6 Reasons to Upgrade Your Business Phone System

WSI Comandix on January 7, 2022

Businesses replace their desktop PCs about every five years. Mobile devices are replaced more frequently, especially for companies that allow employee-owned devices, because many consumers upgrade their smartphones and tablets as soon as they qualify for carrier discounts.

Yet many organizations tend to cling to old phone systems for 10 to 20 years. To give you a sense of how old that technology is, the iPhone was introduced 10 years ago, and the founders of Google purchased the google.com domain 20 years ago.

Why don’t organizations upgrade or replace their phone systems? In many cases, the business value of a new phone system is grossly underestimated. If the old phone system still works, there’s no sense of urgency to replace it. Or is there?

Here are six reasons why you should consider upgrading from a legacy phone system to a leading Voice over IP (VoIP) platform.

1) A New Phone System Provides Cost Savings

This is the slam dunk of a selling point for a new VoIP business phone system. A VoIP system eliminates the need to maintain separate voice and data networks and can help reduce telecom costs. With a cloud-based voice system, you can choose the features you want and pay for the service as a monthly subscription, with minimal upfront investment.

2) Valuable New Features

Today’s VoIP platforms give users access to conference calling, call presence, call routing, “find me, follow me” and many other features through an intuitive interface. All of this functionality can boost productivity and enhance customer service.

3) Application Integration

Unified communications platforms allow users to instant message, schedule and hold virtual meetings, and share files from their desk phone or softphone. Customer relationship management and other business applications, such as SalesForce, AMS 360 and NetSuite, can also be integrated with the phone system to streamline workflows.

4) Mobility Issues Resolved With New Phone System

With today’s VoIP phone systems, calls can be automatically forwarded to a mobile device, where the user can access the same tools and services they would find on their desk phone. This is far more efficient and reliable than expecting a caller to leave a message and wait for the recipient to retrieve the message and return the call.

5) New Business Phone Systems Offer Simple Scalability

As your business grows in terms of personnel and remote locations, a new phone system built on a VoIP framework makes it easy to add users, offices, devices, numbers, services and capacity without reinventing the wheel.

6) Elimination of Obsolete Technology

Old phone systems may still work, but the technology will eventually fail. When that happens, good luck finding parts and someone to make the repairs. Repairing outdated technology is a slow, expensive process, and every minute of downtime will cost you money. Invest in a new phone system now before the old system breaks down.

Why the Right Expertise Matters

Anyone can buy or sell a phone system. Choosing the right system for your organization and getting that system to do what you need it to do is a different story. That requires collaboration with data networking and communications experts. What features do you need? Would a cloud-based or on-premises system make more sense? Will your infrastructure support a new system? How will you keep your data secure?

Eastern DataComm will walk you through the planning, design, deployment, adoption and support phases of your phone system implementation, answering these and other questions to help you maximize ROI.

Let us show you how a new business phone system can help you reduce costs and do business better.

How Communication and Automation Improve School and Office Safety

WSI Comandix on October 5, 2021

school safety

Tragedies involving violence at our schools and places of work have made safety a top-of-mind issue across the country. Many states, counties and municipalities have passed or are considering legislation that mandates increased security measures and greater cooperation between schools, law enforcement and the community at large. Public- and private-sector organizations are dedicating budget dollars to security technologies and training programs designed to enhance school safety.

Traditionally, schools and larger office spaces have focused on perimeter security such as video surveillance and access controls to prevent intruders from entering their facilities. While these tools are beneficial, experts agree that crisis planning and staff training in lockdown procedures play a more critical role in safety. Lockdown drills are recommended best practices that enable schools and offices to test security protocols and give staff an opportunity to practice procedures. With proper training, human beings can assess situations, make quick decisions and communicate vital information that saves lives.

But the human element can also be a weak link in security. Training and drills can at best simulate an emergency. In an actual crisis it’s difficult to predict how human beings will react.

School Safety Case Study

Delaware Valley Regional High School District recognized this weakness and sought an automated emergency notification solution that could be activated from virtually anywhere on campus. The district asked Eastern DataComm to implement our Lockdown and Emergency Notification System (LENS), which promptly notifies teachers, students and staff of an emergency situation and to immediately initiate lockdown procedures.

