The Benefits of IP Telephony For Your Business

Your business relies on its communications infrastructure to make everything work. Without the ability to place or receive calls, your business capabilities are greatly hampered, and reliability has been the major touch stone for telephony service for the last century or so.

With reliability comes cost - maintaining old style land lines, and then inter office telephone exchange systems represents a significant amount of hardware infrastructure and expense, and as anyone who's had to upgrade a legacy phone exchange can tell you, sometimes, those old standards are difficult or even impossible to maintain.
IP telephony (where all voice calls are broken down into packets and sent through the phone system as a digital data stream) has been around since the 1990s. Indeed, most mobile phones are actually IP telephony devices, and as data compression improves, more will make the switch. From a business standpoint, IP telephony offers a number of significant advantages, in both features and ease of management, while also reducing costs.

The first advantage is that the old method of running cables to a dedicated PBX exchange has been replaced with using your existing network wiring to connect the telephones to a blade server in your server room. This allows upgrading the number of phone lines in the office to be as simple as adding another blade to the rack mount, putting phones on the desks, assigning them IP addresses and updating the extension table. Where rolling out an extra hundred telephones in a building used to be a two week process, it can now be done in an afternoon if your staff are prepared for it.

The second advantage is that IP packets travel over the Internet. By use of virtual private networking and other secure protocols, your telephone exchange system can treat offices in Cardiff and Glasgow as if they were in the same building, while also avoiding expensive tolls.

In terms of management and features, once your telephone calls run over an IP based system, monitoring telephone usage, recording calls on your network, and advanced voice mail functions have an implementation cost that's negligible. You can even arrange for telephone call forwarding to desks or to mobile phones for remote users with these systems, and arrange for digital storage and transmission of voice mail messages. On top of this, voice mail messages can be forwarded on to email inboxes, or arrange to have an email message sent when a voice mail is listened to as a confirmation of receipt.

The roll out of IP telephony has greatly changed the underlying infrastructure of how businesses communicate, and have done so fairly seamlessly. Most of your users, if you switch to an IP telephony solution, will barely notice the change, other than swapping out the phone on their desk (maybe) and perhaps adding some additional features they weren't used to.

If you're looking for a way to trim infrastructure costs, and improve the bottom line of your business, IP telephony may be an excellent way to do so, particularly if you have to coordinate remote offices and pay tolls for calls, or have need of a more robust answering system and voice mail solution.