This article originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY

Today every business needs to work smarter, save money and remain flexible. At Broadvox (News - Alert), we call it The New Normal. The new normal demands technologies that can help you do more with less and still exceed customer expectations.

Work Smart

One technology that delivers on its promise of saving money and delivering flexibility is SIP trunking. For those new to SIP trunking, think of it as a smarter way to manage the phone lines for your business by sending voice calls over your existing broadband connection. SIP – which stands for session initiation protocol – is a method of establishing phone calls from IP endpoints such as PBXs, phones, or software clients, over the Internet. Even traditional PBXs that only accept PRIs, or analog line connections, can take advantage of SIP trunking through the use of an integrated access device.

Save Money

Switching to SIP trunking will typically save most businesses a lot of money – up to 70 percent over traditional phone systems. This is accomplished through better cost management by consolidating your voice and data traffic over the same connection. By replacing your traditional phone lines such as PRIs or analog lines with SIP trunking, you can eliminate the costs of these additional circuits delivered to your office.

 Remain Flexible

Additionally, SIP trunks can be sold in increments of single concurrent call sessions. In this way, businesses can right size the capacity to make calls and save over the cost of a PRI with unused channels, which are sold in a fixed number of 23 voice channels. This flexibility and the scalable nature of SIP trunking also allow businesses to expand or shrink capacity as needed.

SIP trunking is just one example of how Broadvox is helping businesses adjust to The New Normal.

Mike Gruszka is director of product management at Broadvox (www.broadvox.com).