Old and Outdated Paging System

Delaware Valley had a 30-year-old PBX and a poorly functioning PA system that had been extended over time. The project involved implementing a ShoreTel Unified Communications system, revamping the PA system and integrating both with the L.E.N.S. Entering a code on any ShoreTel phone triggers an automated system that calls 911, alerts administrative staff and causes a series of prerecorded announcements to be played over the PA system.

Adding Strobe Lights and Display Messages

Because audible announcements cannot always be heard, the system also activates strobe lights, and the district is planning to add digital signage that will display emergency messages. Wireless transmitters using the same FM bands as first responders extend the system to outdoor facilities, parking lots and other areas where wiring is cost-prohibitive.

Launch Emergency Procedures From a Mobile App

The emergency procedures can also be initiated via a mobile app installed on smartphones. This enables administrators to utilize the L.E.N.S. remotely, and allows teachers to summons help in the event of an emergency on a sports field or other outdoor location.

In adopting LENS by Eastern DataComm, Delaware Valley has been able to meet best practices set by the New Jersey State Police for rapid response in a crisis. The New Jersey School Security Task Force, among other authorities, have prioritized the implementation of emergency communications systems as a means of improving school safety. The automation enabled by the LENS speeds response times and reduces confusion, panic and misinformation by ensuring that information is disseminated swiftly and clearly.

No school or office wants to be the site of the next tragedy. Let us show you how the LENS can help you enhance safety through automated emergency response and notifications. Contact us today to discuss your emergency notification needs.

Public, Private or Puffy: What Exactly Is the Cloud, Anyway?

WSI Comandix on July 6, 2017

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption is on the rise, according to the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report, which found that organizations are using an average of eight different clouds. Eighty-five percent of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy, with 41 percent of IT workloads in public clouds and 38 percent in private clouds.

Multiple studies expect up to 60 percent of workloads to be running in the cloud by the end of the year. The cloud enables organizations to minimize capital investments in infrastructure, paying for the IT services they use as an operational expense. It also enables organizations to access IT resources with minimal risk, and scale those resources up or down as business needs dictate. Cloud-based phone systems, video conferencing solutions, and storage and backup services are among the most popular cloud applications.

However, there remains a general lack of understanding about what the cloud is and why organizations are using the cloud, especially in upper management. In a 2016 Forrester Research survey, 96 percent of CEOs said they don’t fully understand cloud computing, and 91 percent of IT company CEOs don’t know exactly what their companies are doing in the cloud.

Much of the confusion about the cloud stems from the practice of “cloud washing.” Many vendors enable to customers to access the vendor’s services via the Internet and market these services as cloud apps. However, connecting to services via the Internet does not a cloud platform make.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing is “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” The NIST requires a cloud platform to have the following characteristics.

  • Provisioning and launching of resources through an on-demand, self-service portal without service provider assistance.
  • Broad network access that is not limited by proprietary standards and devices.
  • The ability to quickly add or remove resources from a shared pool according to business need without service provider assistance.
  • Tracking, measurement and reporting of cloud service usage to ensure optimization and billing accuracy.

There are three primary cloud deployment models. A private cloud is used by a single organization and can exist onsite or offsite. It can be managed internally or by a third party. A public cloud offers virtually unlimited resources that are shared by multiple organizations or the general public. It is hosted and managed by a cloud service provider. A hybrid cloud uses a combination of on-premises infrastructure and public and/or private clouds. All operate independently but communicate to allow data and applications to flow back and forth between environments.

The RightScale report found that private cloud adoption dropped from 77 percent to 72 percent as more organizations focus on public cloud deployments. Public cloud is easier and less expensive to implement and maintain than private cloud. Although the main advantage of private cloud has always been control and security, public cloud providers have made major security gains in recent years.

To be clear, there is no perfect cloud formula that applies to all organizations. Some can’t use public cloud because of industry regulations. But, in many cases, public cloud enables organizations to tap the benefits of the cloud quickly, with less effort and at lower upfront costs.

