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XO Communications has announced that it has released a new suite of communications features for its hosted PBX (News - Alert) (HPBX) service.

“In today’s highly mobile business economy, enterprises need their employees to be able to collaborate anytime, anywhere using high-quality voice, data, video and other apps on company provided and personal devices,” said Jake Heinz, senior vice president of marketing and product at XO Communications (News - Alert). “The XO HPBX features are designed to meet the collaboration needs of businesses of all sizes in this rapidly expanding market.”

The new features include instant messaging, presence, integration with Outlook, as well as desktop and document sharing.

XO is also stressing its ability to work with mobile devices. With the updates to its HPBX, XO is also including the WorkTime application. The app lets users send and receive calls, as well as making video calls and sending text messages using their work phone numbers, even on their personal smartphones. All communications from within the app will appear to come from an employee’s company phone number.

All of these features allow employees to get in touch with each other no matter where they happen to be.

Hosted PBX systems like those from XO appeal to a growing number of businesses because they let IT departments offer new features to their employees without having to install any additional hardware or software. They’re also managed by a third party, which eliminates a lot of the headaches that come with maintaining complex PBX systems. Infonetics (News - Alert) predicts that the market for cloud PBX and unified communications will reach $12 billion by 2018.

 As adoption rates increase, the demand becomes greater for greater functionality and increased mobility for the enterprise. Hosted PBX offers a scalable, price-friendly and reliable alternative to bulky on-premises hardware. The future for XO is unknown, but it is abundantly clear this added functionality is a response to enterprise demand.