Call Management

Media: Comms Business

Date: April 2011

Businesses today have to be able to see into the future as well as look at and learn from the past. Key employees need to view the information that enables them to improve the way their company operates and the manner in which they serve their customers. What’s required is a dashboard through which they can ramp up the levels of their responsiveness, a critical requirement in today’s ultra competitive market place and one that’s key to gaining a competitive business advantage.

Small PBX Market (sub-50 extensions)

Media: Comms Business

Date: March 2011

“The three key drivers for winning business in the sub-50 extension PBX market are now very clear – applications, applications and applications,” says Robin Hayman, SpliceCom’s Director of Marketing & Product Management. “Prospective customers no longer ask “Has your system got feature x?” or “Can your pbx do y?” now its very much “Show me the difference your solution can make to my business”.”

“For the SpliceCom Community, Mobility, Call Recording and Historical Reporting have proven to be key application areas in this segment over the past 12 months,” continues Hayman. “The other thing we’ve found is that the desire of smaller organisations to understand exactly what’s going on in their business – and how best to utilise the resources they have – has led to real time information transitioning from the Call Centre and going mainstream. Demand for Business Dashboards and Wallboards has really ramped-up over the past year.”

Upper-Mid Sized PBX Market (50-100 extensions)

Media: Comms Business

Date: September 2010

“The 50-100 extension market still represents our core market for maximiser, but over the past 12 months we’ve seen the way in which Unified Communication is delivered to these customers’ - and how it’s paid for - begin to shift. Traditional CPE sales via the channel still predominates, however Managed Service offerings delivered by our partners and based on maximiser XS and/or 5 Series Platforms and Hosted solutions from telecom providers like O-bit – again based on maximiser XS and sold via the channel - have started to become increasingly significant for SpliceCom. In each case the features, applications and benefits delivered to the end-user are identical, it’s just that they now have a wider choice of exactly how their telephony is delivered, who manages it and how they want to pay for it, be that through CAPEX or monthly expenditure. This is the very essence of Telephony as a Service (TaaS),’” says Robin Hayman, SpliceCom’s Director of Marketing & Product Management.

SIP Trunks

Media: Comms Business

Date: September 2010

The benefits of SIP trunks, when compared with ISDN have been well documented.

• Easy Porting of Numbers; When using SIP Trunks it’s very easy for business to take their telephone numbers with them, irrespective of where they’re moving to. This is because of……
• Non-geographic numbering; With SIP, telephone numbers are no longer fixed to a geographical location. This assists smaller businesses to portray themselves as much larger with a national presence, and provide local numbers where there is a high density of customers/prospects or in cases where a geographically focussed market campaign is to be run.

Business Continuity

Media: Channel Business

Date: July 2010

“A Business Continuity plan should take into account all eventualities’,” says Robin Hayman, Director of Marketing and Product Management at SpliceCom. “There are those events that on the surface might appear far less trivial than those of fire and flood, but which can be just as damaging where “business as normal” operation must be maintained. It’s therefore essential that the three “R’s are considered as equals when putting such a plan together: Resilience, Redundancy and Recovery.”

Managed Telephony

Media: Comms Business

Date: May 2010

Hosted Telephony’s been grabbing all the headlines over the past few years, but that’s likely to change with the advent of Telephony as a Service (TaaS), which is all set to shake-up the Managed Telephony marketplace (along with Hosted Telephony and good old “tin” sales as well).

Up until now there’s been two basic models for the deployment of telephony; the Hosted model, where the PBX/Call Control is located “off-site” as far as the customer is concerned, and the CPE model where it’s handled on site. Those providing Managed Telephony have employed both models depending on their customer’s historical needs. Think of this as a set menu, when what’s really required is a la carte – the ability to mix-and-match both models within a single network, on a customer-by-customer basis as required. On site call routing with a single IP trunk for “cloud” connectivity to other offices, mobile/home based employees and PSTN breakout - with the option of local ISDN connectivity for resilience.  And direct IP connectivity back to the same “cloud” for smaller offices and those working at home. One system, with a single point of management, offering different delivery options based on each company’s specific needs. This is the vision of the future of voice that TaaS offers.

Call Management

Media: Comms Business

Date: March 2010

By their very nature, 3rd party Call Logging and Management applications will always be a compromise. Most have been designed to work with as many telephone systems as possible and are therefore good at providing basic information and reports. But with no standard in existence for either the call logging output, or the data contained therein, getting to the real “nitty-gritty” information required to provide business critical reports and company wide analysis requires a close working relationship with each PBX/Unified Communications vendor and means that it would be impossible to deliver consistent and identical information across different platforms and suppliers. Presentation apart, which is more a feature of what’s offered by the computer operating system they’re run on, these applications have changed very little over the years. Most simply don’t have the architectural flexibility to adequately adapt to meet the very different demands now being placed upon them by “pure” IP telephony and Unified Communications. Unification of multi-site networks, staff mobility and employees use of multiple handsets/numbers all readily spring to mind.