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.
While the desire to physically own and control the technology utilized in your organization’s telephony system is understandable it isn’t particularly easy to dismantle. The fact of the matter is it’s better to focus your organization’s space, resources and attention on the work your employees perform and not on optimizing and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the lights on and the phone lines open.
Think about all the elements of your organization’s infrastructure, all those elements existing purely to facilitate the production of the products and services your organization runs, and ask yourself if you would really want to be personally responsible for all of them, or whether you’re comfortable having someone else, a specialist group, take care of the “care and feeding” of those systems. It won’t take more than a minute of internal inquiry to realize the more infrastructure operations you can outsource the better- and that includes the infrastructure of your organization’s telephony system.
Yet just because you can easily discount the necessity of physically hosting your organization’s VoIP gear that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write off the human element quite so easily. That is to say, even though you won’t think twice about sending the physical equipment running your phone systems to a remote location, you’ll probably have a difficult time taking the responsibility of running those systems out of your IT department’s hands.
We admit- the human element of switching to any new technology can be tricky to handle, especially if it involves downsizing within your organization or otherwise making one or more members of your IT department redundant.
There are a couple of different ways to approach this dilemma.
We’ve all heard the reports that business VoIP is projected to grow massively over the next couple of years. We’ve all heard predictions that the VoIP market is going to be extremely exciting throughout the rest of this decade. We’ve all heard that VoIP is the future of telephony, for both enterprise markets and the private sphere. But most of the predictions are extremely vague. Thankfully we’re starting to see some new reports come in that begin to align these predictions with some real numbers, and the VoIP-dominated future they predict appears to exceed what most of us anticipated.
The increased demand for mobile VoIP is changing the forecast for the global business VoIP market over the next six years. According to Global Industry Analysts Inc., a worldwide business strategy and market intelligence source, global business VoIP is being influenced by two factors which include the rapid acceptance of VoIP by businesses around the globe and the increased demand for mobile VoIP.
In terms of market segments, the fastest growing market is hosted PBX services. Additionally, the VoIP market on a global scale will be driven by the value and cost savings to companies around the world thanks to new unified communications technology. The hosted PBX market is expected to increase at a Compound Annual Growth Rate by more than twelve from 2012 to the year 2018.
Digital leased lines are no longer the favorites of bandwidth-hungry businesses. As many alternative sources of affordable Internet bandwidth became available, dedicated point-to-point leased lines begun to fall out of favor with many small businesses. Their relatively high cost, by today’s standards, per megabit of bandwidth make them unattractive in comparison to the generous shared bandwidth offers from various telecommunications and cable carriers. That said, it seems like rumors of their rapid demise are being greatly exaggerated. T-1 lines, for example, seem to be entering their 7th life as market for them is getting sudden support by those who had to deal with at least one DSL or Cable outage.
When it comes to choosing a business voice service provider, one of the most important factors to consider is quality of customer service and technical support they deliver. Most customers, be they commercial or residential, consider customer support a core value of a technology business.
This perception, however, is frequently overlooked by technology juggernauts which focus on technical support efficiency, often overestimating the benefit of customers self-service. Accustomed to thinking about customer care in terms of technological solution, they choose the most “cost-effective” operating models by pushing (or rather shoving) primary customer contact to the web and making each successive step a part of hierarchy designed with the same intent. To them it’s all about numbers: by outsourcing technical support major telecom carriers and regional CLECs save millions of dollars, cut call handling times aiming at handling more calls with less technical support personnel.
If memory serves me correctly, five years ago, we used to position VoIP versus traditional PSTN-based dialtone. Then came the hosted concept and theme focus has turned to an on-premise VoIP versus Hosted VoIP. Today we are seeing hosted PBX service providers beginning to further differentiate themselves by targeting niche vertical markets by building on their application integration capabilities.
Hosted PBX price wars are continuing to heat up for the fourth year. The biggest battleground appear to be the growing small business market where integration capabilities coupled with soft entry costs are playing a dominant role in SMB’s choice of a unified communications platform. Most small businesses prefer to gradually increase their operating expenses while gaining immediate access to the critical unified communications technology rather than incurring a large one-time capital expense.