Business Services
Business customers are a service providers’ most valuable asset, so special attention must be paid to meeting their telephony needs. With increasingly scarce resources and budgets, IT Managers and CIOs are looking to reduce their capital and operational expenses at a time when their colleagues are demanding the types of innovative and portable multimedia communications offerings they use at home. Meanwhile their legacy premises-based PBXs are nearing retirement and competitive carriers are offering cut-rate VoIP connectivity.
Hosted PBX
Faced with obsolescence of their traditional PBX or key system, businesses are increasingly looking to IP-based solutions to meet their ongoing telephony needs. Effectively outsourcing their PBX operations can not only save businesses the capital cost of deploying PBX equipment and the operational costs of running it, but can also open up the possibility of leveraging network-based services to substantial advantage. Given these advantages, the majority of enterprise IT managers will opt for a hosted PBX over deploying an IP-PBX.
With a hosted PBX offering from Metaswitch, business customers can obtain VoIP services for main offices, branch offices and telecommuters that connect phones in all these different locations with a common extension numbering plan and support features such multi-line hunt groups across locations. Businesses can also leverage network-based services such as sim-ring to route business calls to cell phones in parallel with desk sets or employ granular call management rules to direct callers on a time-of-day basis. Our unified messaging solutions deliver the convenience of visual voicemail access and network contact management from web, desktop or mobile clients. Together with the CommPortal Communicator unified communications client, business subscribers can extend their critical telephony and rich communications services, such as video, presence and instant messaging to the desktop or mobile handset – ideal when working from home, on the road or just on the go.
Equally suitable for deployment by ILECs, CLECs and over-the-top service providers, the Metaswitch Hosted PBX solution also addresses the concerns carriers have regarding the provisioning and support costs associated with hosted services. Easy-to-use web-based self-service functions enable customers to manage their own telephony services while highly automated remote management of phone firmware and configuration takes the pain out of mass deployment of SIP phones.
SIP Trunking
Premises-based managed or unmanaged IP PBXs provide a natural migration path for an enterprise as they replace their legacy PBX solutions. Offering or leveraging SIP trunking for IP-PBXs affords numerous benefits to the customer and carrier. Native SIP trunks save the cost of TDM interfaces on IP-PBXs – and also save service providers the cost of PRI switch ports. Moreover, SIP trunks can be scaled granularly rather than in dramatic, costly and wasteful steps, as with classic TDM trunks. SIP trunks can also dynamically share broadband connections with other enterprise data, providing even greater cost savings.
Conforming to the SIP Forum SIPconnect technical recommendation for carrier to enterprise IP peering, Metaswitch can interoperate with any compliant customer premise IP PBX or IAD. When deployed from the Metaswitch platform, business subscribers can also leverage the configuration, contact and unified messaging solutions, enabled by our CommPortal product portfolio. These applications can not only enhance the business users’ telephony experience but also extend the revenue opportunities and brand of the host service provider.
