Hosted PBX along with collaboration and communication services are a relatively new topic in the Service Provider industry. The prospect for the end-users of these services are promising. The number of companies willing to adopt these solutions has increased in recent years. In fact, according to market analysts, hosted communication is currently the technology with the highest growth rate. What's more, this technology has changed the way companies communicate and interact with the partner ecosystem. Cost-effectiveness aside, hosted PBX services increase productivity substantially. All these benefits are immediate, require no investment in hardware, and can be deployed incredibly fast.
About Hosted PBX
In this framework, the service provider runs its IT infrastructure and gives the customer access to a service in the cloud. This service not only contains the functionality of a traditional PBX, but it also builds on top of it and expands it greatly. Companies with dated PBX systems can migrate to cloud PBX services with minimum costs compared to the investment required for upgrading the old PBX hardware. With the new hosted PBX model, end-users benefit from greater flexibility, a more efficient control over costs, and only pay for the resources they use. The service provider is in charge with the upgrade, the maintenance, and the security of the IT systems. As an added benefit, users no longer need to waste IT resources on maintenance.
Who is it for?
Hosted PBX is designed for dynamic small and medium businesses that want to cut down on costs and operate an efficient business phone system without having to invest any major financial resources in the purchase and operation of complex equipment. Hosted PBX is a solution that provides flexibility and ensures support for the mobile workforce, part-time or home employees. This is an easy-to-manage service that creates a framework with predictable costs and a return on investment from the very beginning.
Hosted PBX benefits
- OPEX* vs CAPEX**, scale up/down: Companies no matter how small need an efficient business communication system. Hosted PBX is the optimal choice that allows you to access a state-of-the-art business phone system without making any major investment in expensive IT hardware. It also reduces headaches for the company's IT department. This way, the company can redirect its capital towards core business activities and outsource non-core services. What's more, in a dynamic and unpredictable business environment, demands may increase or decrease from one month to the next. Hosted PBX again proves ideal, as it allows customers to scale the service up or down and pay only for the resources they use.
- Lower TCO***: By using a hosted PBX, an SMB actually outsources a complex IT&C solution that is hard to manage and requires specialized resources. If you weigh the costs of an on-premise PBX solution - its acquisition, learning curve, support, and maintenance - the hosted PBX is clearly the cost-effective alternative.
- Automatic upgrades and easy administration: The entire IT infrastructure required by a cloud PBX service (servers, networking, VoIP resources) is hosted and managed by the service provider in charge with the management and the support of IT systems. Customers no longer need to care about the maintenance and the security of their PBX. They get to focus solely on managing phone capabilities for each end-user via a user-friendly web interface (voicemail, call recording, etc.)
- Productivity and mobility: Hosted PBX has far more features (as well as more versatile capabilities) than a traditional PBX. It's an evolved form of business telephony with features such as Voicemail (picking up vocal messages that you can customize to be sent to email), Find Me/Follow Me (intelligent routing of calls to various destinations and devices) so that the recipient can be reached anywhere. Phone extensions can be assigned to various VoIP devices, including mobiles (smartphones, tablets), so that business users never lose contact with their office. All this while benefiting from a plurality of services including voice, IM, presence, and video calling.
- Create your own identity: Use the Auto-attendant feature with customized greeting messages and your company will sound more professional to customers calling your office numbers. An auto-attendant (IVR) will efficiently route calls to a specific department or employee, eliminating the intervention of a receptionist. By using an Auto-attendant, even if your company has 5 members, the customers calling your office will have the image of more solid and well structured business.
- No missed calls: Small businesses need to be flexible and remain able to take all customer calls, even if their employees are not in the office, work part-time or from home. Using features such as Find Me or Follow-me, incoming calls for an employee who is not in the office can be redirected to any other employee available or to a mobile device. There's an actual term for this. It's called Business Continuity, and it applies to situations like calls to an office that deals with a power outage, or Internet downtime. In these situations, calls can be redirected in a "state of emergency" to employees' mobile phones or other landline phones.
*Opex (operating expense/expenditure) = Ongoing cost for running a product, business, or system.
**Capex (capital expenditures) = Expenditure altering the future of the business. A capital expenditure is incurred when a business spends money either to buy fixed assets or to add to the value of an existing fixed asset with a useful life extending beyond the taxable year.
***TCO (total cost of ownership) = Financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or a system.