Hosted VoIP: Managed Telephony vs. Premise Equipment
February 26, 2007 - TMCnet, Mae Kowalke
If you’re the CTO or CIO at an enterprise with 20 to 2,000 seats, you know that managing the company’s telephone system can be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. This is at odds with your need to keep things simple and straightforward and get the job done in a minimal amount of time.
What if there was a way to avoid capital expenditures and the complexities of deploying a phone system, without compromising the carrier-grade reliability that your company needs? Guess what—there is. It’s called hosted VoIP, also sometimes referred to as managed telephony.
Hosted VoIP offers many advantages over premise-based equipment. Some of these advantages are summarized below.
Equipment Cost
Instead of shelling out significant money to buy equipment for your enterprise, a hosted VoIP solution lets you rent that equipment—at considerable cost savings. The equipment is maintained by the provider, so you don’t have to worry about upkeep.
Just as important, choosing a hosted VoIP solution means the associated equipment never becomes obsolete. As technologies change, phones can be upgraded as part of the managed contract. There’s no need to throw out all the money you spent investing in hardware; you get the latest and best at all times.
Redundancy
If the unthinkable happened and your primary facility became inaccessible or damaged due to an emergency, would your enterprise still be able to function? A good business continuity plan must take into account communications equipment redundancy.
Hosted VoIP is an excellent choice for addressing this important topic, because the equipment associated with a managed solution is not physically located at your place of business—it’s hosted, so if a particular location is destroyed or made inaccessible, the communications infrastructure can be routed to another location. Hosted VoIP helps ensure that responding to an emergency is a seamless process.
24/7 Service
Even the most dedicated communications system manager is not going to be available to troubleshoot and maintain the telephony system 24/7. But, if you go with a hosted VoIP solution, support is available literally at any time.
Going with a managed, hosted VoIP solution lets you, the CTO or CIO, focus on doing your job—not worrying about what happens if the phone system does down or experiences glitches at an inopportune time.
Mobility
Increasingly in the business world, ‘work’ is not restricted to one location. Rather, employees conduct business from many locations using mobile phones and laptop computers. A hosted VoIP solution enables your enterprise to stay competitive by giving employees access to communications resources while on-the-go.
A hosted VoIP solution lets users log into the enterprise system from anywhere, using any Internet connection. This means that calls can be routed to the correct person, even if he or she is not in the office. Responding to customers need not be location based, but rather action based.
Multiple Location Integration
Once upon a time, companies with multiple locations operated essentially as separate businesses. If a customer called Location A, he or she would have to be told to hang up and dial a different number to reach the proper rep at Location B. With a hosted VoIP solution, this scenario is eliminated. Instead, doing business is a seamless process across geographically dispersed locations.
A hosted VoIP solution enables your enterprise to stay nimble in the global market by tying together all locations with 4-digit dialing, as well as seamless presence and collaboration tools.
Advanced Features
IP-based telephony offers many advanced features that can help your enterprise stay competitive. These features need not be expensive to deploy and manage. Choosing a hosted VoIP solution means that you get the latest and best technologies, without having to install complicated equipment or utilize company resources managing that equipment.
A hosted VoIP solution is flexible, affordable, and up-to-date. It provides your enterprise with the tools needed to get the job done. The hosted VoIP provider makes sure the system works, so you can focus on more important things.