White Paper: The Advantages of IP-PBXs for Small and Medium-sized Businesses

Introduction

Since Voice over IP (VoIP) is revolutionizing the telephony industry, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been taking advantage of its many benefits. Thisis one reason why legacy Private Branch eXchanges (PBX), circuit-based automatic switchboards for telephone systems, are being replaced by Internet Protocol-based PBXs (IP-PBXs). The IP-PBX transforms these enterprises by giving them the power of Local and Wide Area Network-based communications and the functionality of larger-scale systems. These days, the trend in new IP-PBX shipments exceeding those of traditional PBX is a result of improved infrastructure leading to better productivity, manageability, reliability, and an expanded set of advanced features.

According to Wintergreen Research, global IP-PBX markets are expected to reach $26.9 billion dollars in the year 2009. It took Cisco Systems three years to ship one million IP-phones, and just three months to ship the most recent million. As the market in this new frontier develops at a steady positive rate over the years, growth is brought by the replacement of proprietary analog voice systems with systems that do handle the Internet with combined voice, data, and video. VoIP is currently making serious inroads into the SMB realm due to convergence, connectivity and quality of service (QoS).
Since there are a lot more SMBs than there are larger enterprises, it only makes
sense to target the broadest base of potential customers by developing specific IP telephony solutions to meet their PBX needs. An IP-PBX at the customer’s premises connects to an Ethernet switch on a LAN or WAN and can relay voice traffic over a Telco T1 line. IP-PBX systems streamline the way calls are handled by two methods.
First, telephone switching equipment resides at the enterprise instead of at the carrier. Second, instead of being transmitted via the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), calls are transmitted through a data network; managed and configured with an Internet browser. This effectively eliminates the SMB’s administration costs of depending on an outside PBX vendor for controlling connections and extensions.

The transition from a legacy PBX to an IP-PBX can be handled in stages or in one procedure. Once this move has been made, any organization can expand their network to include branch office endpoints and home office nodes, augmenting the savings of toll-free calling. The new digital system is both flexible and scalable and its operation is very economical. With the improvements that come with an IP-PBX system, a variety of telephony integrations can be accessed with one call management application, which can deploy software resources to monitor, trace and analyze call patterns; add, modify and delete users; and change filters and permissions. With an IPPBX at the epicentre of SMB business services, savings are also accrued in terms of administration time and the monetary costs associated with connection rates. IP-PBX and SIP Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has been adopted for use by all major players in the IP-PBX realm. SIP is used to establish and terminate connections between user agents (UA). It enables enterprise-wide communications features, such as instant
messaging (IM), Presence, and multimedia elements. SIP is a peer-to-peer protocol where clients use TCP and UDP ports 5060 to set up and tear down communication sessions. SIP translates telephone numbers and extensions into IP addresses that are transmitted over LAN, WAN and the Internet to their destination endpoints. Connectivity to the carrier PSTN network is achieved by either external or internal gateways.

SIP is the rising star in VoIP communications. Many vendors are now releasing products, such as gateways, routers and IP-phones, which are fully SIP compliant. SIP has adopted an E-mail like address for users, like SIP: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , so it is easy to associate a SIP URL with any user’s E-mail address – a convenient attribute.

IP-PBX Features
The IP-PBX has a set of standard features that enable enterprise employees, from the PC-based worker and the road-warrior to the SOHO-enabled contractor to maximize productivity.
Several of these primary functions are shared with the Plain Old Telephone
Service (POTS) PBX. Some of these shared features are:
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Companies can better from improved customer service by offering a full-featured IVR. The IVR enables employees to access their voicemail and account information 24/7/365 and also gives clients contact with corporate human resources and information using a telephone keypad. Time-saving auto-attendant features include: language choice, call transfer by extension, by last name or to a group, and operator access (dial 0).

Voicemail: With an IP-PBX, voicemail messages are digitally encoded. This means that users can access, save, delete and forward them using a computer, in addition to the traditional telephone methods. The IP-PBX administrator can select how voicemail storage is decided among users by defining limits in their user profiles. This includes the total number of received messages and the total disk space allowed for storage of all messages on the server.
Call Forwarding: This feature allows calls to be forwarded to a secondary telephone number or a different extension. It is an excellent method for helping callers locate an agent when they are not at their desk or out of the office. Calls can be forwarded to a mobile phone or to a colleague’s number unconditionally, on no answer, on busy or according to a certain schedule. With this feature, users can send their desk phone traffic to any other phone, so they don't miss any important calls at home or on the road.
The IP-PBX also has unique features that are not found in the TDM PBX. These features have great advantages in productivity. A few of them are as follows:
Unified Messaging: With unified messaging, voice messages that are received in one’s voice mailbox are also sent to a user’s E-mail inbox as E-mail messages with attached sound files. They can also be viewed and listened to from within a browser-based application.

