Year: 2013

Enterprise VoIP Market Prefers Private Cloud Over Public Cloud (Pt 1)

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When you hear about virtualized business environments, remote-hosted network solutions and IP telephony services, you might think that all of these terms represent a single monolithic technology. While it’s clear the qualities of these services vary from vendor to vendor, not everyone is aware of the fact there are plenty of different deployment methods for each of these. In fact, the differences between one remote-hosted network deployment and another can be rather dramatic.

One of the biggest divides in the world remote-hosted networks lies between private and public cloud deployment. And while public clouds may be getting all the press, private clouds appear to be the deployment method the enterprise market is jumping to.

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What UC Features Do Businesses Actually Want?

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The promise of UC is great for the future of business, but what features do businesses, their employees and their managers, actually want from this communications advancement? A new survey conducted and released by a top UC provider offers some clues to what elements of modern communications technologies businesses find most frustrating, and what they want to take advantage of when they decide to make the change over to a UC solution.

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Unified Communications Boost Headset Sales

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Headset

Some industry participants argued that modern telephony technologies have made communications hardware obsolete. These individuals believe that due to big jumps in hosted services, and due to the increase in telephony software options, the

In fact, incoming data indicates the demand for telephony hardware may be growing in line with increasing demand for telephony software. average business will jettison their telephony hardware and opt for entirely soft and remote systems. We’ve argued this isn’t the case for some time now, and an increasing amount of data and recent industry projections seem to prove us right.

How could this be? What’s driving this trend? Unified communications.

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Reliability Concerns in IP Telephony (Pt 1)

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Most people see the benefits associated with IP telephony and feel pretty sold on the technology right off the bat. This isn’t too surprising. After all, it’s pretty natural to hear benefits like “lowered overhead,” “increasing organizational flexibility,” “expanded feature sets,” and to automatically say yes to whatever technology hands them over. But there are some people who feel a little skittish about IP telephony and aren’t completely wooed by the technology’s many benefits. Instead, these people let their concerns over the technology’s performance overwhelm their decision making process and they end up hemming-and-hawing instead of taking the plunge into IP telephony.

Thankfully many of the concerns some organizations feel over adopting IP telephony are unfounded or easy to guard against with proper provisioning. For example, let’s take a minute to look over a common concern related to IP telephony reliability, to see how well it stands up in the light of day.

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Privacy Concerns, Medical Information Breaches and Choosing a Secure VoIP Provider

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When you’re picking an IP telephony provider security needs to sit at the top of your list of concerns, and this is doubly true if you’re going to be signing up for a full remote-hosted networking solution, including any sort of cloud storage. Every organization needs to be extremely concerned about network security, yet organizations in certain fields need to be even more concerned with security breaches than others.

Take the example of the medical community.

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Getting the Most Out of Hosted PBX While Traveling

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One of the biggest benefits offered by hosted PBX is the ability to connect to an organization’s network and telephony solutions anywhere in the world, at any time. This is great news for employees who want to telecommute and business owners who want to offer remote work arrangements, but it’s even better news for individuals who want to remain connected while they travel for business purposes. However, if your organization and its employees want to get the most out of hosted PBX when they’re on the road for business-related reasons, you need to make sure they can find suitable Internet connection.

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How Far is Too Far When Helping Clients in Tough Economic Times?

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As a service provider offering essential phone service to our clients we need to make a lot of tough decisions regarding how we run our business, and that’s doubly true when our clients experience rough economic times. This is true not only for DLS but for many other smaller companies that develop close, personal relationships with their business clients over the years.

On the one hand service providers can be rather hard-nosed and impersonal with their clients and demand full payment, on time, every time their bill comes up due. Lots of providers take this approach. They don’t listen when their clients experience financial difficulties and they don’t make any overtures to help their partners out when times get tough. This hard-nosed approach is pretty common among larger service providers who tend to be less likely to ever meet their clients half-way.

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Listen to Your VoIP Service Providers Advice

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Infoworld recently posted a great story detailing this exact problem and just how bone-headed IP telephony implementation can go, and how a simple mistake (like mis-calibration) can make an entire technology seem deficient.

In the story a VoIP service provider was called in to an organization to check out their communication system. The organization had been experiencing a lot of crippling problems with their IP PBX. The organization’s employees were experiencing degradation in call quality, dropped calls and busy signals when and where there shouldn’t. In other words this organization’s VoIP deployment has turned into a mess in a manner their old traditional telephony solution never had been.

Turns out they were using an IP PBX that wasn’t nearly powerful enough to meet their current needs.

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Did Yahoo! Make the Right Decision Banning Work-From-Home Arrangements? (Pt 6)

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There’s one more point deserving a quick mention in the discussion over Yahoo!’s decision to ban work from home arrangements and how this might impact the way other businesses approach the whole topic within their own organizations.

The CEO Question

A lot of the debate over whether or not Yahoo! did the right thing banning work-from-home arrangements has read as a debate over whether or not Yahoo!’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, made the right decision implementing this ban.

While it’s probably not fair to place the full weight of this decision on Mayer alone, it’s wise to note when these sorts of shake-ups occur they’re usually discussed entirely as the sole decision of whomever is in charge, in this case the company’s CEO.

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