As a follow up to the ITBusinessedge.com article “Could the Cloud Kill the PBX”, we wanted to offer our input as to where telephony is going and why old-school telephony days are numbered.
This is not meant as a self serving competitive claim but a look at what is now becoming a natural evolution of things in the internet age. Much like the old world method of snail mail is getting decimated by email, it would only seem natural that the physical relays and switches of telephony systems get replaced by the deft coding of a programmer as so many other things are.
As more and more of our life get centralized to the web, this centralization will allow tremendous power in organizing the multiple parts of a business or a person’s life. From a business perspective, a new small business can run their entire back office online. We are not just talking Virtual PBX phone systems but billing, accounting, customer support, project management, meetings and of course mail. Take a service like Zoho and you can see how nearly and entire office can be coordinated and run from one login. And in case you had not noticed, Google is doing a fine job of collecting and potentially controlling huge amounts of data powering a very effective advertising business.
So if the mail, the invoices, the customer addresses, the meetings are all moving online, it is only natural for the phone conversations to move there too. You get to keep them all in one “box” if you will. This was a natural progression as the bandwidth and the price of memory made it a viable option. As the technologies of voice recognition evolve, the use and necessity of having the verbal communication digitized increases to where you could run a Google like search of a phone conversation with little ease (if I were a conspiracy theorist, that’s quite scary).
So it would seem the old school phone line is a little individuated for our needs. It served us well but it’s time is coming to an end.
Photo credit Dominics pics
How Pam saves her job on the hit show ‘The Office’ by not buying a VOIP phone system.
Punch-key PBXs (the traditional office phone system with those old RJ-11 phone jacks) have officially crossed over into comedic territory. I mean to say, most business people know now a VoIP-based phone system allows offices to be much more efficient, but a recent episode of The Office shows just how prevalent this notion has become. Seriously, what business wants to be technologically behind the made-up paper company Dunder-Mifflin?
The episode begins with a VoIP phone system salesperson soliciting Dunder-Mifflin. Pam soon realizes that the new phone system does 90% of her job and, given the uncertain economy, Pam starts lying to the salesperson in order to prevent him from getting a meeting with Michael (the politically incorrect boss).
When Pam has run out of every excuse she can think of, Jim (the practical joker) steps between Michael and the phone system salesperson and belts out a Fonzie-type “Aaaay!” For ridiculous reasons only understood by those that watch the eccentric (and oft ridiculous) antics of the office staff, others start repeating “Aaaay!” and the perplexed phone system salesperson leaves.
If it’s this obvious to a group of writers at NBC who probably rely less on their office phone systems than the rest of us – has VoIP “jumped the shark”?
A phrase coined on Happy Days, “jumping the shark,” has become a popular phrase to describe anything that has passed its peak. Obviously the majority of office phone systems are still old PSTN-based PBXs which require the telecom engineer to visit the premises or a user to read through a manual in order to make any MACs (moves, adds, changes).
So while the numbers suggest that most offices are still based on the copper wires of their telecom company, popular culture indicates that VoIP is not just here to stay, but a thing of comedy – that is, if you don’t have it.
With the economy as uncertain as it is, everyone is looking for ways to cut spending and improve their bottom line. Diane Meyers, directing analyst for Infonetics Research, has found that one way companies are cutting costs is by turning to VOIP and virtual PBX for their business communications:
Demand for residential and business VoIP services continues to grow through the economic downturn because of the cost savings they provide. As a result, in 2008 the VoIP services market had healthy growth of 33% to $30.8 billion.
This is a trend even small businesses can get on. An online PBX is cheaper than a traditional PBX. Because it is maintained by your service provider and allows you to adjust it via a web site, you don’t need to hire an IT guru to manage it. And because it a virtual PBX doesn’t require any hardware being installed at your facility, it doesn’t matter that your vast entrepreneurial empire is currently limited to the spare room over the garage.
If you have a team of like-minded individuals helping you build your business, a hosted phone system can be even more useful, since it allows customer calls to be routed to any member of your team no matter where they are. So if calls need to go to your programmer in Seattle, your marketing genius in New York, and still reach you at the coffee shop down the street, a VOIP system can route them as if you were all in the same building.
Finally, your internet phone service is maintained by your provider. Upgrades and improvements happen transparently, without you needing to lift a finger. This means your communications stay up to date, no matter what new technologies or tools pop up in the future.
Photo credits: Apreche, pasotraspaso