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March 5, 2007

IP PBX - No Reason Why You Can't Have One

If you are still using the Centrix or analog PBX system from your phone company, you're missing out on cost savings, but more importantly, features available from IP PBX phone systems.

Research firm AMI Partners, writes that the global small and medium business (SMB) segment for PBX (IP and TDM) is set to reach US $6.7 billion this year - from about US $5.5 billion in 2005. Between 2005 and 2010, the cumulative growth rate will cross 11%, according to the latest study by Access Market International (AMI) Partners Inc.

AMI writes that competition in this market is huge including - global enterprise voice vendors and enterprise IT vendors, regional voice and IT vendors, hosted VoIP and broadband VoIP vendors, as well as from software vendors.

One of the competitors in this field is Fonality. They issued press release recently about Version 3.5 of PBXtra Call Center Edition, a full-featured call center for small-to-medium size businesses that supports agents working on premise, at home or from any remote location.

With this version of PBXtra Call Center it does not matter where agents are located because they can now seamlessly participate in their company phone system and receive distributed queue calls in the office, at home, in a hotel on a PC-based softphone or even from their car on a mobile phone. Designed for companies with two to 200 agents, PBXtra Call Center includes feature-rich call center capabilities such as branch office agent sharing, on-the-fly recording, barging, monitoring, text whisper/coach, web and phone agent log-in, real-time and historical graphical queues and agent presence management.

Pricing is $2,995 for unlimited seat licenses.

AMI Partners press release reads There are many drivers that are influencing SMBs to adopt IP-PBX, including a single converged network for voice and data, and affordable purpose-built solutions that meet the needs of SMB customers, "Unified Communications provides improved communications, collaboration, coordination, mobility and accessibility across the extended SMB enterprise," Mr Aggarwal says. "All this leads to a user experience that increases productivity, business value and adoption and thereby accelerates the IP telephony adoption curve."

AVST is launching CallXpress 7.9 which competes head to head with Fonality.

If you don't want to replace your phone system consider Gotvmail. If you want to replace your phone system, check out M5 Networks outsourced phone system.

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