Hosted VoIP in the Enterprise

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Hosted solutions are attracting scads of new business customers. You don’t have to buy new equipment or pay IT staff to install, configure and maintain it. And new, flexible technologies allow services to interoperate with any legacy premise equipment you may have. Furthermore, many services can be offered with high “granularity” – you can buy them on a per-line basis, and your maintenance contract is generally based on per-seat licenses.

M5 provides IP Telephony and PBX (News - Alert) telephone key systems using VoIP in the greater New York and New Jersey area. Dan Hoffman, CEO of M5, says, “The good news for the field is that everyone is acknowledging that this is a good idea, and our prediction, along with some other analysts, is that in 5 or 10 years the mid-size enterprise will stop buying its own systems entirely. All signs of the economics of customer satisfaction point in that direction, and there has been a growth in the resiliency of the network to make hosting possible. Within that broad landscape, we see the end customer splitting the industry into two directions. First, there’s a group that wants to see that costs continue to be driven down, and get basic dial tone over the network. Second, there’s a group that views the technology as a way to drive costs down and drive service levels up.”

“So there’s this group of businesses that are very voice-connected to their customers,” says Hoffman (News - Alert), “and they consider this voice delivery model as a way to finally get some major impact from all of the R&D and all of the rich features that are going into the telephony world, and they want it hosted because feel these things are simply too complicated to deploy by themselves. Just about everybody likes the service model, and customers are gobbling it up as soon as they can find providers who can deliver the services well and reliably. But there are people who are increasingly using it as a way to deploy the advanced features, and that’s where we’re getting some really exciting stories.”