Office Telephone Service Via Cloud

When you think of office telephone service, the thing that comes to mind is a phone on every desk with an easy 3 or 4 digit number to call other phones in-house and access to an outside line whenever you need one. Today, that picture also includes your own direct dial phone number and personal voice mail. Transfers, call forwarding and conference calls are easy to set up. So, where is the equipment that runs this phone system?

For most people, the answer is “who cares?” The actual phone system could be anywhere. As long as it works all day, every day, the mechanics of how this is accomplished is beyond the interest of all but a few people. The ones who care are the business manager who pays the phone bills, the IT person or people who quietly keep everything humming, and the provider of the service.

That provider could be the local phone company. That’s how it was for at least half of the last century. For many if not most companies, at least part of the system is in-house. This could be a small wireless phone system with a couple of lines and a half-dozen handsets. It could be a key system using desk phones with a separate button for each of 4 to 6 outside lines. It might even be a PBX phone system mounted in a back room with lines coming in from each phone and going out to the telephone company.

Since very few people are all that interested in running their own in-house telephone switching system, why not ditch the whole thing? Does that mean going back to analog phones connected to the local Telco? Not at all. Today it means going forward to a cloud based solution that will give you all the functionality you have now and more.

Cloud communications is the new PBX. It’s also the new key system and the new small office system with only a few telephones. It may even provide your broadband Internet.

The cloud telephone system is more formally known as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. You already know what hosting is. Chances are that you already buy a hosting solution from one of the many online providers. This could be a shared solution, a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server of your own. The economics of setting up your own data center just to run a web server don’t make sense anymore. There is so much competition in the hosting field that simple solutions are only a few dollars a month. Dedicated servers are only a few hundreds of dollars per month. That includes the box, the bandwidth and the IT services to keep it all running.

Larger companies that run their own customized packages for business information may have elected to just add one more server for the web to the racks they already have in their data centers. It hasn’t made much sense to go out of house for a solution when you need a large data center and staffing to optimize your business. Well, not till recently. Now these major corporations are shutting down their in-house data centers and moving to cloud computing solutions in droves. Why? For the same reasons that make sense to outsource telephone systems. You don’t need to invest in capital and you don’t need a staff to maintain it.

The point is that cloud services have evolved to the point where both your computing and your telephone can be supplied by a cloud vendor at a lower overall cost with more functionality and lower in-house staffing than doing it yourself. There are other advantages, too. You pay for a cloud telephone system per seat per month. You only buy as many seats as you need. When you need more, you order more. There is no need to maintain extra capacity just in case business picks up suddenly. Provisioning of extra resources is fast and easy because the cloud has all the capacity you need.

Now that you have office telephone solutions in the cloud as an option, is there any reason to be stuck with a technical solution that was “modern” decades ago? At the very least, take a look at what’s available in the cloud, what it costs compared to what you are paying now, and if you can get all new phones included with your service.



Note: Original photo of telephone operators courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives on Wikimedia Commons.

The Ubiquitous Cloud of 2012

The business skies are clouding for 2012. This cloud isn’t a sign of foul weather ahead. Just the opposite. The cloud of 2012 brings relief to businesses living on a razor’s edge with little confidence in their ability to predict the future. Why try to be a forecaster when you can simply position yourself to respond as needed, depending on which way the wind blows?

Is there climate change afoot? One could easily argue that the business climate has already changed. Many businesses have found themselves stuck in the doldrums where nothing moves at all. Others experience volatility, where they are not sure which way the breezes will blow tomorrow. How many managers long for the old days, not that many years ago, when growth was robust, the path ahead was crystal clear, and there were no storms brewing on the horizon?

The best remedy for this new, new climate may not be to run away from developing clouds, but toward them. The IT cloud can be the solution you need to fend off those other clouds of doubt, worry and ill-weather. What the information technology cloud can do is let you ride with the wind and tack as needed to meet your business goals. Technically, what cloud services do is let you move from an ownership model of investing, maintaining and upgrading to a rental model of pay-as-you-go.

Ownership has its advantages. It puts you in control. Your business capital is right down the hall where you can see it. Nobody can take it away from you because it’s yours. You can do with it what you wish. There is depreciation to help the bottom line and once it is paid off, you own it without further payments... or so you think.

