Recently, the Aberdeen Group, a research and analyst group for information technology companies and products, released results of a survey as a result of the past four years studying the best practices of more than 2,500 organizations seeking to optimize their collaborative environments. While it is a well known fact that hosted VoIP solutions provide strong business value in terms of cost, they wondered if this represented the full value proposition of cloud communications.
Hyoun Park, lead analyst in collaboration and integrated communications for Aberdeen, writes that pushback against hosted VoIP is frequently based on uptime and the reliability of communications systems, in comparison to on-premise PBX which has widely been considered a safer bet, Park explains, “because the equipment is locally available and can be accessed more easily in the case of a business continuity threat.”
While “one in the hand is better than two in the bush” has frequently been the perception, Park finds it’s not always the reality. He cites a recent Aberdeen Group research report on the matter, “Conquering the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt of Managing Integrated Communications," which found that of over 100 organizations, the top 20 percent of telecom end-users in terms of performance had “five percent of the downtime and one-fourth of the SLA-defined issues faced by typical respondents.” Also, the top-achieving companies were “more than twice as likely to use hosted communications compared to all other organizations,” Park reported, saying that this demonstrates; “the real-world usage of hosted VoIP is now strongly associated with improved uptime and reduced service impairment.”
Based on the obvious cost savings through the use of a hosted voice solution, the support advantages included with most managed voice services and now the service benefits in this maturing market, the readily apparent value for hosted VoIP is now much easier to communicate to those who handle the purse strings of an organization. By moving to a hosted VoIP environment, organizations move significantly closer to achieving the “five 9s" (99.999 percent uptime) and support that is generally only associated to enterprise-level accounts.