By understanding basic cloud characteristics and deployment models, you can make the right decision based on your business goals and processes.

Contact Eastern DataComm to learn how our cloud solutions can give you simple, cost-effective access to state-of-the-art voice and data services.

How to Simplify Your Telecom with SIP Trunking

WSI Comandix on June 1, 2017

If your business is looking to simplify its phone management, SIP trunking might be the relief you’re looking for. By eliminating the need for maintenance and installations, your teams will have to spend less time managing telecom issues and more time focusing on core business matters.

Fast Implementation

A new SIP trunking solution can be deployed within 30-60 days, or even a few weeks depending on the scope of the project. Because SIP trunking installation is handled behind the scenes, primarily by your SIP trunking provider, you will be able to get up and running without any disruption to your business. There is nothing additional to configure at your end, provided you have a strong connection to the Internet and a SIP-compatible business phone system.

No Maintenance

Once you’re up and running, increasing capacity is as simple as contacting your provider. No more hard wires or installations required – all you have to do is request additional trunks to scale your solution. Your SIP provider will also manage the network and disaster recovery so you don’t have to. With a reliable vendor, redundancy is automatically baked in and your provider will handle all of the failover destinations if a hardware or carrier issue should occur.

Single Vendor

Many SIP trunking providers offer other communications solutions as well. If your provider does, you’ll have one point of contact for all of your communication needs. No more pointing fingers or needing to call multiple vendors to determine the source of the issue. Instead, you’ll have one call to make to get to the root of the problem. By having one vendor, you’ll be able to save time and provider a seamless experience across all of your communications solutions.

Remove Geographic Barriers

With SIP trunking, you can integrate with local PSTNs to streamline interactions between employees in multiple locations. Because remote locations can be added easily to the same network and enjoy access to the same communications applications as workers at headquarters, both regional and international offices benefit.

Support for Growth

As your business grows, you currently have to forecast adding new lines in advance to prevent capacity issues, plus invest a lot of time and money into physical space and installation management required to turn up additional lines. With SIP trunking, call capacity can be increased on-demand to support unlimited concurrent calls. Hence, you don’t have to spend time installing additional lines when business demands change or get caught in a bind if unexpected seasonality occurs. Plus, you won’t have to account for future grow and overpay for lines you aren’t using.

Is Your Old PBX System Hindering Your Employees’ Productivity?

WSI Comandix on September 6, 2016

Most employees today eschew the traditional 9-to-5 workday in favor of work-life balance and the ability to work when they want (and often where they want). The result often is an increase in productivity and a more satisfied workforce—a win-win for companies and their employees alike.

Is your PBX system supporting your employees or hindering them? Are employees able to have the full functionality of their desktop phone wherever they are? Are they able to access customer information through the PBX to streamline customer interaction? Are they able to collaborate with colleagues on the fly by simply pressing a button?

Chances are, your current system offers basic calling functionality and not much else. Plus, you’re probably using a separate collaboration platform, which means employees must maneuver two systems to do their job effectively. The result is a slow, kludgy system that does anything but enhance productivity.

To truly be productive in and out of the office, your employees need more. They need a complete communications and collaboration system on one platform to help them work smarter, faster. They need:

  • The ability to have all of their desktop phone calling features on any device—PC, tablet, smartphone.
  • Collaboration capabilities—including audio and videoconferencing, instant messaging and online meetings—no matter where they are.
  • Integrated customer information at the touch of a finger, to enable richer customer contact experiences.

Most legacy PBX systems lack mobility, flexibility and collaborative capabilities, keeping employees tethered to their desk or forcing them to use their mobile phones to conduct business while away from the office. Either way, they don’t have the power of an integrated communications and collaborations platform.

A cloud-based communications system may be the answer for your company, providing a robust, full-featured, integrated communications and collaboration platform that’s accessible anywhere at any time. Not only do your employees get all the tools they need to do their jobs effectively and efficiently, your business benefits from a system that’s scalable and flexible, and at a price that’s much less than the cost of upgrading your current PBX (which most likely doesn’t include collaboration capabilities).

