In the not too distant past, most businesses installed a local processor or computer server called a PBX (Public Branch Exchange) to operate their telephone system at each site. If a company had one location, it purchased one PBX. If a company had a hundred locations, it purchased a hundred PBXs. However, virtualization, inexpensive broadband, SIP, and advanced router/firewalls have revolutionized this industry. Now a single server can be divided into thousands of segments with the assistance of software. Additionally, bandwidth over the internet has become reliable and less expensive. The use of a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has enabled better voice quality and reliability over the internet. SIP also enables voice, video, and other rich media to travel seamlessly together between systems. Today’s business grade routers/firewalls prioritize voice traffic before it goes over the internet, enabling calls to sound great. Taking advantage of these changes, UC cloud vendors now offer fully functional UC systems, where customers only need to provide the phones, data infrastructure, and an internet connection. These UC cloud companies have very powerful servers at hardened data centers (the cloud) that are built-to-purpose for unified communications. Now businesses can buy a virtualized slice of these resources with all the new UC features from a cloud provider for less money than owning a premise-based system. The many benefits of cloud UC systems include:
- Less expensive than purchasing your own premise-based system.
- Only need internet connections. Costly MPLS, SIP Trunks, and T1s are not needed.
- Only phones need to be purchased. The system costs are calculated on either a per user or a per trunk basis. No need to buy a dedicated PBX.
- Systems are future-proofed. Providers continually upgrade their systems and bring out new features, many times at no customer cost.
- Only buy what you need. Additional people or locations can be added at any time.
- No maintenance required. All updates and maintenance are performed by the cloud provider.
- All locations are connected via the cloud at no extra costs. The Cloud enables all locations to act as one allowing:
- One receptionist to cover for many offices.
- Presence status of users to be seen by other locations.
- Transferring of calls between offices.
- Extension dialing between offices and remote workers.
- Voice conferencing and document sharing are easily added for large numbers of participants.
- Video calling and conferencing are part of many packages at no extra costs.
- Easy interfaces for users and company administrators to make changes and add features.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) is built into cloud UC. Most cloud providers utilize multiple data centers that have built-in redundancy. If one data center goes down, another data center will take over. Locally, we recommend providing separate internet circuits for voice and data, then build each one to provide failover for the other.
- Long Distance minutes and international plans are offered at some of the best rates available.
- All the UC features are packaged into offers by the cloud partners. Some partners have tiered packages: the more you pay, the more features you get.