By Todd Wirth, LightEdge Engineer
Businesses depend on voice communication. Even today in a world of text messaging and email, voice calls are vital to connect businesses with customers, suppliers and partners. Most enterprises have aging phone systems doing the bare minimum: making and taking calls. Times they are a-changing, however, and business people are expecting more features than most phone systems can deliver. People want features, flexibility and mobility. The cool thing is you can all of this without recycling your old system.
Think about your phone system like a car. The average age of cars on in the U. S. is 10.8 years. New Cars in 2012 have a lot more computer-driven features and with little doubt more (and bigger) cup holders than cars from 2001. The 2001 cars are still valuable.
With both cars and phone systems upgrading is inevitable. Upgrading either to get the newest features is unnecessary. You can add a GPS to a car and you can add SIP to your phone system.
Upgrading a phone system connection to SIP will add features, flexibility and mobility.
So, what is SIP?
SIP is cool.
SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) has become the default signaling protocol for next –generation phone systems. It is a data protocol much like the HTTP that you are using in your web browser right now to access this post.
SIP is flexible and allows phone systems to do more than would be possible with a traditional voice connection. It is also used to tie into other communication systems with relative ease and little expense.
Here is a quick list of potential features:
- Smartphone integration
- voice mail to email
- instant messaging and presence
- web based call control
- system redundancy
- advanced routing systems
To make this simple; People need to communicate clearly and quickly to conduct business. If a phone number is published for a business, it needs to be answered. People build processes to make sure that each phone call is answered. A phone system change in an enterprise can be a monumental task as it can break all of these processes and irritate users.
If you have a phone system that still has some life, LightEdge can connect it with Enterprise Trunking and make sure that it works the same as today. We can then work with you to leverage business-enhancing functions like:
- Having two sites share a call load
- Call forward to outside numbers such as cell phones
- Allowing your users to bring their own SmartPhone to answer or make phone calls without revealing their personal number to the world
- Giving each user a web portal to control their features such as call forwarding
- Providing your enterprise with flexibility for future growth allowing for incremental expenditures by easily adding Hosted PBX Phones to your service
- Promises of more integrations and improvements
SIP is the future and using Converged Access with Enterprise Trunking provides businesses with a smooth transition from today to that future.
Smooth is cool.
