As the Virtual PBX Market Explodes, Intermedia Assists SMBs in their Implementation

Touted as a 15 plus year old company that started off in New York City where it was once solely a Web hosting provider, Intermedia has expanded is footprint into not only the Hosted Exchange market, but the virtual PBX space as well. At this time, the company has roughly 350 employees on a worldwide basis with 20,000 plus customers.

I recently had the chance to speak with Luis Curet, vice president of Sales, Intermedia ,who told me that the company’s virtual PBX solution powers one major difference that sets itself apart from others currently on the market.

According to Curet, “Our technology is seamlessly integrated into the administration interface with our software that is called Host Pilot. The main benefit that this provides customers is that they can use a single administrator interface to now manage their electronic communications, e-mail communications and voice communications. And just like our focus on the Exchange side has been on SMBs, many of the features and the things for the PBX are geared for that marketplace as well making it very easy to set up, make changes and incredibly scalable.”

The PBX can be easily downsized or can add new employees with ease. “I think that whole concept of flexibility and adaptability is our technical differentiation,” Curet added.

In a recent example of how organizations within virtually every vertical can benefit from leveraging this offering, Velir, a Web design and development agency, was recently in search of a new PBX service to replace the older legacy system that it used. The biggest challenge the organization was facing, which is not uncommon among companies, was when it wanted to move (relocate to a new facility), add employees and change the system also known as “mac.”

This is known as a dirty little secret in the telephony business, as many firms will go out and sell their offering to a customer but lock them into that exact configuration and any time they want to do anything, they then force the customer to come back to them only in order to make those change. Thus, these businesses are forced to spend a ton of money every time they want to make a change.

Yet, the biggest advantage of a hosted PBX is its high degree of flexibility, and Intermedia is touted as only requiring consumers to pay for what they use. “For example, say you are an accounting firm and you need additional staff during tax season as well as more lines and then don’t need them anymore, as those temporary workers leave you can delete lines,” he stated.

After seamlessly migrating to the robust platform and seeing nearly a 50 percent cost savings,  Pete Navarra, director of information technology at Velir commented, “We needed a voice solution that would be quick to deploy, easy to manage and provide noticeable cost-savings, and the answer was Intermedia’s Hosted PBX.”

As the PBX space continues to change with the times providing more capabilities users are demanding, an increasingly popular trend is the adoption of this offering amongst smaller, newer companies. Additionally, although the unified communications space has come a long way it still has room to grow. The ability to bring an array of technology together including e-mail, instant messaging, phone systems and mobile devices and make it all work regardless if the employee is sitting at work or on-the-go – that is the holy grail that everyone in the technology business is driving toward. Every year, you are guaranteed to see more and more improvements in that area.

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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo