“There are a number of benefits associated with cloud but overall the ‘choice’ factor will remain, meaning that there will still be a place for PBX.
Siemens Enterprise Communications is seeing an increase in interest of hosted telephony as budget cuts and the overall economic situation drives organisations to take a fresh look at their communications strategy. Hosted telephony rationalises the organisations current infrastructure, allowing applications to be removed and added regardless of their location from a centrally stored and maintained service that is always up to date. As a carrier based solution, Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape Voice can provide a scalable, secure and flexible platform that has been designed to support today’s fast-pace and dynamic businesses.
Several business sectors are emerging as strong advocates of hosted telephony communications, especially the cost conscious SMEs. Professional service firms inherently operate satellite and remote operations for a verity of teams and agents, where hosted telephony enables them to make quick, simple changes from adding users and locations to attaching additional unified communication (UC) functions.
Organisations as a whole are seeing hosted telephony rationalise their IT practices and refresh cycles, removing many of the time consuming processes involved with having to select and commit to specific system configurations or types. Businesses can then avoid painstaking system maintenance and upgrades, and disaster recovery planning. SMEs in particular, enjoy the reduced and predicable monthly costs involved with hosted telephony from pay-as-you-use, short-term contracts. These contract types enable the SME to align its income against its outgoings as business activity levels change in addition to enabling capital investments to expand the business and not just to support it.
One area showing increasing potential is cloud based contact centre solutions and the Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape Cloud Contact Center solution provided through a global distribution agreement with inContact, an innovative, all-in-one enterprise grade offering which is providing our customers with advanced contact centre capabilities without the cost and complexity of premise-based solutions from multiple providers. With an agreement to sell in EMEA, Siemens Enterprise Communications is the only vendor to deliver a comprehensive and secure cloud unified communications (UC) solution including voice, mobility, messaging, presence, conferencing, collaboration, video and now contact centre.”