The advantage of this method is that voicemail can be accessed from anywhere
at anytime, 24/7 and voicemail sound files can be conveniently forwarded to another user and archived for future reference.

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD): This feature dynamically distributes transferred calls to a group of operators or agents, which saves time by eliminating manual call routing tasks. During heavy incoming call volume, agents can concentrate on supplying better service by taking full advantage of ACD. With First Idle Extension, incoming calls always start with the user extension with the highest priority weight. If the first extension is busy, the call goes to the user extension with the second priority. When the first extension becomes idle, the next call goes back to that extension. With Most Idle Extension, incoming calls are routed to the user extension that has been available for the longest time, resulting in balanced workloads for employees. In the Circular Call Transfer scenario, incoming calls are routed to the dialled user extension and continue once though every extension in the group using a circular sequence.

Hunt Group: The Hunt Group is a time-saving call transfer distribution mechanism. User extensions are ranked under one communal extension and are assigned different call priority weights. When the communal extension is dialled, the user extension with the highest priority weight will ring. On no answer, the user extension with the second highest priority will ring, and so on.

Presence: SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) is a standard that is implemented by the advanced IP-PBX. Processing logic is used to determine user settings based on their assigned permissions, preferences and presence status. This feature is useful when an individual wishes to broadcast their availability to others. Status options include available, not available, busy, in a meeting, out for lunch, and on vacation. When a user has a certain presence status flagged, calls can be transferred to a different extension or number. This feature improves corporate productivity as a whole, since customers don’t have to be kept on hold or be left hanging without a rapid response to their inquiry. Presence is not an available feature with TDM systems.

Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM): Using this feature, employees within a business environment can promptly communicate with each other without having to be disturbed by a telephone call or read an E-mail. It allows users to multitask while cooperating with other internal agents to assist one another in providing better service to customers. For example, using IM, software developers can trade code snippets with each other for bug fixes and program customization.

Call Recording: A reliable and easy-to-use feature, conversations can be recorded for order verification, quality monitoring and training requirements and saved to the user’s voice mailbox for future use. The result is that they are backed up onto a server and can be recovered in case of an emergency.

User Call Permissions: Call permission criteria, such as restricting (or enabling) long distance/international calls can be created by the IP-PBX administrator in the software’s call permission profile.

Find Me/Follow Me, Call Park and Call Pickup (Pick Up Parked Call): These functions are all part of the same set of features that allow a user to “log into” any phone on the system, effectively making that phone behave as if it were their own.

Inter-Branch Office Mobility: The administrator configures a multi-branch architecture in order to bypass tolls between the branches. This is done using a multi-routing algorithm at the branch level. For example: A company XYZ has three branches based in Montreal, New York and Detroit. Each branch has its own IP-PBX solution. The administrator of the IP-PBX in Montreal configures a route (over IP) to terminate calls for the New York and Detroit branches. With this they will not incur long distance charges. A similar routing plan can be executed at the New York and Detroit branches. Today working on the road or working from home doesn’t have to mean less quality of service. Road-warriors and remote-workers experience the same first-rate high quality services as that of their corporate coworkers, while maintaining full access to all of the IP-PBX’s features and functionalities.

Customers can dial the remote user’s extension and the call will be connected directly to the user, no matter where they are, as if they were sitting behind a desk at the corporate office.

Dialexia’s IP-PBX Advantages
A primary advantage of the IP-PBX is convergence. Convergence is when Internet access, VoIP communications and telephone services exist over the same line to an end user. Convergence signifies scalability, since as a business grows; long-term maintenance and operation costs are reduced. Convergence also means flexibility, since an agent can use their account from any area – whether it is picking up a call from another location in a building, from a branch or home office or on the road. Using VoIP architecture, all their services are available from anywhere at anytime without being hardwired into a telephone on a cubicle desk. With convergence, a rich set of communications services, such as Presence, Instant Messaging, video and telephone calls, can all be accessible using one software application. It inspires SMB management to consider how offices can be better architected with communications cementing together all business processes.