As he reported yesterday, James Slaney, co-founder of Dubber says both managed and hosted telephony systems have seen a significant increase in uptake in recent years, whereas on-premise PBX is evidently in decline.

Flexibility and scalability

The case for hosted telephony is certainly bolstered by the flexibility and scalability that it offers. Just as hosted telephony can grow alongside a business, it can also be scaled back as an organisation requires. This can reduce monthly costs immediately, in contrast to large CapEx that will have already been paid out on PBX, which can’t be sold back just because not all of it is being used.

Flexibility though, isn’t isolated to how a system is deployed. Many organisations for example, record calls for compliance or training purposes, but the nature of the data that is captured doesn’t always make them easily searchable, or provide useful intelligence at the back end of a conversation.

Not only that, but the infrastructure required to capture and store this information via PBX has traditionally made it challenging to access from multiple locations or via different devices. It’s also made it a solution that’s only accessible to larger enterprises, due to large capital expenditure required, and rarely something that can be offered through a service provider.

Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS), which enable real-time communications, such as voice calls and instant messaging, to be integrated into an operator’s existing applications and services without the need to build back-end infrastructure or interfaces, change all that.

James Slaney

Services such as advanced communications capture and voice intelligence solutions for communications can be offered to businesses via a fully managed platform, democratising advanced features for all users by making them affordable for network operators to deploy, and end users to acquire.

Security

With hosted telephony you have the added reassurance of reliable redundancy. Depending on the provider, you may not have immediate access to all of your data but you will have the guarantee that it will be stored securely with recovery solutions. The advantage of on-premise PBX systems is the immediate access they offer, but recovery measures are often so expensive that only larger enterprises are able to justify the cost of this level of security.

To determine which option is right for your business, pricing cannot be considered in isolation, but placed in the context of what an organisation needs from a telephony system. Looking to the future and anticipating how these needs might change as your company grows is just as important as the immediate considerations of cost and convenience.

The author of this blog is James Slaney, co-founder of Dubber

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