“With the diminishing margins available from minute termination activity, and looking towards the bandwidth market with a similar trend imminent, working with its customers, 8el spotted the opportunity to package and bring to market a hosted telephone system to again provide economies of scale to its customers and ultimately offer a broad service wrap that would deliver more value to its commercial relationships.
Rather than hosting multiple dedicated PBX systems in its core, with failover capabilities between two sites we looked at the various technology offerings available and decided on an IP Centrex methodology.
Understanding the need to build-in failover led 8el’s focus to the customer site, which has historically been the Achilles heel for IP Centrex solutions. As such, the 8el team embarked on developing the IP Freeport which offers handsets remote survivability, such that if there are any issues with outbound connectivity this could be addressed on-site through local breakout.
This avoids the “fish being stranded on the beach” scenario and enables 8el’s CallPort IP Centrex solution to deliver blow-by-blow the features and benefits of an IP PBX.
Interestingly, 8el’s average customer is over 100 users and they are targeting organisations looking for feature reach deployments, anywhere up to 500 users per organisation – quite a contrast to the majority of IP Centrex vendors.
As an organisation, 8el are enjoying increasing economies of scale as they are adding users onto the platform having paid for the system and are continuing to focus on the CallPort platform with the recent introduction of Thin Client capabilities for their soft client and an ACD module to address call centre requirements.”