Hosted VoIP breaks 600,000 seats

Reblogged from VoIP Blog:

Hosted VoIP Market Breaks 600,000 seats at year end Well the year ended for Hosted VoIP with a buoyant 4th quarter, with the year ending on 613914 hosted VoIP seats deployed. I guess the themes of the year are as follows: Large Players enter the market: This year we saw a market entry by Vodafone and BT Wholesale, also we have seen momentum from both Cable & Wireless and Virgin business. So this year we saw a large increase in the channel capacity for Hosted VoIP Broadsoft & Hipcom Winners in …

Excellent information proving the success of VOIP systems

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Babblevoice Stats

Just got the latest stats for Babblevoice and wow! I know I’ve tweeted Victor Hugo’s quotation ‘There’s nothing more powerful than an idea who’s time has come’ before but I hadn’t realised just how powerful!

The number of active domains (switchboards) has jumped by 50% in one month! That’s got to be due to our new partners so thank you one and all.

Financial Services company promises better customer service using www.babblevoice.com.

Promise Solutions comprises a number of specialist companies providing services and technology to Financial Intermediaries, Corporate Partners and consumers. Based in Wolverhampton Steve Walker, the man behind Promise led Purple loans – a GE subsidiary until 2003 when the Promise group was formed. Promise is a technology led organization, but is heavily committed to a compliant, controlled, customer centric service.

Promise prides itself on innovation, offering choice, quality products and a service to match – both to introducers and the end customer. Understanding and exceeding the needs of partners, both large and small, is a priority in maintaining the long term, win – win relationships which Promise thrives on.The latest innovation adopted by Promise is the introduction of a completely hosted telephone switchboard which already integrates well with the company’s technology. In truth this development was primarily driven by the move to the new premises. The old traditional PBX was going to be hugely expensive to upgrade or replace and would require significant work to integrate into new innovative systems being developed by Promise’s IT team.

The question ‘Why don’t we move to a cloud based solution?’ was raised as this would be significantly easier to develop for and could offer significant additional benefits.

Due to the low costs, short term contract and scalability of the Babble Voice solution, the Promise team was able to test the hosted solutions along side the existing systems and deal with every one of the most clichéd perceptions held by the anti-hosted brigade.
Subsequently Promise moved to new offices and left the old phone system behind. Almost all of the potential problems with a hosted solution were found to be with the network infrastructure and the Internet Service provision. Most of these were solved naturally and by getting the babblevoice team to talk to the new ISP meant that the quality of the line was quickly sorted out. It then only took the re-configuring of the network security on site and the introduction of new switches capable of separating voice traffic from data. A decision was taken to take a second Internet connection to add resilience.

Development work was undertaken to integrate babblevoice into Promise’s existing systems which immediately enhanced the existing call recording facility into a full call recording and archiving function built into the Promise solution.

The system already included many of the required ‘new features’ as standard and the plain English rule system meant that it was easy to replicate the ‘hunt groups’, call recording, voicemail and other necessary features. The ability of babblevoice to interrogate diaries meant that programming the switchboard intelligently was easy. Calls could be handled appropriately based on opening hours. Out of hours messaging and voicemail to email means that Promise is able to react much more efficiently to customer requests.

Using a mixture of headsets and soft phones, desktop handsets and even applications on smart phones Promise have put their stamp on innovation.

Is VOIP a serious competitor to traditional PBX switchboards?

Firstly, what is VOIP? Is it Skype? video messaging like MSN or Gmail?

Voip, as is usual in the computer world is an acronym standing for Voice Over Internet Protocol. This means that you can have a voice connection using your internet line. We’ve been doing this since the late 90′s so what’s new?

Well firstly more and more of us are doing it which accounts for the degradation in quality experienced using Skype in the afternoon and evenings when the USA is awake. Secondly, it is possible now to do everything and possibly a bit more than most traditional PBX (Personal branch Exchange) switchboards offer.

More importantly it is now possible to achieve call quality equal to or sometimes better than that offered by ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). Even more importantly, it is possible to have multiple calls active on the same ‘line’.

