Recently, discussions in the Telecom industry have pitted on-site and cloud-based phone systems against one another. I have often wondered as a telecom professional offering solutions for both, why the two are so disparate. There are many compelling reasons for both solutions, but I am not going to beat a dead horse in this article perpetuating the argument. In the spirit of peace, love and understanding, I am going to talk about how these two diverse environments have already begun and will continue to move closer together by highlighting the major features that should reside in the cloud and some that make sense to manage locally.

The Cloud Phone System

Auto-attendant

While the auto-attendant can make sense to host locally for a single site company, hosting the auto-attendant can make a lot of sense for multi-location companies or single site locations with a lot of remote or mobile users. Imagine a multi-site company with many diverse phone systems. This is very common for a company whose growth has come through acquisition. If the auto-attendant was located at each location this would not be ideal, from a corporate cohesion perspective. An auto-attendant in the cloud would bring all of the disparate locations together into one system while providing a strong level of disaster recovery. In this kind of setup an outage at one location could not bring down the rest while maintaining a unified corporate image.   This approach would also make it easy to add more acquisitions or new locations, quickly bringing them into the corporate fold.

Voicemail

Once you have your auto-attendant in the cloud it makes perfect sense to also move your companies voicemail to the cloud. This would allow a more uniform method for user access to voicemail. Mobile users would have the same procedure for checking voicemail company wide. It also helps for disaster recovery and resilience since it is not affected by a single site outage. Management and administration is simplified as there is one location.

Remote & Mobile Users

By its very nature a cloud based phone system is better suited to handle the needs of remote and mobile users. These users would have one standard way to connect  that is managed centrally by the company’s IT team.

Call Recording

Call recording is something that can easily be done locally or by a cloud system, but the cloud has major benefits for scheduled recording since it is a conduit for incoming calls and can record calls going to any site or user. Ad hoc recording is sometimes a better fit for a local system since  it can easily spread out the resources.

Advanced Call Routing

Some carriers provide this today, but being able to route and reroute calls is definitely better left to the cloud. Imagine if a multi-site company has inbound calls routed to their headquarters, but an outage has made routing the calls impossible. The cloud could make the decision to automatically reroute the calls to another location. A cloud system could also route based on time of day or by geography.

The On-Site Phone System

PBX manufacturers have recognized these challenges and recently have built options to host the main corporate PBX in a data center. This is generally referred to as centralization, but in essence it is a cloud application. Even with PBXs moving towards the cloud there are certain features that lend themselves towards the site.

Overhead Paging & Facility Integration

While there are a lot of cloud integrations available today, there are still hardware requirements on site. There still needs to be something to integrate with overhead speakers for paging and to integrate with access management systems. There are paging integration hardware options that make this easier to do from the cloud, but they still require local intervention. Companies like Cyberdat and Bogen have led this charge with IP solutions.

Local Music On-hold

Many companies, even multi-location companies, want a local friendly feel. One way to do this is with local radio for hold music. This integration requires an on-site system to enable. This is still a relatively untapped area for the cloud.

Local Call Management & PSTN Failover

Having a local PBX also has its advantages when a data connection goes down and the local office needs to fail to the PSTN. For this to work it must have the ability to take over local call control. Some cloud enabling routers have the ability to take over call control and route calls over the PSTN, but these are still located on site. Router companies like Adtran, Edgewater Networks and Ingate all have routers with this capability. They allow local phones to fail to the PSTN even if the Internet is down and the cloud application is unreachable.

Summary

With on-site PBXs moving towards the cloud and cloud based applications using on-site hardware, the line will continue to blur between these offerings. Over time they may even merge into a unified offering as PBX manufacturers and cloud service providers work to integrate their offerings. Hopefully in the future, phone service will be boiled down to simple, low cost, high value solutions.

“Some people say I am a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

Tags: bandwidth, cloud, phone system, Phonebooth, Sean Rivers, telecom