The problem with the ownership model for technology is that today’s servers and PBX systems aren’t like steam engines, lathes, CNC machining centers or mainframe computers. You don’t buy a monster machine for your company and expect it will still be going strong long after you retire. The half-life of anything powered by electronic chips or dependent on the vagaries of the World Wide Web is almost shorter than the time you need to get it fully productive.

Your capital investment is also the start of your costs, not the end. Even if breakdowns are infrequent, there is a steady stream of upgrades, modifications and security features to be installed and tested. That means ongoing costs for both software and personnel. None of this stuff runs perfectly for long with your back turned. There is always the need to deal with something that has dropped offline or needs a soft reset. It is nature of anything microprocessor based to get lost in its nearly incalculable software paths. It’s rare that you need to shutdown a box to stop the smoke from pouring out. It’s a given that you’ll need to unplug it and plug it back in to “magically” fix whatever is hung up.

There’s no denying the inherent nature of technology. The real question is whether it makes more sense for you to take ownership of these issues or pawn them off on someone else. A decade or two ago, the answer was clearly to do as much in-house as possible. Today? Launching those monkeys off your back and into the cloud is looking better and better.

I haven’t dropped the word “outsourcing” yet, but this is the time to embrace it. In simplest terms, you hire someone else to do things that are more cost effective for them to handle than for you to do yourself. On a macro scale, there can be major societal upheaval caused by suddenly shifting 100,000 jobs from here to there. On a micro scale, business by business, the evolution from doing everything in-house to buying services from other companies specialized in that service can increase your agility to compete in a world where the view of tomorrow is murky. Outsourcing technology to the cloud is going to be big in 2012, perhaps enveloping.

What can you transfer to the cloud? Technology tools are prime candidates. You use these tools to perform your business, they aren’t the core of your business. Does it make any difference to the nature of what you are doing whether you own that rack of servers, rent the same boxes from a colocation center or pay by the hour to use virtualized servers in the cloud? Not if they all do exactly the same function.

Technology services in the cloud now include virtual servers that can be expanded or contracted instantly, pools of disk storage, high bandwidth Internet connections, network security, development platforms, enterprise software packages, and telephone communications. That’s right, you no longer need a telephone system in your office. You still need the phones, of course, but the switching system and the outside trunk lines to the public telephone network can be provided by the cloud. That includes contact and call centers as well.

There must be a good reason for all the fervor surrounding cloud based services. Is it simply the fashionable new thing for business or are we experiencing a fundamental shift in how we will run businesses for the foreseeable future? If this is the new mode of operation to be competitive, how long do you want to wait before checking it out? It’s likely well worth your while to at least compare cloud options to what you are doing now. Then decide whether a small cloud, large cloud or no cloud at all makes the most sense for your business.

Hosted VoIP Can Improve Telephone Reliability

Many mid-size and even large companies insist on maintaining their own in-house telephone systems in the belief that it’s the only way to ensure reliable communications. Is this really true, or just one of those long held beliefs that need to be re-examined?

There’s been a major game changer introduced into the telephone services industry recently. It’s the rise of hosted PBX or HPBX. You’ll also hear it called hosted VoIP or communications in the cloud. Like everything else “in the cloud,” this is truly a revolution in technology. In a decade or two, we’ll look back and wonder why we didn’t always do it this way.

“Cloud, schmoud,” you say? I can see how you might feel that way, especially if you’ve been burned by a poor implementation of VoIP technology. VoIP isn’t a particular product or even standardized methodology. It’s a general class of voice communication based on packet switched network technology. VoIP runs the gamut from software running on a laptop computer at the coffee shop, to dongles that let you plug your telephone into a PC, to broadband phone that shares an Internet connection, all the way up to enterprise and even carrier level solutions that are indistinguishable from traditional phone systems to the caller.

What successful enterprise implementers of VoIP telephony know that others don’t realize is that you need a carefully engineered network from the telephone handset to the service provider to protect fragile voice packets from being crushed by more numerous and robust data packets. In most cases, that means stay off the Internet except when you absolutely have to in order to include a remote worker or someone traveling. One reason is that the Internet does not support Class of Service controls to ensure the integrity of voice packets. Other parameters, such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss and out of sequence packet arrivals are uncontrollable on the public Internet. All of these are readily managed on private lines, MPLS networks and SIP trunks.

