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A New Look at VoIP. Smarter Phone Systems Choices for Small and Medium Businesses

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(1)A New Look at VoIP Smarter Phone Systems Choices for Small and Medium Businesses.

(2) Title Table of Contents Case Studies VoIP Beats Hurricane Katrina.................................................................................................................3 Startup Car Dealership Saves Time and Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars.........................................3 Airline Call Center Auto-Manages Calls..................................................................................................3 Correctional Facility Uses VoIP to Great Effect.......................................................................................4. A New Look at VoIP What Do Companies Look For?.............................................................................................................4 A Brief Look at Savings...........................................................................................................................5 Variable Costs of VoIP and Cloud Computing.........................................................................................6 Communication Trends for Small and Medium Businesses....................................................................6 The Characteristics of the SMB Market for Communications Systems..................................................7 Problem Areas with VoIP........................................................................................................................8 

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(4)   . A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 2.

(5) Title VoIP Beats Hurricane Katrina When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the devastation was immense. No one was prepared 

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(12)  and expected to return to work on Monday. They couldn’t. A typical story about how organizations were forced to cope is provided by the Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans (CCANO). This is a large charity that had workers spread all over America - more than 1000 of them and all of a sudden, they all lost contact with their parent organization. By a sheer stroke of luck, CCANO had tied up with a VoIP service provider in California a few weeks before Katrina. This VoIP service became the life line for CCANO once the hurricane struck. All local phones were unserviceable, cell phone services were patchy and call durations were restricted. The VoIP number became the main source of communication between CCANO and its 1000 workers and it continued to work. Hurricane Katrina has come and gone and Hurricane Sandy has made its presence felt, but CCANO is not worried anymore because the VoIP system has now become the mainstay of   !!

(13) "!!! workers still continue to work with the charity.. Startup Car Dealership Saves Time and Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars In another case, a company decided to take advantage of the economic slump to acquire a new car dealership at a throwaway price. Costs had to be pared to the bone but none of the capabilities could be cut down. A phone and intercom system is the life blood of a competitive business. Instead of going in for a hardware intensive PBX system, the company decided to go for a cloud based VoIP solution. The company now estimates that it saved $200,000 and a full three weeks in installation time by choosing a VoIP solution. Operations commenced just before the economic revival started in the US and the company is now negotiating for four more dealerships. Was this just a lucky break or sound business planning?. Airline Call Center Auto-Manages Calls When an airline decided to do up its call center, it looked for a solution that could select the best available employee to handle the caller query. The VoIP system it selected interacts with a software application to select the best match. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 3.

(14) Title employee to answer the query and collects data about the query. Overall, the caller management system works to resolve the customer query in the fastest manner and reduce the queue of callers, this directly results in higher numbers of handled calls and increases transaction values. A traditional analog system would not have been able to meet these needs.. Correctional Facility Uses VoIP to Great Effect The Oregon Corrections Enterprises handles a large number of inmates, many of whom have not held steady jobs earlier. The corrections enterprise provides hands on training and work experience to its inmates. The facility ran a 130 seat call center to provide inbound and outbound services for Businessto-Business and Business-to-Consumer communication capabilities. Since this was a correctional facility, there were stringent requirements for its inmate agents. #

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(20)   expanding its hardware based system was proving to be prohibitively expensive. Finally, the correction facility switched over to a VoIP based solution that interacted with special software and 

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(26)   would not be able to violate the terms of their. sentences and access the Internet and yet would be able to handle all functions of the call center. *

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(32)    not be so evident were the replacement of a large number of T1 circuits with a high bandwidth IP channel. This alone had brought media costs by 40%. Overall the entire investment was recovered in just 60 days and the level of training and capability saw a jump.. What Do Companies Look For? The small cases discussed above bring out a few important issues about how SMBs select their communication systems. They look for technology that:. •. Is widely available, inexpensive and reliable. •. Has low upfront costs. •. Does not come with long and rigid contracts, and. •. Does not need dedicated staff to manage. Any company planning to sell communication systems to SMBs must keep their priorities in mind. What is critical to a large company may be just a frill to a small company that is struggling to keep its head above water.. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 4.

