Today Forbes had a great article on hosted voice:
One of the virtues of Voice over Internet Protocol is that your business can have a sophisticated phone system without installing a phone system. With a VoIP system hosted on the Internet, all you need are the phones.
One situation where this particularly makes sense is if you run a relatively small (or lean) business with lots of locations. Rather than have each office install its own phone switching equipment, you can have all locations tie into the hosted system. By putting all locations on the same VoIP system, you make it possible for them to call each other toll-free. Each location can have its own local phone number for local customers, while also getting the ability to 3-digit dial or transfer calls to anyone at any other location – what can be called an ‘extension to anywhere’ setup.
Other scenarios are possible, of course – you could buy VoIP equipment to install in your home office or data center and have other locations access it over the Internet. So the decision still comes back to the central tradeoff associated with any cloud computing scenario – would you rather buy and manage the technology yourself, or have someone else do it for you? Would you rather have it on the books as a capital expense, or as a monthly service fee?
Kevin Stuecklen, the director of information technology at LocalLife, had just enough experience from a previous job working with the “archaic servers” powering a predictive dialing telephony systems “that I knew I didn’t want anything like that.”
He signed up with a hosted VoIP provider because LocalLife had opened a San Diego sales office and was starting to expand in the U.S. It has since opened offices in Northern Orange County and Chicago. LocalLife is an Internet marketing firm that works with small to midsize businesses to promote their websites, or set up a website if they don’t have one.
Since a primary goal was to keep U.S. and U.K. staff in touch with each other, sound quality ”was one of my concerns,” he says, “but it’s been clear as can be.”
As part of the contract, the VoIP provider assigned a project team to help with details like naming conventions and network setup, so there were few technical details for Stuecklen to master. The phones work on power over Ethernet, so they can be set up anywhere you can string a network cable, without needing to also be plugged into a power outlet.
“One of the nice parts is you don’t have to be that savvy to implement the solution,” he says. He takes care of administrative actions, like assigning new extensions, by signing into a web portal. Each employee can also go to the portal to make some basic changes, like setting up call forwarding.
Some offering hosted VoIP also emphasize the availability of unified communications services that tie together voice, email, instant messaging, and presence (where your PC and phone work together to let the rest of the business know if you’re at your desk available for a phone call or instant message). These offerings aren’t necessarily for small offices only – some phone systems for entire office buildings, while relieving them of the burden of managing a piece of private branch exchange (PBX) equipment in the basement.
I’ve heard a lot of other arguments in favor of hosted VoIP over the past year, from all sorts of startups and small businesses that want to reduce the technology overhead for their businesses, or make it easier to support home office workers. If the organization is buying into a range of cloud services, hosted VoIP is usually on the list. Aside from the benefits for day-to-day operations, many mention disaster recovery as another reason for choosing such a setup. In the event of a fire or a flood or a snowstorm, your phone system need not go dead or be left unattended. With hosted VoIP, you can move your work extension to your house using a computer and a headset, or a phone you brought home from the office. Larger organizations with their own phone systems can replicate them at a backup data center, but SMBs are better off choosing a cloud-based phone system that has backup and recovery built into the package.
For many small businesses, the question is not so much “why hosted VoIP?” as “why would I do anything else?”
meshIP offers its meshPBX hosted VoIP solution to business large and small. Please contact us to find out how we can save you money and simplify your communications strategy.
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