500

Hosted IP PBX phone solutions are revolutionizing how SMBs serve their customers, grow their business and support their employees.

A hosted IP PBX system delivers enterprise-level phone system functionality, currently in use by some of the largest organisations – but at a fraction of the price. Here at 500, we pride ourselves in ‘bringing the big to the small’ – our best of breed hosted IP service provides enterprise grade functionality and benefits to the smaller sized business. Our hosted system will allow a business to save money whilst improving customer service, customer responsiveness, business image, employee productivity and employee efficiencies.

So how does it work? 500 Hosted is a hosted telephony and application suite delivered over fixed data circuits such as a suitable internet connection. It bypasses the need for on-premises IP PBX ownership, saving on installation and maintenance costs. Instead, a business is able to make use of a top-end fully featured enterprise-grade phone system on a ‘per user per month’ basis with de minimus capital expenditure. Employees and departments can be set up within minutes and businesses can have different dialling codes for a single office regardless of geographic location. Furthermore existing numbers can be easily ported; as the business grows and relocates almost no reconfiguration is required (existing numbers being retained).

The functionality offered by such a top-end system is near limitless. Two functions in particular that small businesses are finding useful are ‘find me, follow me’ and ‘hunt groups’. The ‘find me, follow me’ functionality means that a call can be routed to two or more phones in succession. For example, if the call comes into your office and isn’t answered it can be re-routed to a mobile number; if that is not answered either then the call can be re-routed to an answer phone. Perhaps most useful of all, both your office phone and your mobile phone can be configured to ring simultaneously – a benefit that once tried is found to be indispensible.

Hunt groups work in a similar way but the re-routing of calls is dependent on the status of a user’s phone – available or busy – and groups of employees who are best able to handle the incoming call. For example, a call to the sales department is received but the primary sales department contact is busy on a call so specified secondary contact’s number(s) are called instead.

The benefit of this type of functionality is to ensure that no important business call is missed or lost in a voicemail system or auto attendant. With 500 Hosted, such functionality is easy to set up and configure via our dedicated web portal – and it is extremely cost effective.

500 Hosted can support small businesses with as few as five end-users to larger enterprises with thousand users in multiple locations. For further information simply call us on 0845 0000 500.

In the world of IT and telecommunications, long term contracts are standard practice; signing for 12 month, or even 24-month contract lengths.

Many existing fixed telephony lines, within a business, will probably be on a 1 to 3 year contract.  The same is also true of the hosted IP market and the contracts that are signed with service providers.

Though many VoIP service providers have ‘per user per month’ charges, once the initial set up cost is paid, which may or may not include the necessary IP phones and switches, most businesses are tied into a minimum 12-month contract. Contracts can be cancelled but a charge is normally incurred.

Sometimes larger businesses prefer the longer contract, as they are able to negotiate steeper discounts.  This is more difficult for the small and medium sized businesses.  Small businesses who have a good relationship with their service provider might want to sign up for a longer contract in order to negotiate additional value-added functionality.

Here at 500 Limited we too have the ability to provide the longer contract should a business require it.  However, so confident are we of our service that we have a rolling contract that only has a 30 day noticed period should any business decide to walk away.  We believe that a business, happy with its phone system, is not going to want to change and doesn’t need to be tied into a lengthy contract.  Instead a high quality of service will ensure customer loyalty.  All the equipment we provide is standards compliant.  So should any business walk away they would be able to use another standards compliant VoIP service immediately.

For further information about our Hosted 500 offering then please call on 0845 0000 500.

With the economic down turn of the US economy, the credit crunch hitting the British economy and a looming world recession, all industries are concerned. However, every cloud has a silver lining. No more so that the emerging VoIP market which is well positioned to help business cut their costs.

During a downturn, companies look to save money and one way they can do this is by cutting down on their existing outgoings. Shifting from a traditional PBX system to a VoIP solution is one effective way of achieving this.

A secondondary yet often cited factor driving the take up of VoIP services is the high petrol prices. Higher fuel prices have meant that smaller businesses were changing the way that they work, allowing employees to work from home and having a disparate workforce. VoIP has empowered employees to become ‘geo-diverse’. In turn, this means less need for large and expensive head offices, again allowing for a reduction in rental overheads.

VoIP has gained maturity; it offers SMEs not just cost benefits but also functionality and flexibility that they would not have considered in the past. It is being said that the VoIP industry in evolving quicker and more dynamically that the traditional phone industry ever did.

The question is: ‘How can our business harness these savings without exceeding the IT and communication budgets?’ A phased adoption approach is one answer. By taking this approach businesses can converge their existing telecommunication networks (such as PSTN and ISDN lines) and migrate to a robust load balanced broadband network –with all VoIP, video-conferencing and data-based applications running on one single IP network. The maturity of VoIP ensures a reliability and quality of service for any mission critical business application.

The conferencing and instant messaging aspects of VoIP comes into its own as less employees converge to a central head office for business meetings. This allows the business to save on travel costs. Once a small business can comprehend these cost savings it is then worth considering the next stage of migration.

Whilst bearing redundency and failsafe in mind, all remaining ISDN and PSTN lines are replaced with VoIP connectivity. The legacy PBX can be replaced by an on-premises IP PBX, which can be managed by the SME or VoIP provider, or through a hosted IP service, that requires minimal on-site equipment.

These steps allow the business to make genuine cost savings that in turn can be used to fund the sequential upgrade to a full VoIP service.

Should you have any questions or wish to discuss this article further, then please give us a call on 0845 0000 500.

Some information for this article is taken from ITadviser, Issue 54, Summer 2008.