Hosted PBX Featured Articles

The growth in the IP/PBX market has been strong recently, and is expected to continue that way for the next few years. According to Infonetics (News - Alert), the global market for this technology should grow to $12 billion by 2018. In addition to the cost savings that it brings, hosted PBX is a better fit in today’s enterprise. So much so, that continuing to use a legacy PBX (News - Alert) system may actually hobble a business in a world where customers demand more.

Any business that continues to be its own phone company is spending time and money on labor and hardware that is difficult to justify. Hosted PBX systems save money on the costs of installation and upgrades, since the provider handles those tasks on their site and relatively little hardware is at the customer’s site. They are great for companies that are looking to expand or that tend to have sizable fluctuations in users. There’s no dependency on location, so any employees that work at home or work in branch offices can be a part of the same system.

Technology has not only reduced the costs of having a phone system, it has also changed the way companies operate compared to 20 years ago. For businesses that are support-intensive, customers expect to be able to email, instant message, text, use a browser as well as reach support agents the traditional way by phone. Legacy PBX systems are not a good fit in such an environment and are also not well-suited for call center operations requiring quick re-routing of calls or up-to-the-minute statistics.

It’s often the case that the employees are equally, if not more demanding than their customers when it comes to communications technology. They expect BYOD support from their employers and have the similar multi-channel demands as the customers mentioned earlier do. More meetings are held by video, saving on travel costs. A legacy PBX system is not going to integrate very well with a UC configuration like that, but hosted PBX systems will.

Although the market for hosted PBX phone systems may be shifting from the buyers’ to the sellers’ side, it will remain strong as more companies upgrade their communications. There are still many older systems available, but sales are stagnating while the cost savings and technological benefits of hosted PBX are too compelling to pass up. Eventually, hosted PBX systems will become the office standard while copper-wired systems will go the way of the payphone.