With the connectivity issue solved, there is still the issue of reliability. Won’t an in-house hardware solution that’s been proven over years of operation be inherently more reliable than “something out there, somewhere?” Not when you realize that the “something” you are referring to is the latest high quality servers set up for redundant protection with multiple levels of backup power and complete environmental controls. Like everything else in the cloud, there is a lot of virtualization involved so that resources are available in depth and instantly scalable.

The hosted solutions provider absolutely must provide high quality service or they’ll go out of business. After all, this is either a major part of their business or all of it. They almost always have technical staff on duty 24/7 and keep up with maintenance activities. How about at your company?

This is where the superiority of in-house PBX starts to become suspect. First of all, is your system really that rock solid? Parts never fail? The power never glitches or goes completely off? You may have duplicated the security, environmental control and power backup of a SAS 70 Type II data center, especially if you need this facility for your IT equipment. On the other hand, if your PBX is simply sitting in a “telephone closet” or maintenance room where the phone and data lines come in, you may not be all that well protected against disasters.

How about the age of that machine? We know that computers go obsolete almost before they are unboxed. PBX phone systems aren’t quite that bad, but they do start to degrade as the years go by. At some point, it’s hard to find replacement parts or even someone knowledgeable to maintain the system and make repairs. New features are introduced into the telephony marketplace, but you can’t take advantage of them. Your system is just a bit too old to be upgraded. This is how obsolescence begins. Pretty soon, you’re patching together a dinosaur that should have been hit by a meteor years ago.

It is being recognized that hosted VoIP solutions can be as reliable and even more reliable than in-housed PBX telephone systems. You need to pick a quality supplier and install highly reliable network connections to gain the benefits of high reliability in the cloud. If you do that correctly, you’ll enjoy reliable communications, access to the latest productivity features, integration with mobile devices, and the cost savings of paying by the month only for what you need.

Has this discussion piqued your interest on how hosted solutions might be a better choice than what you have now? If so, get pricing and features for Hosted VoIP solutions that meet your particular requirements. See if you can’t get more value for the same or less cost than your current business telephone system.

Why NOT to Buy a New PBX

For decades, the standard answer to a failing business phone system or one that had run out of capacity was to install a new PBX in a process known as a “fork lift upgrade.” A new PBX is something like a new car. You get higher performance, greater reliability and more capacity. So now that you are in the market for a shiny new PBX or IP PBX, the best one to buy may be none at all.

What? You mean hang on to that old junker that’s almost impossible to keep running? No, not at all. Don’t go out and spend a thousand dollars or much more on yet another PBX box. Instead, look at a hosted PBX solution.

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP or PBX in the cloud, is a service rather than a product. You simply remove your old PBX and don’t put anything in its place.

Oh, then what do the phones plug into?

The phones will plug into your computer network. Nearly every company has a LAN with Ethernet jacks for each desk and office. You are used to having two separate networks in your company. One for the telephones and one for the computers. A hosted solution is based on a converged voice and data network, which is the Ethernet LAN that you have now. Larger companies have long ago converged their voice and data networks to take advantage of enterprise VoIP solutions. Small and medium size businesses can do the same. What’s important in a converged network is that voice packets have priority over data packets so that phone call quality is maintained regardless of the load on the network.

Clearly, you can’t just plug your old telephones into the LAN. The connectors are different sizes. That’s for good reason. Standard analog telephone equipment is completely incompatible with computer networking standards. There are two ways to resolve this. Either put network adaptors on each phone or replace the phones with newer IP phones that already have standard network interface cards built-in. You’ll probably want to use IP phones because they support more features over the network.

What do the phone lines connect to? There won’t be any outside lines connecting to your building like there are now. In other words, no analog business lines and no ISDN PRI. All the outside lines are connected to the hosted PBX at the service provider. You connect to that service provider using a line called a SIP Trunk. This can be a T1 line or Ethernet over Copper configured for SIP Trunking service.

