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We provide a host of telephony platforms for our customers to allow them to take advantage
of telephony services without having on-site equipment. The terms "hosted" and "cloud communications"
really are very interchangeable. They mean one and the same thing. The term cloud is
relatively new and simply refers to services that are provided by a third-party provider
in the cloud.
We believe that customers should have access to a telephony platform that comes without
any hidden costs. That platform needs to be stable, scalable to business needs and agile
enough to adapt and be able to accommodate things that the business requires. There are
many reasons for a business to choose a hosted platform over premises based piece of equipment.
I think firstly, there's the capital expenditure. Because the system's rented, you can plan
the expenses very easily. Also, there's no in-school or maintenance costs associated
with operating on a hosted platform. Secondly, to reduce risk, the system's already there,
it's already in place, and it's already working.
It's going to scale with your business and you don't have to make decisions as you would
with premises based equipment, for example, where you would need to buy maybe, a 25 user
system now although you only have 10 users, you don't need to plan your capacity in advance.
I think also this [xx] professionalism. Typically for a small business, you need to provide
things like IVR's, and actually the feature sets that you require from a hosted or telephony
system are a lot more than a large business would provide.
By using a hosted system you can unlock those features far more easily on a standard monthly
fee than buying an expensive in-house system. There are numerous technical benefits of running
on a hosted platform. First thing's is the lines and the access. We will take care of
the connectivity to the public telephone network and actually routing the calls which means
you don't need to worry about legacy circuits such as ISDN on your premises.
On the access circuits chances are you've already got an existing connection to the
internet but we can use that to group the calls over as well. Operationally, you don't
need to worry about back-ups because the provider will maintain that. You don't need any support
staff on site to maintain any on-site equipment. These benefits of reliability and scale, reliability
as the platform provider, we provide fault tolerance to make sure the platform runs 24/7.
And in terms of scale, with multi-tenantism can run from one to thousands of extensions
very easily. We also have the ability to integrate with on-site equipment. This is probably best
explained with an example. Maybe we use the example of looking up a sale and record of
a customer assistant.
So when a call comes in, we would look up the name rather than the numbers so we can
present that with the call. This really puts us apart from one of the mail-hosted telephony
platforms. By virtue of using a hosted platform, location independence comes out of the box.
So it doesn't matter whether you're connecting from the office, whether you have some remote
workers, whether you have people connecting from hotel rooms while they're on the move.
That all happens by default. One of the trends we all say is start-up companies are exclusively
using cloud based services. Particularly, they will getting their email services, their
application services, from people like Google Apps and now the telephony services all from
the cloud.
This is because of the availability of high speed internet connections such as broadband
and AFM circuits. We got customers right through from agricultural, right up to finance. We
have them on a simple level, of simple to telephony right through to call centers. The
choice of using a hosted telephony platform is really more about how you buy it, and your
capability of buying what you need.
You may need 10 extensions today and not know what the scalability requirements are, and
it's easy to scale a hosted platform down, or up to maybe 20 extensions in a year's time.
As a good example, one of our customer's marketing moves, moved to the Foehn telephony platform
and saved 50% on their annual communication's cost.
That's a very good reason for moving. There's also good reasons for owning your own PBX
on-site. The hosted telephony platform we provide at Foehn is based on the same technology
and offers exactly the same features as our own premise equipment. The moving and transitioning
from hosted to home premise or home premise to hosted or actually having a mix of both
for disaster recovery is perfectly feasible and very easy to do.