This is my fourth and last article in a series on VoIP and unified communications. Having talked about the key terms, how to put together a basic evaluation checklist, the offerings, price and value, in previous articles, I’m going to talk a bit about what else is important — those considerations that are difficult to quantify and calculate, but that should still play a role in every purchase decision.

In my pervious articles, I talked about FAR’s decision to host our own espresso machine. When we decided to buy our own espresso machine to save money, we didn’t look at the cost of getting our beans wholesale and buying a coffee roaster. Not just because it wouldn’t go with the office decor. It also wouldn’t have made business sense.

A business should decide what is really integral to your business and what is not, and buy the tools that are integral to success, but consider renting the nice-to-haves. For most small and medium organizations, it makes sound financial sense typically to buy an on-premise phone system; if they have concerns about maintaining it, they can outsource the support and monitoring to a business like FAR. Just putting the suggestion out there!

Think about the service.
Where the espresso metaphor becomes a little problematic is in the question of service. I tried having Vince (my CMO) make espresso for me, but it just wasn’t the same as seeing a smiling, happy barista. On the other hand, if I want an espresso at 2:30am, I just phone him and get it delivered. He knows who signs his cheques (no, seriously, I would never phone Vince past 11pm for something that small).

But imagine a coffee shop where the line-up may be really, really long one day, and short another. The barista may be very nice and knowledgeable or very apathetic depending on the day. Having your own machine in the office means you can make your espresso when you want, and if you make it yourself, you know the service is going to be spectacular. Now, multiply the important of good coffee by the urgency of the most business-critical system you have, your phones.

The problem with making a business decision based purely on service is that it’s often difficult to determine what level of service you’ll be able to expect consistently from a provider until after you’re signed up. If you’ve ever signed a long-term service contract, you know that the quality of service doesn’t always hold up over time and that you rarely find out until it’s too late. Business should be careful to research their service providers to ensure that they are not just committed to good service but transparency in their business dealings.

With an on-premise solution, you have much greater control over service. You have the choice of hiring internal resources to manage your system. Or you have the choice to hiring an IT managed services firm like FAR.. Or you can rely on the vendor’s professional services and support organizations. Or you can do all three to solve specific problems. It’s entirely up to you, and you can make the decisions you think best for your business. With hosted VoIP, you’re one customer among potentially hundreds vying for the same resources when the system goes down, and your ability to draw in additional resources if often extremely limited.

Don’t believe everything you hear about disaster recovery
Many hosting providers tout disaster recovery as a key feature of their VoIP offer. At FAR, we take security, continuity, failover, redundancy, robustness and recovery very, very seriously. When it comes to disaster recovery, we advise our customers that what’s important is to have a comprehensive plan that protects their corporate data, their network infrastructure and their most valuable resources: their people. Disaster recovery is critical.

But it’s worth noting that any good on-premise VoIP system should provide redundancy and disaster recovery. Adtran’s NetVanta’s solution does and at a fairly reasonable cost. Also, keep in mind that the disasters that can happen to your business can also happen to your hosting provider’s business and the lines and cables in between your business and their business. Hopefully they have a lengthy disaster recovery plan of their own. If you do decide to use a hosted service provider, be sure to ask about this.

If up-front capital expenses are a problem, think about leasing an on-premise system
Even though the business case for an on-premise system is strong, many small and medium businesses want to get their feet wet with VoIP first before they make a long-term buying decision. This is understandable, but businesses should know that leasing an on-premise system is also an option, depending on the reseller. Leasing is a lot like renting, and there are economic advantages and disadvantages, but it can sometimes help your business to better structure costs.

Prices are also decreasing generally. The old, fairly expensive PBX systems of just 10 years ago are coming down rapidly in terms of their pricing, and typically, PBX replacements like Adtran’s NetVanta are even less expensive. There are free, open-source solutions. However, these often require a fair amount ofprofessional services and support to make them operational. The nice thing about a solution like NetVanta is that it’s inexpensive, very quick to install and deploy, and there’s a lot of end-user productivity functionality out of the box. In any case, businesses don’t have to buy Cisco or Avaya just to get a reliable PBX or PBX replacement anymore.

Remember, the features these days are more in the software, less in the hardware
In theory, a hosting solution provides a clear and compelling argument in terms of delivering new features when compared with a traditional hardware PBX, but in practice, this isn’t as good as it sounds. A hosting provider can deliver new features at any time – if the hosting provider deems it appropriate, if it fits with their business model and if they hardware and software decisions they’ve made allow for it. There are no guarantees, and the features available today and down the road may vary substantially based on the technology your VoIP solution provider puts in place.

With Adtran’s NetVanta UC Server on other, similar, software-focused solutions, to get a powerful new phone system with the latest features, we just upgrade the software. It’s very cost-effective and simple. Yes, we’re dependent on the vendor to add new features, but NetVanta’s software also provides a service creation environment. We can build our own phone-based applications whenever we want. The system is mostly drag and drop and it easily hooks into corporate databases.

So, should you host or not host?
What FAR recommend to clients is that they come in for a demo of Adtran’s NetVanta UC Server before they make a decision. If they like it, then they get a very powerful, very cost-effective phone system that really opens the door to individual and organizational productivity that empowers every employee in the business. If they don’t, then worst case, they get a free espresso and are able to make a clear and informed business decision based on the available options.

And if they come in to talk about VoIP, I also talk to them about their network, their security, their Website, their email and, most important, how information technology relates to their business process and how FAR can help them with all of those things. A phone system is just one business tool in the information technology arsenal these days.

In my next couple of articles, I’ll be talk about some of these technologies and whether putting them in The Cloud makes sense. Be sure to check back!