So why are most traditional telecom companies so anti VOIP? Possibly the same reason petrol companies are so anti electric vehicles. The investment in technology required for a traditional PBX in most companies is huge and we’ve sort of got used to it. ‘If you’re a serious business you wouldn’t risk your business on Skype would you?’ And all VOIP is just like Skype! WRONG!

We can point to many businesses that have taken to decision to get rid of the ‘tin’ and move to hosted telephony or VOIP, saving themselves considerable money. There is little inclination to go back to PBX, any more than a modern van driver would revert to horse and cart.

In fact most of the PBX manufacturers are now offering a VOIP connection in their switchboard…….at a cost! That’s the only way they can tie their customers in to using their hideously expensive handsets!

So what are the problems with VOIP?

Usually ignorance of how to buy and of the conditions necessary to get the best quality out of your system and a stupidly complex ‘dashboard’ that makes setting up simple call handling really difficult. To this end we’re setting up partners in the IT support community who can pass on their wisdom to ensure you get crystal clear telephony and the best deal on phones to suit your business.

at http://www.babblevoice.com/wiki  we’re happy to share with you exactly how to do this and which phones will work best from free soft phones to desk phones, receptionist modules and even applications to use on your Iphone or Android phone. We’ll also put you in touch with a local partner.

For more information call 01594 372 011 and ask for Eric

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November newsletter

babblevoice – Newsletter

Dear babblevoice user, Last time we declared our love for iGoogle and introduced you to two of our Google Gadgets. Here is a follow up with some Gadgets, which will hopefully to help make your life a little easier.Cost per CallerThe traditional method of managing your call cost was to wait until the end of the month (or sometime afterwards) when you received your 300 page phone bill, listing all of the calls you made from your business.OK, you are a babblevoice user and last month read about our Call Details Gadget. Now you can just browse your calls see who’s doing what? OK, that’s fine for micro businesses but any larger business will have a lot of calls to browse through which makes it difficult to understand what is happening.Enter the Cost per Caller Gadget. One small simple pie chart showing you the collated information of who has been spending the most amount of your money. Call Count per Caller If you have a small sales team you might be interested in who is making the most calls? Then this one is the one for you, it lists number of calls per caller. Balances If you want to see the balance of your babblevoice domain (or multiple domains if you are a serviced office or reseller) then this Gadget allows you to keep an eye on the balance(s), helping ensure they do not run out of calling credit when they need it. Status We have introduced a concept of a domain status. The power of this little Gadget is not so obvious, but it’s worth spending the time to find out more about it. We have a couple of uses for the domain status at the moment. The first use is deciding how to handle a call. Let’s say you run a small business, you have decided that our integration with Google Calendar is a little too restrictive. Instead of the phones stopping ringing at 5:30 dead, you want the phones to divert to voicemail or out of hours mobile when the last person leaves. Enter the status Gadget. This is a little like your facebook status, it is a small sentence (perhaps even one word) you can set from the Gadget. So, as an example you set the status to “we are closed” – from your iGoogle home page – very simple. In the background you will have already created an inbound call rule: “When a call comes in on 01442299282 then check if the word ‘closed’ is found in the domain’s status, if it is jump to extension 100 otherwise jump to 101” 100 happens to be voicemail 101 is the office call group – whatever – you get the idea. The second use is intended for mutli-tenanted situations – where you may have a central call handling reception (such as a serviced office). So, this time, one of the many tenants you have, sets their status from their iGoogle page “we are currently out of the office until 3:30pm”. Now their inbound rule might look like (same as before): “When a call comes in on 01442299282 then check if the word ‘out’ is found in the domain’s status, if it is jump to extension 100 otherwise jump to 101” The extension 100 actually is now a special rule which tells babblevoice to pass the call off to your reception. When reception take the call they also get the status in a message. This enables them to be much more personal when handling the call for the tenant. As usual, all our Gadgets can be found from the babblevoice main login page or from iGoogle search for babblevoice. The babblevoice team. November Issue In the last issue we introduced iGoogle, what it can do for you and a couple of ways babblevoice works with iGoogle. In this issue we expand on this by having a whistle stop tour of a few more of our Gadgets.