There is no contest between hosted and premises PBX, but it’s not because there is a clear winner. It’s because both delivery models have a place, and customers don’t have to choose. This, according to panelists in the session, “Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX,” at the VON Conference & Expo, Monday.
Dan York, director of emerging communications technology, Voxeo Corp., said his company started offering a premises-based option in 2006 because certain customers required it.
To be sure, the requirement often is philosophical – a bias toward having the technology under their own roof. However, York said, it’s sometimes for a more tangible reason, such as regulatory requirements for control of data. “It’s easier to say, our box is behind a firewall,” he said.
Or if they have heavy integration with a database, they may not want it to go over the WAN for performance and security reasons. “Security and performance may require them to have data on site – not everyone has 100 MB Ethernet,” said Chris Thompson, senior product manager for ADTRAN.
But, the reality is that customers don’t have to choose. Hybrid systems incorporating both premises and hosted options are cropping up more and more.
York said failover to hosted is increasingly common. Mike Oeth, CEO of Junction Networks, said he has one customer that uses its services around holidays to handle excess call capacity.
Thompson added, for others, it’s a cap-and-grow strategy driving a hybrid approach. “If you have a small business with an old Norstar system – they don’t want to get rid of it, but they certainly don’t want to spend money on it,” he said. “Hosted service providers can offer a hybrid system where they can deliver a gateway to feed legacy interfaces to that old Norstar and allow them to expand using IP phones and do the interworking of the two systems back in the cloud [to enable 4-digit dialing, for example.]