One of the oldest, yet still most essential business resources is one's phone system--commonly referred to as a PBX (short for "Private Branch eXchange"). While technology has greatly altered the internal workings of the PBX, its importance to business remains unchallenged. For those who doubt this, unplug your business' phone system for about 5 minutes and see what happens!
The PBX is how a business organizes and manages its telephone calls, so that customers connect to the right people and so that business actually gets done. If you have a business, you need a PBX.
The PBX is, if anything more important now than ever before, as businesses increasingly service customers farther and farther away from their physical site. The PBX is the nerve center of your business' telecommunications. No matter where it sits, no matter how it is managed, that is what the PBX does.
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| Your PBX (no matter where it sits) |
What about all the hype about getting rid of the PBX and putting everything "in the cloud"? Understand that the hype is exactly that: hype. Yes, businesses can and should take advantage of Internet-based and cloud-based technologies to get the best PBX implementation possible, but moving to the cloud doesn't eliminate the PBX from your business, it merely relocates it to an hopefully better networking environment.
(Trivia note: The PBX was actually among the first "cloud" applications, dating back to the 1960s in the form of CO Centrex services marketed by telecommunications carriers).
The question is not "Do I need a PBX" but rather "What PBX do I need?" This is the question that addresses what role a PBX--and telecommunications overall--plays in your business.
At the broadest level, businesses need phone systems that are robust, reliable, and cost effective. The desire will always be for lots of features, and for few if any licenses.
At Voice The Right Way, we build our PBX solutions around the Open Source software Asterisk, the leading Voice Over IP platform in the world. Leveraging our expertise in phone system design with the software expertise of Asterisk's sponsor Digium, we are able to assemble phone solutions that meet our customers' needs exactly.
Unlike commercial systems which require costly licenses to enable various phone features, Asterisk solutions have most basic features built in at no extra cost. Here are but a few features that are "baked in.":
- Ring Groups
- Call Queues
- Auto-Attendant recordings an IVR systems
- Voicemail
- Call reporting and analytics
If the core Asterisk system does not have a feature already, we can in most instances design a solution using Asterisk to fill that need, again with minimal costs. As part of fulfilling the requirements of being reliable, robust, and cost effective, the software is also highly flexible and extensible.
What makes Asterisk an excellent foundation for PBX solutions is that it runs on regular PC and server hardware. Everything needed to make an Asterisk PBX function can be had from literally any computer hardware vendor. Not only does this make the hardware less expensive overall, but it makes recovering from hardware failure easier and faster.
You need a PBX because you want your business to succeed. The PBX you need is one built, supported, and maintained so that you can focus on your business. The "right" PBX is always the one built the right way--the right way for you, the right way for your people, the right way for your customers. The "right" PBX is one that uses standard "off the shelf" computer hardware that can be sourced from anywhere.
At Voice The Right Way, that is the only type of PBX we design, build, or sell!
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