Onsite and Cloud

based PBX – making the right decision

for your business.

Rob Lith

Introduction

• Rob Lith – Business Development Director at Connection Telecom

• Involved with Internet services since 1994

• Co-founded Connection Telecom 2004

• Initially started providing on-premises PBXs till 2009

• Now predominantly hosted PBXs for last seven years – so I may come across slightly biased to hosted!

Transition from premises to hosted

• The transition of analogue and digital systems to CBX/IP Telephony intersected in 2010 and today IP Telephony is greater than 90% of systems

• Hosted PBX and Unified Communication has moved well beyond early stages and is the only area of any material growth

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2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

LegacyPBX

CBX/IPT

Conclusion

So the future is IP – that question is answered

The question is Hosted or Premise based?

Some of the following common points have been the main points of differentiation in the past… I’ll go through these as relevancy remains

On-premises PBX

• Higher initial cost and set-up cost

• Potentially higher maintenance costs

• Usually costs per feature – IVR, Voicemail, etc. unless you’re choosing an Asterisk based system

• Lower monthly cost after expenses are covered –except BRI/PRI’s can cost more than IP circuits

• Ability to SIP trunk to get lower cost calls

• Local PTSN port provide quality calls – but not HD

• Complex to provide redundancy

Hosted PBX

• Lower initial set-up cost

• Full PBX features available

• Lower maintenance costs - PBX provider maintains provisioning of features and handsets made available to all

• Lower monthly service cost – network cost less than traditionally over provisioned PSTN lines

• Easy to add extra lines / voice channels

• Upgrades and new features are included

• Extended features, like conferencing, call recording, chat, mobility and contact centre applications are easily added

Negatives of on-premises PBX

• On-premise IP-PBX needs a provider who can maintain & manage it

• Expansions may result in complicated projects depending upon the provider

• On premise PBX manufacturers obsolete equipment and support forcing upgrades or replacement

• Technicians generally need to be called out for upgrades and patches to software

• Loss of power or PBX failure will result in callers not being able to get through

Negatives of Hosted PBX

• Poor voice quality as a result of Internet connections with no Quality of Service for voice

• Loss of Internet can result in loss of phone service if no redundancy planned

• Customization of features may be slow or unavailable depending on provider

• Fees can be increased and cancellation fees can be charged

• Stability and uptime of provider may vary

Pros of on-premises PBX

• Current carrier does not have to be changed

• SIP trunks can be added to save on calling costs

• Server ownership reduces expenses over time

• Responsibility is more easily defined

• Customer can determine their own timelines for changes, adding features and functionality

• Not susceptible to the whims of the hosted platform provider to change or drop features.

Pros of Hosted PBX

• Hosting providers have more resources and new feature sets are able to be frequently and rapidly deployed

• Scaling up or down is easily achieved – adding or decreasing users for seasonal demand

• Moving a phone system is easy, only an IP connection needed

• Future proof - upgrades of serves and applications are ongoing

• Loss of Internet or catastrophic event has no effect on operations because calls can be sent other operations or remote users

• Numbers can be ported to provider of choice

• Other hosted services are easily accessible, CRM, call recording storage and many more

Bigger picture!

That is what was.

Now there is a much bigger picture to consider with the advent of new modern delivery platforms

The next wave

• A world of opportunities is now opening with new technologies making thousands of services available to hosted platforms that are developed rapidly to take advantage of new services developed extremely fast – agile deployment sprints can be as frequent as weekly

for all browsers

Multi channel services

• Multi channel service support can now (truly) be delivered – email, chat, voice, video, social media

• “Context” is here – customer aware

• Rich value can be added with micro services available – example IBM Watson Speech to Text service with sentiment analysis

• Many other micro services can be added for validation, payment, CRM info - applications are as far as the imagination can go

Hosted vs. Premises

• So based on the future of cloud platforms

delivering rich & powerful, multi channel

services for hosted PBX and contact centres,

the question should be

– Why not hosted?

• did I mention I was biased…

Hosted vs. Premises

Thank you.