Strategize 2009: Hosted and Cloud Telephony

We’ve been through Analog Centrex, Digital and ISDN Centrex, and now IP Centrex. It has been a long and bumpy road, causing new IP Centrex-style offerings to be ‘re branded’ into a ‘Hosted VoIP’ alias. While all of these services and technologies deliver the same basic set of features, the technologies used to deliver these solutions has changed. With the advent of cloud computing, several readers have asked about the future of “Telephony In The Cloud”, including hosted environments that could have millions of customers and complete millions of calls per hour. Believe it or not, we’re already using cloud telephony at the carrier grade level, and we don’t even realize it. What’s important to note, however, is how the hosted solutions market will grow significantly in 2009 for enterprise customers. Why should adopting a hosted voice, convergence, or UC solution be a part of your 2009 strategy? 1) Just like the previously mentioned topic of virtualization, the idea of a hosted voice solution provides significant cost savings across the board. Even the idea of co-locating critical voice infrastructure in a remote datacenter when constructing coast-to-coast communications networks can provide a large cost savings. The set-it-and-forget-it mentality alleviates many concerns and costs associated with traditional telephony evnrionments. 2) The power of upstream and inter-network connectivity is golden. Akin to the potential of significant cost savings, moving towards a hosted solution utilizes pre-established carrier peering agreements, unlimited trunking potential, and the fault-tolerance capabilities that would cost a single organization millions of dollars. Why aren’t organizations adopting a full-scale cloud or hosted telephony technique? Pulling the plug on your 20-year-old PBX is scary, as is giving the keys of your telephony kingdom to a 3rd-party provider. However, the idea of telephony-in-the-cloud is not new, and service providers are constructing fully-redundant, secure, and nearly bullet-proof environments that are ready to handle your volume. Every day, more capacity is added to these environments, and more and more organizations trust their dial tone to these services. Time has proven that this strategy works. There are several service providers and strategies that are satisfying the needs of small and large organizations alike. With the ability to deploy the feature set, mobility, and convergence-like strategies without investing in millions of telecom capital, hosted solutions are quickly becoming the solution for organizations in this new economy.