By Don Panek, TelephonyWorld EditorMany years ago in the very early days of Telephony, I was fortunate to get my hands on a TalkSwitch PC PBX to run my small office. Naturally as a small business owner, I had to watch costs and could only afford a single POTS line to run the company phone system. Mainstream phone systems were well out of my reach. But I still wanted to have a large company appearance and wanted to have various phone extensions for employees, voicemail, unified messaging capabilities and even follow me features. At that time, the TalkSwitch PBX was a godsend for well under $1000 and performed like a champ. While my original unit is no longer in service, I'm quite certain it could still do very well for any small company starting out.
As you can imagine, the OTTAWA, ON based company has not rested on its' laurels and has brought the TalkSwitch up over the years to remain a highly competitive force in the small business marketplace. Last week I was very happy to see a news release from the company announcing the availability of their latest PBX systems that fully integrate VoIP. The 280VS and the 284VS are fully hybrid IP PBXs that accommodate two incoming telephone lines and provide eight local extensions that the user can configure as IP or analog, and ten remote extensions. The 284VS also includes support for four VoIP trunks.
The new systems are ideal for small businesses, smart homes and franchise operations that want a feature-rich telephone system with a large number of extensions, but with minimal investment in incoming telephone lines. They also provide access to IP technology at a great price. And they protect the customer’s investment because they are networkable, meaning the system will grow right along with the business.
The beautiful thing about these units are their simplicity. Small business owners can easily set up and configure the systems, features and functions, and create a unified business image that looks like very large corporations at a fraction of the cost. While I haven't played with one of the new units, if they are anything like my original unit of years ago, I'm sure they are well worth the money spent.
Very small businesses are traditionally underserved by technology vendors and normally you don't think of them adopting cutting edge technologies like IP telephony. However, these businesses are increasingly needing robust communications solutions, as the SMB workforce is increasingly mobile and distributed, said Gary Chen, Yankee Group Analyst in Enterprise Research Small and Medium Enterprise IT Infrastructure and Applications. The challenge in this segment is not to sell them cool technology, but something that is drop dead simple, flexible, very affordable, and that has real business benefits.
Like all TalkSwitch telephone systems, the 280VS and the 284VS are available through authorized TalkSwitch resellers, or directly from www.talkswitch.com. The 280VS is priced at $1095USD and the 284VS is available for $1395USD.
CommPartners this week also made an announcement that will give small businesses more VoIP options as well. They announced their new CommPartners Connect™ for Linksys® One. The new CommPartners offering provides activation, network services, and automated service delivery for the Linksys hosted communications platform called Linksys® One. Linksys One is an affordable, easy-to-install Internet Protocol (IP)-based services platform that enables the delivery of data, voice and video applications to small businesses.
The combination of Linksys One hardware (Services Router, IP Phones, and Gateway) and CommPartners' network services specifically developed for the small- and medium-sized business customer makes affordable, converged communications a reality. Instead of paying for and managing separate internet access, phone system, and computer networks, small businesses have one converged services infrastructure with Linksys One for everything: phones, fax, data networking, Internet and business applications.
CommPartners Connect for Linksys One line pricing plans include unlimited local and long distance calling in North America for $39.95 per line. Services are sold on a "per line" as opposed to a "per user" basis which is a more economically attractive offering for the SMB market to purchase their IP communications services. CommPartners also offers local telephone numbers, local number portability (LNP), operator and directory assistance, directory listings, and E911.
PBXtra is another system making headway from LA based Fonality. PBXtra, Fonality’s enterprise-class IP-PBX, is based on a modified version of the popular open source Asterisk code base. Fonality has modified Asterisk to add reliability, stability and enterprise-class features. PBXtra is less expensive and easier to deploy than all other major PBX offerings on the market today. The price advantage comes from Fonality’s use of Asterisk-based open source technology to deliver the PBX foundation. The advanced, enterprise-class features and management ease come from Fonality’s innovative PBXtra application with its intuitive, web-based interface designed for the average business owner. In addition, PBXtra’s hybrid model that combines public telephone and VoIP network support, and Fonality’s experienced 24x7 technical support team delivers rock solid reliability to all customers.
Fonality announced this week that PBXtra Users Hit 50 Million Calls, Average 1.5 Million Calls Per Week, a clear indication that SMBs are taking advantage of VoIP and the benefits it can bring to their organizations.
These recent announcements and many others like them, make me happy to be doing what I do. While VoIP is still not mature, it's worlds ahead of where it was 10 years ago when I was dabbling in it. Small businesses need to put aside their fears and frustrations, and seek out some of the players I mentioned. There are also a host of others. A quick Google search on "VoIP Small Business" will lead you in the right direction.
I speak to a lot of SMB owners and execs who tell me all the time that they are totally interested in VoIP solutions for all the right reasons, but they are still hesitant to act for all the wrong reasons. Once again, I go back to my soapbox about education. In such a fast moving, intelligent leading edge industry, there is still a huge disconnect when it comes to educating the potential end user. Small business owners are being inundated with pitches from the big carriers who are telling them that they need services, hardware, and infrastructure from a number of different vendors and providers in order to successfully deploy a VoIP solution. This would scare even larger companies. Immediately as a business owner I would think about who is responsible when my systems doesn't work? Who will support me? Will they all blame each other? Come on already! Give SMBs a break.
I realize more than anyone that at the heart of a VoIP solution are some very complex interconnected parts, like phones, networks, hardware, software, firmware, switches, routers and so on. But guess what? SMBs don't need to know that...they just want somebody to give it all to them in one box. Make it easy. Support it. Maintain it.
And I think that the few companies and products I highlighted at the top of this article have finally done just that. Take all the pieces, hide the complexity, glue it all together so it works, cover up the underlying configurations with wizards and easy GUI interfaces, and just make it work. Pretty much out of the box. That is what will win the SMBs over to VoIP. And let's not forget. Most SMBs are entrepreneurs who are always hungry for technology. They want to embrace it and use it and have the latest and greatest. So let's just give it to them without feeling the need to scare them with the details of how and why it all works.
Tell them the benefits, what it will do for their company and bottom line, how it saves money, increases productivity, and looks and feels cool. Then tell them the price. Done!
See ya next week!
