Migration Solutions

The managed-services model can help you get the biggest benefit from the smallest investment.

The smaller your company, the more versatile your technology needs to be to gain the greatest benefit from the smallest investment. The challenge is that versatility often costs more, making it critical for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to maximize the return on their technology investments.

Recent research from IDC shows that interest in IP telephony is strong. According to a recent study (in which 63% of survey respondents had fewer than 2,500 employees and 66% had annual revenues of less than $1 million), these businesses plan to spend even more on telephone systems than they do on basic networking equipment, with a net spending increase of 5.6% on their phone systems anticipated over the next year.

Many companies may think that the implementation costs are out of reach, but consider that you're already paying for a private branch exchange (PBX)—on-site telephone switching equipment—or Centrex system hosted by your local phone company, where the equipment still sits in a central office. You can set up the same system on your own network, contracting with a managed-service provider to host an IP-based telephony system so that you don't have to manage the technology yourself.

Improving Productivity

SMBs need their employees to be as productive as possible in today's competitive marketplace; unified messaging features can help.

"From a communications standpoint, companies have made their employees dizzy," says Tim Gaines, vice president of VoIP Sales for Covad Communications , pointing out that many employees need to gather messages from multiple voice-mail boxes on corporate systems, home-office lines, and cell phones. Frequently, these calls need to be forwarded, but that doesn't work on an outside system. Likewise, if the caller is requesting documents, those have to be sent via e-mail or fax, which means users have to return to their computers.

Gaines illustrates how the benefits add up:

• Time it takes to leave a message: 90 seconds
• Time unified messaging saves per day: 15 minutes (based on 20% improvement on 10 calls)
• Increased annual productivity for 20 employees: $5000

How do you achieve productivity gains like these?

• "Find-me/follow-me" features allow users to forward their incoming calls to any number they choose; the caller doesn't have to guess which phone number to use.
• When you retrieve messages from an IP-based phone or Web interface, you can see all your messages in a queue, allowing you to return the most urgent calls without having to listen to all of them first.
• If a caller requests a document, you can attach the file to the voice message.

Who Manages It?

The question remains whether you should manage your own system or use a service provider. There are situations in which you should consider managing the system yourself, but experts agree those scenarios are highly specialized.

The managed-services model makes sense for most SMBs for the following reasons:

• It holds the provider responsible for building in system redundancies for disaster recovery
• It offers SMBs the ability to keep up with improvements in the underlying technology.

"In this environment, where telecom is going to be so very competitive for the foreseeable future, I don't know why one would want to keep it all in-house," says Bob Rosenberg, president of telecommunications research firm Insight Research . "Hosted solutions are much more reasonably priced."

Either way you choose to go, the benefit is clear. "The nature of these applications will change dramatically in the next few years," predicts Insight's Rosenberg . "For the first time since the invention of the mass telecommunications market in the 1930s, we're going to see a qualitative difference in what can be done on the user's desk."