(33) Title Since the VoIP application is itself digital and connects very well to a menu based interface, interfacing such an application to a software application is very straightforward. The software can handle analysis and processing of call related data and tailor the communication system more closely to the company’s operations.. A Brief Look at Savings A comparative study in a 650 person business <

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(37)  traditional PBXs. The table below is eye-opening:. proved to be a great leveler. The SMB can now match any other company in its communication capability and take advantage of its small size to achieve more agile operations. Traditional Feature Set. VoIP Feature Set. Hold. Fax. Transfer. Follow me. Mute. =

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(44) . Voicemail to inbox. Call Forward. Automated call support. 1. Estimated Annual Productivity Gains Production Metric. Savings. Time gained per user. 2.7 days per year. Productivity gained per year per user. $480. Productivity gain at a 650 user site. $312,000. Presence tracking Directory search One click call One click conference Data screen. Besides the savings in costs alone, VoIP con

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(47)  For years, small and medium businesses were resigned to using basic PBXs due to cost consideration alone. Strictly going by the depth of their pockets, there was no way than an SMB could hope to compete with a large company in the quality of its communications architecture. However, VoIP, just like cloud computing has. 1. Technology is helping David take on the Goliaths. A feature set comparison between traditional telephone exchanges and VoIP makes another strong business case for a switch over. Whereas the traditional system offered six basic functions, VoIP covers all of these and then some more.. http://www.intel.com/it/pdf/parsippany-voip.pdf. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 5.

(48) Title An interesting input about VoIP relates to space savings. While everyone is very clear about the cost savings of moving from traditional PBXs to VoIP, what many do not mention is the associated savings in space. In a typical case, there was a 67% reduction in space used when companies moved to VoIP. This savings in space itself is calculated to be valued at about $20,000 per year. There are associated savings in power and air-conditioning costs as well.. Variable Costs of VoIP with Cloud Computing Cloud computing allows companies to hire only as much of the service as they need. Many users of cloud computing would hire additional instances of the servers they need when the load on 

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(57)  limit. As the load reduces, the excess servers are released back to the cloud. Since costing is by the hour, this leads to services that will never get overwhelmed and collapse not will they be grossly over catered. Small and medium businesses love this kind of costing. VoIP servers can be hosted in the cloud. During peak hours, available lines will increase automatically, while the excess capability will be shed at off peak hours.. Communication Trends for Small and Medium Businesses An agile and sharp small enterprise can demonstrate enormous innovative capability. Much of this rests on communication. Did you know that a large number of mobile phones in the world are connected to machines and not handled by people? Vending machines often use a mobile phone embedded in them to communicate with their parent organizations. Think of the possibilities such a simple device opens up - machines can accept credit cards, send their stock status and a hundred other data points to their hubs from areas of very poorly developed resources. Small businesses are beginning to use this kind of capability routinely. Small businesses are also great users of business ‘apps’ that allow their employees to accomplish many business related tasks on their smartphones. Of course there have been issues with being able to recover your data if you decide to switch applications. Communication is no longer about voice alone. The Internet has become inseparable from businesses. With cloud computing, SMEs can access their data from anywhere on the globe and achieve 24x7 operations. Cheap and reliable communications allow SMBs to outsource their work to anywhere and get quality products at very competitive prices.. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 6.

(58) Title What used to be a luxury that only large companies could once afford has now become commonly available to anyone who has a broadband connection to the Internet. Video conferencing has cut distances and allowed face to face meet-. VoIP Facts • In 2010, SMBs spent $26 billion on mobile communications alone. • The growth rate of the SMB market is 5.4% which is higher than that of the total market • Barely 3% of SMBs use the same provider for all communication needs. ings at a cost that any SMB can afford. The resulting improvement in communication and productivity has given small businesses a new edge. Yet another trend is the breaking up of the communication medium. Barely a couple of decades ago, companies communicated using mail and paper based messages. Today, one needs to J

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(62)  nications. Any company that misses out on using the entire spectrum of communication capabilities fully is not working optimally.. The Characteristics of the SMB Market for Communication Systems A telecom major has carried out a study on the opportunities offered by the SMB market for com 

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(67) teresting and will naturally be of great interest to the readers of this paper. Most large suppliers, it was found, focus on the large enterprise segment. That of course is where the big ticket purchases are. However, smarter suppliers have found that SMBs offer a vast and rapidly enlarging market segment that cannot be ignored even though service providers 

