“While we especially recommend this for business start-ups, smaller multisite customers and small businesses, it is also gaining traction in the up to 50 extension sector. The key drivers for this have been the recession and particularly the credit crunch, plus the more widespread acceptance of ‘cloud’ IT solutions and the improved customer understanding of what is needed to provide a reliable service.
The credit crunch made business finance almost impossible to get for start-ups and very small businesses. Hosted telephony solutions such as Spitfire’s SIP Communicator require much lower capital expenditure and are a 100 per cent tax allowable business expense, unlike capex.
The general move to cloud provision of IT services means businesses are less concerned about owning premises equipment, particularly if operating costs can be shown to be substantially reduced compared to a conventional ‘box on the wall’ telephony solution. The advantages of the features that cost significant amounts using an IP PBX being included at no cost, such as multisite working and voicemail to email mean small businesses can get big business features at an incredibly low cost.
Concerns about service failure have been met with back-up provision such as call divert to mobile. Obviously at Spitfire we believe we offer some significant advantages. Because Spitfire is an ISP, SIP Communicator is designed as an end-to-end service to guarantee QoS when deployed on suitable products from a range of available options from Ethernet to ADSL. We also offer subsidised circuits for our SIP Communicator customers allowing us to deliver real value for money.
The PBX servers are hosted on Spitfire’s own wholly owned core network designed and operated to give low latency and jitter. Call termination is done over SS7 interconnects and calls are never routed over the Internet. This ensures that Spitfire remain in control of all aspects of call quality from end to end.
This call quality control through an end-to end service provision has given our Authorised Partner channel the confidence to sell SIP Communicator to their customers. At Spitfire we believe that a tipping point has been reached for hosted telephony that will gradually see the end of the customer phone system in the sub 50 extension market.”