Justin Hamilton-Martin, Managing Director at 8el says the technology brings an unprecedented potential for not only cost savings but for developing a new level of flexibility in the way users and businesses can interact.
“With 44% of companies planning to spend more on VoIP and IP telephony in 2007 (mybusiness.net, ‘VoIP market review’), IT departments are in the process of reviewing the potential VoIP solutions available on the market, including IP PBX’s and IP Centrex platforms. En mass, companies are leaning towards the potential offered by IP telephony against the comparative risks of moving from a conventional in-house system.
While replacing existing on-site PBX’s with IP enabled PBX’s does enable companies to run VoIP and access IP applications, there are several reasons why dedicated equipment per customer site does not have to be the way forward. Technology offerings can also be subscribed to as managed services, with or without customer sited boxes, with web access available to all. For example, we share BT exchanges and 1571 services. Why have your own if a managed service does the same thing?"
After assessing the demand and requirements from their existing customer base, 8el launched an IP Centrex solution, branded C@llPort, which enables businesses to capitalise on the true benefits of next generation communications.
8el comment that IP Centrex is an end to end, hosted IP telephony solution allowing traffic (voice, data or video) to travel in the same format, namely IP, and moves away from closed proprietary systems and signalling. By having the central network intelligence in the core, 8el provides a geographically independent way of working, enabling Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies to flow and business continuity to be a natural capability. C@llPort IP Centrex allows corporates to invest in a service rather than a technology to drive business benefits and even competitive advantage.
8el IP Centrex charges on a per user licence basis, delivering the features and benefits of an IP network, without the associated capital expenditure and maintenance costs of an IP PBX solution. Multi-site companies can find it costly to adopt the IP PBX solution as it is necessary for each site to have its own hardware. 8el’s C@llPort solution is also commercially leading the market by offering their customers the ability to completely eliminate charges for on-net plus all national and local calls (i.e. 01 and 02 numbers).