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August 22, 2006

PBX Parachute from Virtual PBX

When your PBX phone system goes down all of the sudden, you don't want to be in a situation where you've got to wait for the phone company to make repairs while your customers, employees and partners can't get in touch with each other.

Virtual PBX's PBX Parachute essentially creates a hot mirrored standby PBX that can field calls once the on-site PBX system goes down. Since many businesses PBXes are tied into the main power lines, a disruption in power can cause the phone lines to go dead. PBX Parachute can then route the calls to any preselected phone number. Employees can be working in a shelter, hotel room, relatives home or any other location.

If the business is using a 1-8XX number, then the phone line should already have a direct termination overflow (DTO), which will route all calls to PBX Parachute. Most local landlines also have a DTO that can be specified during the set up of parachute. If all else fails a simple call from a cell phone or outside line to the phone system can switch incoming phone calls over.

PBX Parachute can also be manually engaged by the business if they are aware of a possible outage. This gives businesses the flexibility to continue working through a planned power outage or routine maintenance.

Reservations Services International, Inc. (RSI), is using PBX Parachute? as part of its hurricane preparedness plan. RSI, a reservations company for dive trips throughout the Caribbean, makes thousands of travel arrangements for its clients by phone each year, and required a backup phone system to allow continuous business operations even during emergency situations.

PBX Parachute was put to the test by RSI in October 2005 when Hurricane Wilma hit south Florida and knocked out the travel agency's power for 10 days.

"We had just completed our implementation of PBX Parachute the day before Wilma hit,"? said Cheryl Arscott, president of Fort Lauderdale-based RSI. "Our existing PBX phone system went down but incoming calls were immediately transferred over to the PBX Parachute backup, which transferred the calls to our employees who answered from their homes or left voicemails for us to call them back. We didn't miss a single customer call and our business continued, virtually uninterrupted."

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