration company, is to make our customers faster, better and smarter.”

Scott Strochak · October 2021

That sentence describes an outcome a customer can recognize. The technologies in the surrounding announcement were specialized; the desired result was familiar. People wanted to get their work done. ProTelesis’s own approach includes testing products before deployment, sometimes using them in its production environment. It is a useful practice for a business whose promises depend on several technologies cooperating.

The relationships around the work appear in Strochak’s comments about people, too. Recommending Rich Long, he praised responsiveness, knowledge and a willingness to help. At the UC Summit, he valued learning from peers and identifying paths for his organization. Those public remarks give a practical account of what he sought from professional connections: useful knowledge and people prepared to respond.

More recent public activity has him discussing a new company with Christoph Pluchar and looking ahead to Channel Partners 2026. The appetite for building remains visible. So does the impatience with a simple question left waiting on a telephone line. Across the changes in products, partners and company names, that small request provides a fitting test. An address should be obtainable. A customer should be able to get back to work. The hold music has had its fifteen minutes.