Before we lived in a world where Unified VoIP Communications were not yet a reality we first had Skype and Vonage emerged as market leaders in the consumer world. Then video was added as internet speeds improved. Mobile providers began to grapple with commercial issues of VOIP on their mobile revenues.
Next SIP technology allowed business customers to reduce the cost of voice traffic. This was done by connecting an alternative to the traditional PSTN, to their PBX telephone system. The capability and functionality remained on site, on hardware with a high reliance on the system maintainer to manage moves and changes.
As a result the intelligence began to move from site, to the cloud, with customers offered elements of self-service and modest capital investment versus a traditional PBX. In addition as well as hugely simplified multi-site solutions.
However, despite many providers offering hosted communication platforms for some years now, its not always been a consistent, stable experience businesses demand and expect, with hugely variable quality of internet access at the core of many issues.
Finally, we’ve reached the point where cloud solutions are delivering the feature. These are rich and robust platforms businesses can base their company communications on – adaptable to the changing workplace, simple to deploy, and secure. And now good quality, high speed internet access is now available to so many, whether fixed or mobile.
Meanwhile the pandemic has unquestionably accelerated growth of unified communications. Dunedin IT have spent much of the last 18 months helping many customers migrate legacy solutions to provide the flexibility their mobile workforces now need. And above all retaining a consistent experience for their customers.
Other drivers we’ve seen have included reducing costs, sweating existing assets such as Microsoft Teams and the near-future switch off of PSTN services (including ISDN). We’ve also seen home-working demand some inventive mobile solution when locations have been challenging for the fixed line networks.
Finally we can say communications are now truly unified and importantly, IT companies are leading the way as voice has become another application accessed over the company network rather than a standalone consideration.
Now conversations have moved on to adding value – compliant Call Recording, webchat, and conferencing are the topics for discussion now, where once they were around handset models and rackspace.
To conclude, in the world of communications, the question we’re left with is, as always, what next?
The clock is ticking, in 2025 BT will have switched off all their analog services.
Whether you have a solution from us or thinking about upgrading, let us demonstrate Dunedin IT Voice Platform (3CX) and Microsoft Teams Direct Routing.
