Out of the Box IT
Osama M. Faris brings out of the box thinking about information technology into focus.
Posts Tagged ‘virtualization’
To host or not to host your VoIP?
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010At some point, every business makes a purchase decision about a phone system. As one of the communications tools most critical to a successful business, which phone system to buy is one of the most important business decisions your business will make. These days, lots of small and medium businesses are trying to decide whether to move to VoIP. If they do want to move to VoIP, a lot of them are trying to decide whether it makes sense to put their phone system in The Cloud (with a hosted VoIP solution) or to keep it on-premise.
The question these days is: which VoIP solution is right for my business? Not always an easy question to answer. In some cases, the choices are very complicated, and this series of articles intends to help small and medium businesses make good decisions.
In my last two articles, I talked a bit about The Cloud and what it means for small and medium organization. This article continues a series that articles that advises small and medium businesses on what to host and what to keep on premise, and how IT managed services fits into the mix. I’ll be answering questions about whether to host a VoIP phone systems with its own small series of four articles, starting with some basic terms, and then moving through some discussions in terms of evaluate price and value. I’ll end with a summary of key buying criteria to help you make an informed decision.
What’s a PBX and what’s a PBX replacement?
My very first phone system was a Betamax waiting to happen. Some of you probably remember the Betamax (Sony’s competitor to VHS). It was the HD-DVD of the video cassette world. It was a technical marvel, technically superior to VHS in many ways, except the ways that customers seriously valued. From a technology standpoint, Betamax was a great technology. From the standpoint of general customers, it was an overpriced and under-featured solution to the problem of recording home movies.
As a technology, public branch exchange systems (PBXs) are similar. PBXs were a great technology in the 1970s. But in terms of today’s business communication needs, a PBX is fairly one-dimensional and not the broad communications solution most business need. The first corporate phone system I ever bought was manufactured by NEC. It was a traditional PBX, which sat in a closet. It was fairly expensive. It did provide consistent and reliable dial-tone to the desk phones in my office, but in terms of helping me and my team effectively respond to customers, helping to manage my email, faxes, cell phones, customer data, and so on, it didn’t do all that much.
Today, to keep it simple, “the PBX” is rapidly evolving from a particular kind of device to a term that describes a solution to the problem of business communication (with a focus on voice communication). Some vendors refer to their offerings as PBXs, some as soft-PBXs, some include their PBX capabilities within “unified communications”. Some refer t their offerings as PBX replacements. From an education standpoint, the product category is a big mess.
My current phone system is a VoIP soft-PBX with unified communications. That means instead of using regular phone lines, it uses the Internet, and instead of being a specialized computer that sits in a closet, it’s software that sits on a Microsoft Windows server in my server. How things have changed! They’re poised to change even more over the next decade.
“VoIP-enabled unified communications”: a lot of syllables for a lot of benefits
As complicated as choices have become, the news is good for customers. Businesses no longer have to wed themselves to hulking, closet-monster PBXs for 5-8 years, paying 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars just to get dial-tone to desk phones, locked into the same brands of phones and other peripherals. Prices for a phone system are rapidly decreasing and more and more offerings come with value added software (e.g., unified messaging, instant messaging, service creation, and a lot of other things I’ll be explaining in the articles in this series).
Suffice it to say, there are a number of different “PBX replacement” technologies. Some of them are network devices similar to routers. Some of them are purely software. Some of them are PBX systems with VoIP capabilities. Sometimes they’re called PBXs, IP-PBXs, SIP-PBXs depending on the specific offering. It all depends, and that’s part of the confusion when trying to make a purchase decision. The PBX replacement that FAR uses is called NetVanta Unified Communications Server (made by ADTRAN). It provides VoIP-enabled unified communications (you can learn more about NetVanta here).
Voice over Internet Protocol-enabled unified communications (VoIP-enabled UC) and the perhaps even more onerous “communications enabled business process” (CEBP) are a lot of complex syllables to describe basically three things:
- A phone system that uses the Internet and similar networks to make and take calls (the VoIP part); it makes network architecture a little simpler, provides a single point of management and it lowers costs on your phone bills.
- Productivity tools that help employees respond their customers by phone, fax, email, IM and other tools more quickly, more intelligently and more professionally (the unified communications part). UC helps small and medium organizations look bigger.
- Organizational productivity tools that tie communications systems into back-office databases to help business as a whole work more effectively with customers (e.g., imagine a package tracking system that allows you to enter your package PIN and get an update on its delivery over the phone – that’s CEBP).
Easy, right?
What businesses really need to know is that today, almost all business communications solutions, whether voice, fax or data, should be a part of your information technology plan (that includes email, fax, instant messaging, operator consoles, call-routing, etc.). It’s no longer necessary (or advantageous) for these to be separate purchase decisions. Now that you have some ideas on the diversity of offerings to replace your PBX and some of the key terms, I’ll be talking about how to prepare your business to be VoIP-ready. Watch this space!
