Jeff Gigoux, Chief Product Officer with Ring Carrier (www.ringcarrier.com), says:

Hosted telephony is gathering attention because of the significant reduction in business’ CAPEX and OPEX; the ROI to make the transition can be months, not years in many instances. In an economic environment that is still very challenging, immediate cost reductions are realized by mitigating the human and capital requirements to deploy, configure and maintain expensive on site PBX equipment.

Hosted telephony has helped lower the cost for monthly communications service. Companies that offer hosted telephony are offering incentives to lower the upfront costs, which is quite attractive to SMBs, and an important requirement for this market segment to transition to VoIP.

Data centers should be prepared to be able to provide SLAs to ensure the hosted telephonyequipment is properly monitored, mirrored and immediately failed over to a redundant system in order to guarantee service uptime at 99.9% of the time.

Remote employees can make extension to extension calls within the system and be situated anywhere the world there is a broadband connection!  This type of system would have cost several millions of dollars to implement not so long ago and isolated to Fortune 500 companies with very large IT infrastructure budgets.  Today, it can be done easily and extremely cost effectively even for a company with less than 10 employees and no IT department.