For an increasing number of companies, hosted VoIP will become an attractive alternative to their existing inhouse implementation. Let’s briefly review the rationale behind your choice for either a hosted VoIP or on-premise VoIP solution.
It won’t deliver a solid business case when one decides to make the transition to hosted VoIP or Unified Communications at a time that the existing inhouse communications solution still works flawlessly and within budget. In reality, there are two excellent opportunities to consider hosted VoIP:
Traditionally the choice for hosted VoIP was typically beneficial for smaller companies, while bigger organizations opted for an on-premise solution. Due to the development of IT costs, the trade-off point between both options is moving towards larger number of users. Hosted VoIP is also an option which perfectly fits the generic trend towards outsourcing and cloud services.
Typically, organizations which are very large and complex in business models, internal structure and geography opt for an inhouse solution. These organizations often use internally shared services centers which are responsible for all IT operations and act as a kind of internal hosting provider towards the different departments and locations. Also, it is hard to transfer all the organizational complexities of a multinational to specialized VoIP service provider. And if a lot of bespoke integrations are required, complex business processes have to be supported or security and data integrity is a key demand, an inhouse solution is often required. Certainly, if an organization has a strong focus on inbound or outbound services (like call centers), there may be so much company-specific adaptations that a choice for an on-premise solution is inevitable.
Nevertheless, we can say that hosted VoIP is on the rise. Cloud-based Unified Communications provider BroadSoft – recently acquired by Cisco – does a survey every year with service providers and industry leaders to better gauge the trends in the cloud UC market. If we compare the figures of their different surveys over the years, we see that the predictions for the use of hosted VoIP in 2020 in the different segments increase every year:
What is specifically striking is that the larger segment percentages are approaching the small business segment ones. Traditionally, hosted or cloud VoIP and Unified Communications are associated with smaller companies. Now, also the big ones are catching up.
We as RSconnect provides Single Sign-On functionality for Cisco VoIP solutions which make use of Extension Mobility. Our smart client (Active Login Manager) is installed on computer or laptops of Extension Mobility users and whenever they log into their computer, automatically the telephone on their desk is loaded with their settings and features. And the other way around. As soon as a user switches off his computer, his telephone is logged out as well.
Our smart client works with the CUCM (Cisco Unified Call Manager). Although our solution is traditionally used for on-premise Cisco Unified Communications solutions, it is also available for hosted VoIP providers. Any hosted VoIP offering based on the Cisco CUCM technology can provide Single Sign-On functionality to end-users deploying our client software.
