This article originally appeared in the April 2011 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY.

If you’re looking for a hosted PBX (News - Alert) service provider that will outfit your business with a full array of features and functionality at an affordable price, be sure to consider Broadvox and Cypress Communications (News - Alert). GO!VBX establishes a new business model in pricing for hosted PBX service.

The average cost per extension typically is about 60 percent less than what competitors charge for comparable services. Broadvox is able to deliver such low pricing by separating the price of the per extension license fee from local and long-distance calling charges.

That means organizations with a high number of extensions but low usage pay less than those with the same number of extensions but with higher usage. And with GO!VBX, customers aren’t required to pay for usage from seldom-used phones in areas like conference rooms, kitchens, warehouses or reception areas.

“The majority of providers out there, the way they’re pricing their product it’s per seat with the included voice calling, regardless of how many calls your entire domain can make at any given time,” Broadvox and Cypress CEO, President and founder Andre Temnorod says. “We separate voice and hosted PBX; we take the voice out of each seat.”

That gives customers the flexibility to vary how many calls they can make in and out of the PBX.

“If you take as an example a current PBX deployment, you pay for the PBX, for the phones, and then you also pay for a certain number of PSTN trunks,” Temnorod explains. “We try to emulate the same model, so this way when customers are making the decision to move from a traditional PSTN PRI/PBX model into the hosted model they can still calculate their savings – how much they’re going to save on a monthly basis for moving their on-premises-based PBX to a hosted platform, and how much they’re going to save by moving their PRIs into the SIP trunks.”

GO!VBX delivers business IP PBX features with IP phones as the only purchase requirement. The service scales from five to 1,000 extensions and is suitable for both small and medium businesses, and enterprises. It can be used to deliver PBX services to the entire organization, regional offices, branch locations and to telecommuting workers. Whatever the customer size or implementation, however, GO!VBX delivers a full-featured Unified Communications (News - Alert) solution including Outlook integration, collaboration, instant messaging, fixed-to-mobile convergence, videoconferencing, soft phones and real-time presence.

GO!VBX can be ordered with any of the GO!SIP Products; GO!Local for unlimited local calling; GO!Anywhere for unlimited local and long-distance calling in the U.S. and Canada; GO!Domestic for bundled minutes of long-distance and toll-free calling; and GO!Broadband for DSL, T1, Ethernet or DS3 connectivity.

Gartner (News - Alert) recently named Cypress Communications as among the select companies in the Visionaries quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America report. Daniel O’Connell and Bern Elliot of Gartner wrote that vendors in the Visionaries quadrant "demonstrate a clear understanding of the UCaaS market and offer a strong and differentiating approach to one or more core areas.”

Brent Kelly (News - Alert), senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, meanwhile, comments that: “The merger between Broadvox and Cypress combines complementary product portfolios well-suited to compete in today’s emerging unified communications marketplace.” He adds that the combined company offers "a broader range of services that spans carriers, premises-based tools, and hosted UC for SMB and enterprise customers.”

In addition to a comprehensive set of PBX features, businesses that subscribe to GO!VBX get access to a user-friendly administrative portal. Tenant managers can use this to set user permissions for each user and administrator, and can do things via the portal like set music on hold. The administrator level within the portal allows for the assignment of permissions for each end user of each tenant.

That enables businesses to more easily control their services and MACs as needed. But Broadvox and Cypress are always close at hand for their customers, from the initial service turn up to throughout the life of the organization’s contract.

“When a customer is going through a turn-up process, in afew cases with VoIP things don’t work from the get-go,” Temnorod says. “It requires engineers to get involved and do things like packet captures, trying to figure out a customer set up, how the customer is sending us packets, what type of information they have inside of those packets.

“But our engineers have been at this for many years, and they’re capable of helping customers with difficult problems,” he continues. “I’ve seen other providers simply give up. We do not give up on our customers.”