![]() 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. In the event of a fire or a flood or a snowstorm, your phone system need not go dead or be left unattended. Aside from the benefits for day-to-day operations, many mention disaster recovery as another reason for choosing such a setup. If the organization is buying into a range of cloud services, hosted VoIP is usually on the list. 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. We can forward those extensions transparently to the customer – just forward to a cell phone when they’re out in the field." If a customer calls in to the San Diego office and needs to talk to someone in Chicago, that call can be forwarded from office to office "and it’s very seamless and transparent to customers," he says. "That’s particularly good for our sales force, which is predominantly out of the office. "One of the things that’s phenomenal is the call forwarding, and the auto-attendant that kicks in after hours," he says. But the basic phone features were the ones Stuecklen is most enthused about. TelCentris has a consumer unified communications product called Voxox and also offers unified communications features, such as voicemail-to-email forwarding of sound clips, in its hosted VoIP service. These offerings aren’t necessarily for small offices only – Cypress manages 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. Some of the other firms offering hosted VoIP, such as Cypress Communications and Alteva, 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). Each employee can also go to the portal to make some basic changes, like setting up call forwarding. He takes care of administrative actions, like assigning new extensions, by signing into a my. web portal. ![]() "One of the nice parts is you don’t have to be that savvy to implement the solution," he says. 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. staff in touch with each other, sound quality "was one of my concerns," he says, "but it’s been clear as can be."Īs part of the contract, TelCentris assigned a project team to help with details like naming conventions and network setup, so there were few technical details for Stuecklen to master. 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. It has since opened offices in Northern Orange County and Chicago. ![]() He signed up with TelCentris because U.K.-based LocalLife had opened a San Diego sales office and was starting to expand in the U.S. 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." 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? 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. ![]()
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