I should mention that SIP Trunking can be setup to support your current analog telephones and wiring directly. In this case, the provider installs a piece of equipment called an IAD or Integrated Access Device. The IAD splits the SIP Trunk into telephone lines and broadband Internet service. In other words, it supports the two separate networks that you have now.

The whole reason you installed a PBX in the first place was to gain control of your internal calls and manage the sharing of multiple outside lines. The hosted PBX does the same thing from afar. Your internal calls stay on the network so that you don’t pay for office to office calls. Outside calls connect to the public telephone network at the cloud service provider.

A hosted PBX does some tricks that your old PBX doesn’t. You can have offices in many different cities all on the same phone system. You can also have local phone numbers in cities where you have customers but no physical office. Callers may dial a local number in Bangor, Maine and you’ll answer it in Phoenix, Arizona.

A major advantage of hosted telephone services is that you don’t have to come up with large amounts of capital to purchase a PBX system nor hire the staff to maintain it. That’s all handled for you by the service provider. They buy a much larger PBX system and have the staff available around the clock to maintain it and handle any problems that arise. You pay by the month for service, which often includes unlimited local and national calling plus a wealth of features to make office operations efficient. Some providers even include the IP phones in your service plan.

Are you getting ready for a telephone system upgrade? Don’t go out for a bank loan yet. Instead, get a quote for cloud hosted PBX telephone service and see if paying by the seat per month rather than making a big investment makes more sense for your business.

More MPLS For MPLS

XO Communications, a major provider of Multi-Protocol Label Switching network services, is expanding network services in Minneapolis (MPLS), MN.

The Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area will benefit from a 190 route mile expansion of the XO metro network into the northern and eastern suburbs of Anoka, Blain, Crystal, Fridley, Maplewood, New Brighton and Shoreveiw in the Minnesota Twin Cities. In addition to more points of presence, XO is deploying its Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology more broadly to make this scalable, high speed bandwidth service available to more businesses.

XO has been aggressively building out its 19,000 mile nationwide fiber optic network and promoting some of the hottest communications services, including Ethernet over Fiber (EoF), Ethernet over Copper, MPLS IP-VPN, Ethernet VPLS, Cloud Communications, Hosted VoIP and SIP Trunking solutions. Their capability includes speeds up to 40 Gbps to support the most demanding enterprise applications.

MPLS networks and Ethernet over Copper offer an especially cost effective way for businesses to link multiple branch offices, warehouses, retail outlets and headquarters operations within metropolitan areas and even nationwide. MPLS provides point to point or mesh networking with inherent security. EoC offers fast access over already installed wiring.

MPLS IP VPN networks are built on a technology quite different from what’s used on the Internet. The Internet is all about a public network with net neutrality, ease of access for all, and robust routing to work around equipment and line failures. Security is pretty much “bring your own.” MPLS networks are designed for limited access, quality of service controls and careful engineering of parameters such as latency, packet loss and jitter. Security is a feature of limited access and proprietary switching technology that makes outside intrusions much more difficult.

While the Internet is a wonderful resource for low cost connectivity from anywhere to just about anywhere else, it can fall short of the performance required for latency sensitive applications such as enterprise VoIP, video conferencing, financial trading, and mission critical business processes. XO’s MPLS network is fully managed to provide the required bandwidth and class of service needed to transport voice, data, video and converged network services.

Where Ethernet over Copper shines is in local point to point data links or last mile access to MPLS networks. Carrier Ethernet services like EoC and EoF provide a simple standardized Ethernet interface to company networks. Ethernet services tend to be more scalable than T-Carrier or SONET telecom connections, giving you more bandwidth options and faster provisioning on upgrades. Ethernet over Copper has the advantage of being able to be brought in on existing copper pair telco wiring at speeds from 2 to 20 Mbps. Finally, Ethernet connections are more often than not considerably less expensive that equivalent traditional bandwidth services.

Are you a Minneapolis-St. Paul area company, or a business located anywhere else, looking for a bandwidth upgrade or better pricing on the service levels you have now? If so, have a look at competitive pricing and availability of Ethernet and MPLS IP VPN network services. There are major savings to be had right now.



Note: Photo of downtown Minneapolis courtesy of Susan Lesch on Wikimedia Commons