Other benefits of a cloud-based communications system include:

  • The ability to get back online quickly should the unexpected happen, such as a natural disaster, fire or weather-related event.
  • Low or no hassle for the IT department, since a cloud communications system is a hosted system managed offsite.

In today’s business environment, your workforce must be productive no matter where they are. Take a look at the benefits of a cloud-based communications system and what it can do for your company.  Contact us here for cloud-based communications system solutions.

4 Reasons Why SIP Trunking is the Perfect Match for UC Solutions

WSI Comandix on June 27, 2016

SIP trunking comes with many benefits – reduced telecom costs, cloud functionality and ease of capacity expansion are just a few. When paired with other communications solutions such as unified communications, businesses are able to seamlessly integrate those benefits with UC functionality such as desktop sharing or instant messaging. By extending your onsite UC solution with SIP trunking, you’ll be able to improve employee productivity, reduce costs and harness the flexibility of the cloud.

What is SIP Trunking?

SIP Trunking is a way to deliver voice and media over the Internet. If your business phone system, or PBX, can connect to the Internet and use the SIP protocol to make calls over the Internet, then SIP trunking can be a means of delivering high quality, reliable digital voice services for your business without the cost of additional hardware.

There are many benefits associated with SIP Trunking, but here are our top four reasons why SIP trunking and UC are the perfect pair:

  1. Consistent Experience Across Offices

SIP trunking supports voice and media data so you can run your all communications efforts over the same network. By removing geographic barriers, you’ll be able to deliver a consistent experience across your different office locations and remote employees, and increase productivity by giving your employees access to the same systems and data.

  1. Improved Business Continuity

Carrier diversity and redundancy is a key benefit of SIP trunking. If an outage does occur, your business phone system will have access to multiple carriers through your SIP trunking provider’s network to ensure uptime. Top SIP trunking providers invest a great deal into their network to ensure automatic failovers that support disaster recovery needs. Plus, your vendor will manage all of the carrier relations and maintenance so you don’t have to.

  1. On-Demand Scalability

When your business grows or if you have seasonal fluctuations in call volume, you’ll likely need to add phone lines to support those changes. With SIP trunking, your telecom connectivity can quickly scale as you need it to. Call capacity can be increased on-demand to support unlimited concurrent calls, while ensuring you never pay for more than you need. Instead of forecasting advance installations and incurring the associated costs, all you’ll have to do is contact your provider to increase the number of trunks.

  1. Stepping Stone to Cloud

SIP trunking is a great alternative if you’re considering the cloud but aren’t quite ready to make the leap. By combining onsite UC solutions with SIP trunking, you’ll be able to maintain the control of your onsite solution while gaining cloud benefits such as flexibility to grow and simplified management.

Have you thought about pairing #SIPTrunking with your #onsite #UC solution?  If so, give us a call today!

Hosted or On-Premises? Factors to Consider When Choosing a Phone System

WSI Comandix on August 31, 2015

A hosted or cloud-based Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system offers a number of advantages. If you’re already using VoIP-compatible phones, which many organizations are, capital costs are minor. Operational costs are also reduced because management and maintenance responsibilities shift to a third-party service provider. You pay as you go for the services you need, using the provider’s enterprise-class technology and security tools. A hosted system can also be deployed quickly and easily, resulting in faster time-to-value.

A hosted VoIP phone system does indeed offer many benefits and represents a sensible model for many organizations. However, that doesn’t make it the right approach for everyone. With an on-premises system, you choose the technology, own the infrastructure, and retain complete control of your system. That gives you more flexibility to customize your phone system to suit your needs. You don’t have to worry about a service provider’s outage knocking your system offline, and you’re not at the mercy of the service provider’s rising costs when your needs expand.

Consider the story of The Hawkswood School. The school decided to have its cable service provider implement a hosted system. It took nine months to install the system. The phones didn’t work. They had connectivity issues. They couldn’t call 911. After six months of failed attempts by third-party technicians to fix these and other issues, the Hawkswood School contacted Eastern DataComm.

