Does Hosted Voip Spell The End Of The Business Telephone System As We Know It?

By Author: ambrozy
Total Articles: 10
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For years companies wanting sophisticated telephony features have had no choice but to buy an office telephone system and have it physically installed in their office and connected to ISDN (digital) or analogue telephone lines. These complex pieces of technology then require expensive support contracts in order to look after them and keep this critical piece of business equipment operational. The business telephone system or PBX (private branch exchange) has served businesses well but has always been cumbersome to make changes to, complicated, and expensive.
Hosted Voip removes the requirement to own and manage a business telephone system by allowing companies to connect to a cloud based telephony service. The explosion of high bandwith broadband services in recent years have allowed this mature technology to be delivered cost effectively to businesses worldwide. That is to say that hosted Voip is not a new concept or technology but has been restricted in its use because the connectivity required to run it has either been too expensive or not available to most businesses.
The simple question then is, if the same ...
... features can be delivered to a business without the requirement to invest in expensive equipment, why would they consider anything else? The simple answer is that it should not as long as it selects the right Voip provider to deliver the service. The answer to this question is evidenced by the fact that hosted Voip sales are on the increase and PBX sales are on the decline in the mature telephony markets of North America and Europe.
As described earlier it is the availability of high quality broadband services that make hosted voip a viable (and preferable) alternative to the business telephone system. However it is still very important to understand that delivering voice over an IP network (broadband) is a complicated business and most traditional PBX resellers do not have the required skill sets to deliver hosted voip effectively. This has led to the emergence of a new breed of business telephony company that have built their businesses around a new set of skills and a new business model to deliver hosted voip.
Companies such as Voxalis have never sold a business telephone system but have come to the market with a new business model based on delivering hosted voip on a service provider model. That is to say that the customers of Voxalis pay on a monthly basis for the delivery of telephony service. This is often referred to as voice as a a service (VaaS) and is the same model as software as a service (SaaS) with both coming under the terminology of cloud services that we read so much about. AS Voxalis relies on its clients paying monthly it therefore must continually focus on first class service delivery of its hosted voip service. If it fails in this goal, clients simply will not pay. This effectively puts the power back into the hands of the client. This is the ooposite of the old PBX model where once the equipment has been sold the supplier had made its profit. The hosted voip model therefore gives the client a far greater level of comfort.
It seems clear that simply from a business model perspective that hosted voip is likely to spell the end of the business telephone system over the forthcoming years. In addition to this there is a far greater level of flexibility that hosted voip can deliver that PBXs simply can not compete with. These will be addressed in future articles.