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(72)  >*R!"!9 SMBs spent $26 billion on mobile communica 

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(74)  ' ' voice and data communications. The growth rate of the SMB market is 5.4% which is higher than the growth of the overall market. Hence this is where new business lies. As far as the SMB market is concerned, telecom equipment decisions are more personal in nature. Fewer telecom specialists are involved in the decision making process – perhaps because there are fewer telecom professionals in SMBs to begin with. Therefore selling to SMBs is more complex than to large enterprises where decisions are based more on technical parameters.. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 7.

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(88)   their purchase decisions. A surprising statistic emerging from the study is that many service providers are not handling the SMB market well enough. This is indicated by low loyalty and frequent churn. More than 50% SMBs had at least two mobile service providers. Just 3% had a single service provider for their 

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(96) ` It was also found that the user experience was often patchy. A case in point was when a service call was transferred from one help desk to an

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(102)  erator often had to be repeated to the next. Companies had not provided methods for capturing 

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(104)   it on between operators. With basic shortcomings such as this, customers cannot be expected to be loyal and hence there is quite a churn in the market. Modern, software based systems are making it even easier for customers to switch vendors. Previously, when there were large upfront capital ex

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(107) #9 when your entire investment largely consists of LAN cabling and VoIP terminals, switching vendors is far easier and can be accomplished over a weekend. Most SMBs however would not want to take on. Threats to VoIP Systems Denial of service attacks Fears of hacking Toll fraud VoIP phishing. the hassles of switching vendors if the overall service quality is good. Some more points to 

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(112)  system.. Problem Areas with VoIP While VoIP has proven easy to deploy and use, the very ease of use is giving rise to a number of areas of potential weaknesses. Fortunately, most of these weaknesses have occurred in other branches of Information and Communication Technology services and are well understood. If care is taken while the system is being set up, most of these problem areas can be averted. #

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(117)  _{ ` }tacks - the method is similar to DoS attacks on payment gateways and popular websites. The 

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(121)     cases the problem is alleviated by implementing 

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(126) . A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 8.

(127) Title VoIP tunnels or VLANs that guarantee a minimum bandwidth. Hardening of all endpoint devices and setting the routers to drop all packets that do not seem to have a legitimate purpose also helps. Other VoIP problem areas relate to Toll fraud where a company’s VoIP connection is used to run up huge bills using international calls. There is also a growing menace of VoIP spam in which voice messages are sent to listeners using the VoIP system (imagine an advertisement in the middle of a conference call). Fortunately, all of these can be handled by a well set up VoIP system that involves encryption and tunneling.. Country-Specific VoIP Regulations In a large number of countries, VoIP has '

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(130)  telecommunication systems - many of them state owned. Besides this, VoIP systems can be encrypted more easily in comparison to analog systems and once a VoIP stream reaches the 

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(135)   impossible. For all of these reasons (and more) a number of countries have placed severe restrictions on VoIP usage, although they are slowly being relaxed with the inexorable march of technology. If you are a small business that is planning to rely entirely on VoIP for your overseas use, it would be worth checking out the state of legislation in. the countries you plan to do business in. Most companies in any case opt to use hybrid systems to provide redundancies in case of disruption. Issues have also been reported in connecting VoIP calls to emergency numbers. However, these are getting resolved rapidly and may not be a real concern anymore.. Conclusion VoIP has given small companies communication capabilities that can match the largest users. When interfaced with suitable software, VoIP allows a degree of in-call processing that increases the productivity of operators several times over. The ultimate in the VoIP experience is switching over to cloud based VoIP servers that adjust the number of instances automatically depending on load. As a result, costs are minimized and customer throughput is increased. There are a number of areas where un-hardened VoIP equipment can be vulnerable to hackers. However, basic and standardized precautions are adequate to handle these threats. While some countries still have reservations about permitting unrestricted VoIP telephony, the restrictions are being lifted gradually as security constraints are being overcome and legacy systems are outliving their usefulness. Modern VoIP systems are here to stay. When are you switching?. A New Look at VoIP. |. Compare Business Products ©2012. 9.

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