We quickly came to two conclusions. First, a hosted system was not the best approach. Second, by switching telecom carriers, the school could implement a better system, fully offset the cost of new technology, reduce monthly telecom costs, and eliminate the issues experienced with the hosted system.

Whether you choose a hosted or on-premises VoIP phone system, you need to first evaluate your existing infrastructure, applications, services, processes, and future needs. You need to analyze workloads and use cases, and conduct a cost-benefit analysis. You need to identify what specific objectives you want to achieve by upgrading your phone system and make sure the approach you choose is aligned with your organizational strategy.

Let’s say you’ve weighed the pros and cons of hosted and on-premises VoIP phone systems, and you’ve determined that a hosted system is the best choice. You still have to choose the right cloud service provider. Does the provider’s solution deliver the right functionality? How will the provider ensure that your performance requirements are met? What will the provider do if terms of your service level agreement are not met? Does the provider have relevant experience with organizations and industries similar to yours?

Eastern DataComm can help you choose a hosted/cloud or on-site VoIP phone system, recommend programs to help offset costs, deploy the new system seamlessly and efficiently, and provide the necessary training and support that enable you to take full advantage of the solution. Let’s sit down and discuss your organization’s needs and determine which approach is the right fit.

When Disaster Strikes: Looking to the Cloud for Business Continuity

WSI Comandix on April 6, 2015

It’s a Monday afternoon. Calls are rolling in, there are countless voicemails to respond to, and business is humming along. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Paul the sales manager knocks on your door with a perplexed look on his face.

“Do you know what’s wrong with the phone system?” he asks. “There’s no dial tone, no access to voicemail, and no calls coming in.”

Ah, yes — the feared phone system failure. Whether caused by a clumsy utility worker, a big storm, or some other unpredictable problem, phone system issues can create enormous headaches. In fact, if your company hasn’t implemented any kind of disaster or redundancy plan, those failures significantly disrupt business continuity and productivity.

You can’t afford that kind of stagnation. So, you close your laptop, pull out your cell phone, and call your telecommunications provider. An hour later, you finally get someone on the line. Two hours later, you’ve diagnosed the problem. And, right around closing time, the phone system is finally working again. Problem is, you and your team have lost a day of productivity. And your customers aren’t happy.

A Simpler (and More Effective) Way to Manage Disaster Recovery

Until recently, the only way to ensure this scenario didn’t happen to you was to duplicate all of your systems and implement a complex disaster recovery plan. Both of those require significant investments in equipment and infrastructure, which is why many businesses have instead chosen to roll the dice and hope for the best.

Today, there’s another solution that is cheaper and much more efficient. Cloud-based phone systems have greatly advanced system recovery and business continuity in the face of an outage.

Because cloud systems are hosted virtually, there’s no need to worry about the types of disastrous scenarios that used to disrupt on-premise or landline phone services. If a phone line is cut, cloud-based systems are totally unaffected. If Internet service goes down, phone calls can be re-routed to backup cell phone numbers or other business offices.

Simply put, recovery and continuity is a non-issue.

3 Key Business Benefits of Switching to the Cloud

While that kind of peace of mind is pretty compelling on its own, there are a handful of ancillary benefits of the cloud to consider, as well. Here are three particularly important ones:

  1. Cloud-based phone systems are less expensive up-front than on-premise solutions — and that’s with built-in disaster recovery and redundancy planning.
  2. Unlike on-premise solutions, cloud-based phone systems are totally scalable. If you need to re-direct call flow from one site to another, it’s very easy to do without any disruption in call quality or service
  3. If a total outage strikes, wiping out your office’s power and Internet service, cloud-based phone systems allow employees to connect from anywhere — their home, a coffee shop, or wherever they can tap into power and a data connection.

With these benefits in mind, the question, then, is why you wouldn’t switch to the cloud.

Truthfully, there are still compelling arguments for on-premise phone systems, and it’s important to consider your goals before making any major change. But if connectivity, business continuity, system redundancy and reliability are important to your company, employees and customers, you’d be wise to take a closer look at the benefits of the cloud. If nothing else, it will help you better plan for network disruptions you can’t possibly anticipate. Contact us today for the best cloud solutions.

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