Are We Becoming Trapped In The Cloud?

Hosted Telecom - It’s all the rage and it is nothing more then CENTREX.

You may or may not remember Centrex service, how great it was going to be, no equipment to purchase, no upgrades, no backups and most of all, NO control.

Big reasons for going Hosted Services is the ability to be anywhere anytime, just plug into the internet and BANG your on. Your choice of hardware is limitless, well, as long as it fits their platform, and even then the shinny phone you want on your desk may work, just not all the shinny features. You can even maintain your little bit of that rented cyber space from your Web Browser at anytime and anyplace. Yep! it is one better then Centrex with a little more control.

When thinking of Hosted services you must take into account, the quality will be as good as your internet connection, the more telephones you have the more bandwidth you need, problems with a phone is now your IT person’s responsibility, new IT personal means more training to maintain your Hosted Service, want to implement custom applications or connect to your warehouse paging system, it now takes TWO companies. Giving up control over your Communications requires an awful lot of trust in the keeper of it.

One reason for not using Web based applications for your communications is that you lose that control. With IWATSU Enterprise Communications Server you maintain the stability of keeping control while having the ability to fully provide Web based services to your organization.

As with most flavors of the day, marketing campaigns over Hosted and Web based services have just begun. The intent is to sign you up and move on to the next customer. The goal is to keep an eye on what is realistic and not just newly packaged. The ability to interface with SIP and other service providers such as SKYPE FOR SIP , should be an important factor that Hosted may or may not seamlessly provide.

Iwatsu Enterprise Suite IP Networking allows local offices the ability to use IP or TDM handsets and trunking all the long maintaining a local infrastructure that allows the exchange of communications between main and remote office locations anywhere worldwide. If the wide area networks fails—for example the connection between Toronto and New York—the local offices simply operate in local mode. Desk-to-desk intercom calls are unavailable, but local outbound calls are made normally. If a single office location loses connection to the rest of the IP network, the location operates in local mode and the rest of the network locations operate as normal. When the link to the network becomes available, the individual office locations automatically rejoin.

For more information contact Tim Whitehouse @ 1.800.465.0883.