When customers are ready to evolve beyond landline phone services and step into the world of IP voice they must determine whether to keep the VoIP infrastructure onsite or use hosted VoIP and rely on the service provider to supply and manage the solution in the cloud.
Hosted VoIP is certainly the popular answer these days. The implementation of this hot commodity has grown quickly within the past few years and continues to do so, Infonetics reported that hosted PBX and unified communications (UC) revenues increased by 33 percent in 2011. Additionally, the Aberdeen Group reported in 2011 that one-third of businesses surveyed have outsourced their VoIP phone systems, with another 35 percent planning to do so within in the next two years.
As hosted VoIP becomes commonplace in the market, these percentages are only expected to climb higher this year. Yet, as more companies look to outsource the management of their VoIP services, there are still those that want to keep their VoIP systems onsite. Given this reality, it is important to be the voice of reason behind recommending the most appropriate solution.
The following questions can help guide your customers to the VoIP solution that will meet their specific needs:
- Can your network support VoIP ?
- Do you have the internal personnel to support an onsite VoIP solution?
- Does your vendor have a well-trained sales and support staff to assist with customer service and consulting if necessary?
- What are your capital expenditure (capex) and operational expenditure (opex) budgets?
http://www.channelpartnersonline.com/blogs/peertopeer/2012/08/help-customers-find-the-right-voip-service.aspx