Communications is at the forefront of any business operation, large or small. The way in which a company engages and interacts with customers and partners defines the image it portrays, making communications technology a key factor in success. Thus, as the technological landscape changes, so too must businesses adapt if they are to put their best face forward and stay ahead of competitors. This is never truer than for the SMB (small to medium-sized business), which often finds itself pitted against larger, well-established enterprises and other small firms looking to make a name for themselves. For these businesses, therefore, striking the right balance between cost and functionality is crucially important.
When it comes to telephony, hosted VoIP (voice over IP) offers an ideal balance. In fact, the scale may actually be tipped heavily in favor of the SMB, considering the sheer number of features that come along with such an inexpensive service.
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Jim Murphy, CEO of residential and small business VoIP services provider PhonePower, agrees.
“Much of the reason that hosted VoIP has exploded over the last few years is that it brings immediate cost savings and feature enhancement without a lot of upfront investment,” he told TMCnet. “Companies see their telecom expenditures drop by as much as 80 percent, and small to medium size companies now get advanced calling features that were previously exclusive to the largest PBX (News - Alert) systems. There are hidden savings as well, in that companies can now manage their own phone systems, instead of paying an outside PBX vendor every time a change or addition is needed.”
In an age of increasing mobility, telecommuting is increasingly becoming the norm, with the concept of the “virtual office” quickly gaining traction. For a small business, then, an on-premises VoIP deployment can be both prohibitively expensive and non-conducive to business goals. Hosted VoIP, on the other hand, allows these companies to effectively empower their mobile workforce and dynamically adjust to their telecommunication needs.
“With a hosted deployment, telecommuting is as simple as sending an office phone home with the employee. Hosted deployments also allow for instant scalability, and quickly adding new features like call recording,” Murphy explained.
Moreover, the intrinsic nature of the cloud allows for nearly guaranteed performance reliability and offers a host of business continuity/disaster recovery options. Murphy suggests that SMBs look to see if their provider’s platform is “geo-redundant” to make sure it can maintain phone service to their business, regardless of local or regional emergencies.
Taken together, these features make for an ideal SMB communications solution. Hosted VoIP provides small businesses with enterprise-level capabilities for a far-from-enterprise-level price. It thus looks to be an increasingly popular choice among SMBs going forward.
“Small and medium businesses are demanding more mobility, scalability, and advanced features from their phone systems. Hosted VoIP checks all those boxes, and brings added cost savings,” Murphy said. “The proliferation of hosted VoIP providers shows that the market is still growing at an enormous rate.”
Edited by Alisen Downey