TMCnet
Hosted VoIP is so last season. In style now are telephony-in-the-cloud services, communications-enabled business processes and managed service providers.
Don’t think basic PBX, darling. The new trend is all about outfitting businesses with communications solutions that offer presence, can allow today’s worker to go from wireline to wireless in a flash, and have hooks into popular business applications.
“Hosted business VoIP is not very descriptive. I prefer telephony from the cloud because that’s what we’re really talking about here,” says Bill Bumbernick, CEO of service provider Alteva. “VoIP today is just one component of many things that are coming together to create communications.”
Bumbernick adds that a communications-enabled business process could have email, text and/or telephone.
“And all of this stuff is to create efficiencies in business,” he says. “The cloud or the hosted part of this is what creates the rapid development – the ability to rapidly move that capability into businesses.”
Don’t think basic PBX, darling. The new trend is all about outfitting businesses with communications solutions that offer presence, can allow today’s worker to go from wireline to wireless in a flash, and have hooks into popular business applications.
“Hosted business VoIP is not very descriptive. I prefer telephony from the cloud because that’s what we’re really talking about here,” says Bill Bumbernick, CEO of service provider Alteva. “VoIP today is just one component of many things that are coming together to create communications.”
Bumbernick adds that a communications-enabled business process could have email, text and/or telephone.
“And all of this stuff is to create efficiencies in business,” he says. “The cloud or the hosted part of this is what creates the rapid development – the ability to rapidly move that capability into businesses.”
David Zwicker, vice president of marketing at Whaleback Systems says his company considers itself a managed service provider and fits somewhere between the two options of buying a PBX from Ayava, Cisco orShoreTel and using IP Centrex.
Hosted business VoIP sounds like it is purely Internet-based, meaning “best effort,” Zwicker says, and Whaleback is certainly not that.
“We don’t want any part of that association,” he adds.
Rather, Whaleback provides QoS through intelligence in the PBX, intelligence in the network operations center, and control over the gateway where the IP-PSTN handoff takes place. Additionally, he says, Whaleback provides a dedicated pipe for voice traffic.
As part of its service, Whaleback handles installation; cuts a deal for access connectivity, which could be for a T1, DSL, cable modem service or whatever is the best option in the customer’s area; provisions the bandwidth needed for the customer’s applications; and maps how those calls will move over the network so it can control the call paths, says Zwicker.
Whaleback, which supports CrystalBlue Voice using its own server-based PBX, aims its collection of products and services at customers with five to 500 employees, he says. But Whaleback considers businesses in the 15 to 99 employee space as its sweet spot because they tend to be too big for key systems and too small for traditional enterprise-class PBXs.
Customers today are looking for alternatives to expensive PBX purchases because of the economy and because they just don’t want to put a lot of capital into these systems, says Zwicker. Hosted VoIP is an option, but a problematic one, he says, because it risks service quality and can limit feature functionality. But a managed service in which Whaleback provides the hosted PBX systems, the management of it and the connectivity packaged in “a nice, predicable, flat-rate” setup is a more attractive offer, he says.
Hosted business VoIP sounds like it is purely Internet-based, meaning “best effort,” Zwicker says, and Whaleback is certainly not that.
“We don’t want any part of that association,” he adds.
Rather, Whaleback provides QoS through intelligence in the PBX, intelligence in the network operations center, and control over the gateway where the IP-PSTN handoff takes place. Additionally, he says, Whaleback provides a dedicated pipe for voice traffic.
As part of its service, Whaleback handles installation; cuts a deal for access connectivity, which could be for a T1, DSL, cable modem service or whatever is the best option in the customer’s area; provisions the bandwidth needed for the customer’s applications; and maps how those calls will move over the network so it can control the call paths, says Zwicker.
Whaleback, which supports CrystalBlue Voice using its own server-based PBX, aims its collection of products and services at customers with five to 500 employees, he says. But Whaleback considers businesses in the 15 to 99 employee space as its sweet spot because they tend to be too big for key systems and too small for traditional enterprise-class PBXs.
Customers today are looking for alternatives to expensive PBX purchases because of the economy and because they just don’t want to put a lot of capital into these systems, says Zwicker. Hosted VoIP is an option, but a problematic one, he says, because it risks service quality and can limit feature functionality. But a managed service in which Whaleback provides the hosted PBX systems, the management of it and the connectivity packaged in “a nice, predicable, flat-rate” setup is a more attractive offer, he says.
