Telephone Engineers – the New Breed of Business IT Expert

Business telecoms, these days, are frightening things. Panasonic telephone systems and their industry counterparts offer the most astonishing arrays of connectivity and adaptability - but they do so at a price. Namely, the comprehension of most normal employees of a company, who know how to use the functions their systems have been enabled with but have no idea what to do if anything goes wrong. Sounds familiar? It ought to; it's the exact same problem that everyone has had with computers for the last 10 years - and the reason why telephone engineers have become the new IT department for a lot of successful companies.

The thing about Panasonic telephone systems (and pretty much all of their comparable rival systems, for that matter) is this: they're as much based on computer technology as they are on actual telephones. These days, a business telephone system is mainly "hosted" on the Internet, or at least on company servers - which is how it is able to do so many things and hold so much information. Answering services alone, which reckon on being able to hold hours and hours' worth of voice messages, use server space to store old calls, send text messages and emails to alert phone users that they have messages, and so on - which means the telephone engineers responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting the system need to be fully conversant with at least basic routing technology and server maintenance.

None of this is to suggest for a moment that modern systems (Panasonic telephone systems and their contemporaries) are unwieldy: far from it. A modern business telecoms system works so well, and is such an integral part of that business, that there's almost no area of company activity that doesn't require its use in some way. What that does suggest is that business phone systems have become so indispensable that telephone engineers themselves are close to replacing the traditional IT department as the heart of all things company related. Without good engineers, these complex installations (like the Panasonic telephone systems that have become practically an industry standard for deliverable functionality and memory capacity) become a liability because no one else is able to fix them when they start playing up.

The information stored on and in them is getting to be as much and as vital as the information stored in "normal" computer use by a business: company communications systems, far from being simple phone lines, tend to hold every communication under one umbrella these days. And that means that when the phone system goes down, stored emails are under threat too. Stored emails, of course, are the modern business equivalent of a paper trail - if anything goes wrong, they are used to prove that a company has followed correct procedure, or has delivered on promises. Telephone engineers are the only things that stand between the users of these new tools, the Panasonic telephone systems and their equivalents, and the same kind of potential disaster that IT departments once used to fend off. The world is changing - and the custodians of communication are now vital to its continued ability to do business.

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Panasonic telephone systems, and their equivalents, are increasingly the centre of good business operations: which makes telephone engineers essential to continued success.