Looking for a PBX? Consider the Cloud.

I’ve spoken of the virtues of a cloud PBX on many an occasion.  The reality is for the last 8 years, I’ve been running my phone system / PBX in a cloud for many reasons.  The most important is redundancy.

The system has had no downtime except for when I was applying maintenance upgrades.  My phone bills literally went down from over $500.00 per month to about $50.00 per month.

There are many benefits to running a PBX in a cloud.  For one thing, the system is fully redundant.  The costs are astronomically less (increase in ROI) and most importantly, you don’t have to play the capitalization game (for those of you out there that are the CFO types.

Your remote and traveling users can use SIP softphones on their laptops and have direct extension to extension dialing from anywhere in the world to you.  You can choose least cost routing and most importantly, the majority of those communications taxes go away.

You can administer the PBX via a web interface and make changes on the fly. The sound quality is better than land-line phones in most cases and if you’re running HD phones, you can have high-definition sound.

The cost of a comparable featureset would cost thousands more and in the case of an enterprise (mid to large sized company), you would expect to spend over 500K for a comparable phone system to run your call center.  Now you can do it for a fraction of the price.

It’s definitely worth investigating, but the most important thing to think about is disaster recovery.  In the event there is a disaster in your area, your phones don’t go down.  They can be configured to take voicemails, email the voicemails to your users, or even forward the calls to their cell phones.

A properly configured cloud PBX can run your business with no interruption.  That’s the most important thing.

As for 800 numbers, imagine paying 25% of the price per minute vs. what you’re paying now.  Need more capacity?  Just add more with a phone call to your provider.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the PBX in a cloud, please feel free to contact me.

I will be updating this post with some hard numbers and more details, but if you really want to consider this option, I suggest you contact me.  Advice is always free.

**Update** I added 2 CloudPBX offerings in my eStore that run on 2 of the most reliable cloud providers on the market.  We’re just missing one and the last one is going through a few mashinations with me to get it running.  If you’d like to deploy a cloudpbx or just try it out, consider signing up for one of these below.  There is no term and you can test with SIP telephones.

CloudPBX on Linode: $59.95 per month  [wp_eStore_buy_now:product_id:4:end]

CloudPBX on Amazon EC2:     [wp_eStore_buy_now:product_id:6:end]