Navigating through the labyrinth of Business VoIP Solutions

For many organisations looking to upgrade or replace an aging office telephone system making the right decision is not as easy it may first appear. When defining your requirements it would seem rather straight forward. Your new office telephone system must be able to do the core functions you would expect from a phone system. Things such as making a call, receiving a call, transferring a call, call waiting, voicemail etc, etc. That’s where the easy part ends and the interesting part starts. What do I mean by this? Simply do an Internet search on “Office Telephone Systems” and you will get a myriad of suppliers offering a variety of products and services using terms such as Business VoIP Services, Voice over IP, IP Telephony, the list goes on and on.
So here is the dilemma, you simply want a new office telephone system and end up having to go through a crash course in what is voice over IP, how does it work. Once you have figured all that out you then need to decide on what business VoIP solution will support my business now and into an ever changing future. In the good ole days you simply purchased an office telephone system, it sat in the corner of the office, on its own voice network and simply did what you expected of it, without much thought. With Voice over IP phone systems you are now moving into the realm of implementing and supporting an application that runs on the same infrastructure as your office computers.
In this brave new world you need a completely different set of skills and management tools to support your IP telephony compared to the older, more traditional analogue systems. This is an area that significantly increases the total cost of ownership of a business VoIP phone system if you do not already have these skills sets and tools in-house. On-going operational costs are an area that is often not well defined or understood when calculating the true cost of a new office telephone system. If you are looking for a new business VoIP solution, I encourage you to take the extra time to understand this cost component thoroughly. I will talk about this in more detail in a later article titled “understanding the true cost of business VoIP solutions”.
Fortunately, there are solutions available that remove this complexity and on-going operational costs. Voxalis is one of those VoIP service providers who do this by delivering hosted IP Telephony. You still have a new IP telephone on your desk but all the complicated infrastructure stuff sits in a data centre and is managed by Voxalis. And, if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can tell the accountant that Voxalis will give you a fixed cost per user so they can accurately forecast the cost of your new business VoIP service without any nasty surprises. For visit business VoIP