Traditional phone systems always ranked among a company’s highest CAPEX investments and ongoing OPEX costs. It was a daunting task to research, compare/contrast competitive offerings, and anticipate what capability and functionality each employee and workstation would require, both in the moment and for the future. And when that upfront homework was done, it only led to an even tougher task: leasing all that customer premise equipment (CPE), not only the main trunk, or "box" in the closet, but each individual desktop phone as well.
Hard Costs Are Always Hard to Cover
Whether that box was an antiquated "hard iron" PBX unit, or a later, more automated, digital Unified Communications (UC) system, many of which are still in productive operation today, they both presented similar cost challenges that weren’t easy for businesses to cover, including:
- Having to invest in hardware you knew would only demand future cycles of upgrades
- Laying cabling that would need rerouting with every major phase of growth
- Being "stuck" with carrier-tied equipment that wasn’t open-source engineered
And more frustrating still: As technology sped forward, one would painfully witness all that purchased hardware—frozen in time—gather physical, and figurative, dust.
Enter the UCaaS Revolution
Fast-forward to the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) technology paradigm shift, which redefined IT/Telecom business models forever. Disruptive subscription-based communications services were introduced that enabled businesses to purchase the systems and services with the performance and availability they needed—and scale them up or down on demand. This watershed development ushered in today’s latest technology revolution: Hosted Voice. Has your organization "answered the call" to cut costs by making use of this technology?
Cutting Costs While Expanding Capabilities
Why make the switch to Hosted Voice? For starters, more features and less cost—beginning by eliminating the huge capital investment of buying on-premises hardware. Hosted Voice is a cloud-based communications system, so the PBX, or "the box," is a cloud-based application. And many providers offer soft-phone options, where calling apps can turn desktops, tablets and mobile devices into virtual business phones. Plus, expanding call functionality used to require upgrading to phones with added analog features. Today, most of those features can easily be added through your cloud interface.
Other Ways Hosted Voice Helps You Save
In addition to hardware savings, Hosted Voice for Business helps you cut costs while adding capabilities in many other ways. For example…
- It’s an easy-to-use single tool, reducing the need to pay for and support numerous communications solutions.
- No need to worry about upgrading technology because it lives in the cloud.
- Maintenance and support are handled remotely, allowing IT teams to focus on other business initiatives.
- Additional value-added features are available, like video conferencing and virtual collaboration, productivity tools, voicemail-to-email, call forwarding, remote telecommuting, and more—again, these add-ons are all cloud-based and included in the subscription.
And finally, since Hosted Voice operates in the cloud, systems come with tracking tools and performance analytics for monitoring, managing, and optimizing utilization, yielding more bang for your buck.
Ready to save even more?
If you’re looking for a more affordable Voice solution, one that can equip your team with the power and performance of Hosted Voice, be sure to add Skywire to your search. Find out what we mean when we say, Connectivity to the EDGE. Your Way.™ — and how such added capability and access flexibility makes Skywire, well, the better choice for Hosted Voice.