Buy a PBX, Build a PBX, or use a Hosted PBX Service

2008-01-22T14:53:00.000-08:00

Tackling a topic as broad as “Buy, Build or use a hosted PBX service” could easily warrant an entire book. The options in this market change every day and rather than spend months compiling such an effort I have taken some time here to simply cover the high level process you should engage in when considering a new phone system.

In the upcoming months I will actually break the questions in to smaller sections and attempt to give the reader a much more comprehensive detailed step by step process as they consider the world of business phone systems.

However let’s just dive in and get started.

15 years ago the choice was simple. All you could do was a buy or lease a premise based PBX. There were some very limited offerings around the Centrex architecture, but they never gained wide spread popularity.

To Buy.
Today purchasing a premise based system from one of the established vendors such as Nortel, Avaya or Siemens still makes sense, especially if you are looking at multiple large offices with hundreds of employees. Rollover backup from one location to another can provide a level of business continuity and the feature set is more in line with a large organization. These days you are certainly going to evaluate the concept of installing an IP based system. Routing calls intra-company through existing data connections will provide enormous cost savings over using the PSTN. Newer entrants that should be added to this list of vendors includes none other Cisco.

Lets say you are not a 1000 person company and you are simply looking at serving your company of a few hundred people. Once again consider the above vendors but your options are also expanded by the choice of building your own open source system and using a hosted PBX service.

In terms of building a system,
the open source PBX system of Asterisk has taken off like wildfire. You can build your own Linux switch, purchase the hardware to go in it, download asterisk, sign up with a carrier to deliver you IP backhauled calls and then buy and install the ip phones for everyone’s desk. Sounds a bit daunting and it is if you are not skilled in all of the above. Microsoft has also entered this market with their OCS platform. A simpler approach would be to buy a preconfigured system from a vendor like Fonality, who announced in Jan 2008 that they would be working with DELL as a sales channel.

For the startup or smaller organization, you should seriously consider using a hosted service. This approach takes the cost of the hardware, IT skills and time out of the requirements list and allows you to concentrate on your own core business.

Hosted services
such as VirtualPBX and Gotvmail provide a number that you can use for your company. Each employee can then configure through a web interface where they want their calls delivered to. This allows the employee to be able to take calls from their home phone, office or even cell phone without being tethered to a desk phone.
Most of these services offer a local number or toll free number. You pay per user and an amount for the cost of the call to be delivered to your phone. VirtualPBX.com who has been doing this for over 10 years seem to have got it right. They offer the most sophisticated set of features with ACD queues, advanced routing of calls and easy to use web interface. But there are hundreds of other vendors getting into this space with many of the same basic features. Probably the best advice is to use one of the more established vendors such as VirtualPBX, Ringcentral or Gotvmail.

We will look at each of these in depth in the main site under services.

Getting Started with HostedPBX-Guide.com

2008-01-21T23:08:00.000-08:00

The hosted PBX market is maturing very rapidly. New vendors and solutions seem to appear on a weekly basis, yet trusting your phone service to an unknown entity can be very intimidating. So we have decided to build a resource site at http://www.hostedpbx-guide.com/ that is independent and factual.

Our goal is build a site with information and resources about this market; who the players are; help on finding and using solutions and suggestions and ideas from users.

The main site http://www.hostedpbx-guide.com/ is just getting started and I hope to have news and reviews of most of the top providers in the market as well as information on related topics such as conferencing, faxing, finding and using toll free numbers etc etc.

Well that it for now… please email us at hostedpbxguide@gmail.com with your thoughts and comments.

Not your Father's PBX

Buy a PBX, Build a PBX, or use a Hosted PBX Service

Getting Started with HostedPBX-Guide.com