What “The Cloud” means to us earthlings
Monday, January 11th, 2010
First, what is The Cloud?
The Cloud simply refers to information technologies that are externally hosted or otherwise “virtualized”. For example, your Web site is probably hosted through an Internet service provider. It’s in The Cloud. If you’re using Gmail for email, your email is in The Cloud. If you have “hosted VoIP” or “hosted Microsoft Exchange”, then that means your most business critical tools are in The Cloud. If you use SalesForce.com, Autotask or other software as a service (SaaS) offerings, you’re using The Cloud.
For IT pros, The Cloud is just a new way to refer to a general trend in computing (usually referred to as cloud computing) over the last 20 years to move computing resources and applications off-premise. For businesses, using The Cloud means that they don’t have to worry as directly about administering, managing and provisioning the hardware and underlying software for those applications (along with some up-front savings). There’s nothing especially new about The Cloud (except for the recent round of hype).
Is The Cloud really gaining momentum? Reality bites.
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but The Cloud is still a fair amount of unrealized potential and, analysts and vendors aside, a source of confusion for us earthlings. That doesn’t mean The Cloud isn’t useful for some applications. It is. It’s just that small and medium business owners need to be careful to set their expectations accordingly and that IT professionals need to do a better job of educating customers about what the benefits and pitfalls of The Cloud are.
It’s always difficult to predict when a way of managing information technology is going to gain critical mass. Sun declared that the network was the computer in the 1990s. If you read the press at the time, we were all going to have thin-clients on our desks. Corel was converting Word Perfect to JAVA in anticipation of a swing in the market. Things didn’t turn out exactly as expected, did they?
That’s not unusual. Lots of good technologies and good ideas never transform the market. But that doesn’t mean The Cloud isn’t gathering momentum this time around. There are good reasons to believe that there is some truth to the hype about The Cloud. Security, bandwidth, decreasing costs for computing resources and other factors are looking very good for The Cloud, but there are rarely any guarantees with information technology. For now, The Cloud is still on the horizon, and FAR is advising clients to take a wait and see approach unless they have very compelling business reasons to switch to The Cloud.
What should small and medium businesses put in The Cloud and what should they keep on premise?
This is always the most difficult question to answer. It depends on the business. It depends on their costs and business model. It may even depend on the types of customers they service (their verticals). At FAR, we work with customers to put the right solutions in place for their needs. More and more, small and medium businesses, even if they have IT teams in place, need that kind of help from a company like FAR. What is important is using the right tool to meet the right challenge, and using the tools at your disposal (whether they’re in The Cloud or in your server room) in ways that work for your business.
But really, what should and shouldn’t small and medium businesses put in The Cloud?
Most companies can divide their information technology into two key groups: user productivity and related business systems (e.g,. their customer relationship management applications, their project management applications, and so on), and their core infrastructure applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, their VoIP phone system, their network and so on). These are general categories and some products straddle both.
The Cloud is sometimes a good way to address the needs of the first group. For example, FAR uses Autotask to manage its professional services automation. We love it. I love it. FAR also hosts a lot of our clients’ Web sites through a virtual Web server provided by an ISP. So, these are both in The Cloud.
The Cloud is often a bad (bad as in costly and potentially dicey) way to manage the second group (core infrastructure products). E-mail, phone services and unified communications, for example, are typically so critical to many businesses and so expensive to host over even a 2 year period that putting them in The Cloud doesn’t make much sense for many small and medium businesses. FAR hosts its Exchange and VoIP phone system on-premise for this reason, as do the majority of our clients.
What key factors should businesses consider?
The Cloud and on-premise solutions are not mutually exclusive ways to solve business problems. They are two different but increasingly related tools to solve the challenges many businesses face. There may be overlap between the two in the same business process.
For example, when I wrote this blog, I wrote it using Microsoft Word on my desktop computer. Then I uploaded it as an attachment to an Autotask project for the proofreader (into The Cloud). So, even though I didn’t write the document in The Cloud, we used The Cloud during the process; now that I am publishing it to this blog, the content is officially in The Cloud again.
Even though we could have used Google Docs to write the blog (and so, used The Cloud from beginning to end), we won’t be switching to Google Docs any time soon. Why not? Microsoft Office provides us with the right cost/benefit ratio and the features that we need. That’s really the best way to make a decision about what to put in The Cloud and what not to put in The Cloud: does it make financial and business process sense?
Beyond that, there are a number of factors to account, but the big questions are usually: What are the costs? How important is this information technology to our business? What level of service does this application require? In some cases, cost-wise, it may make sense to rent an application (in The Cloud), and in some cases, it makes sense to own (on-premise). In some cases, the business system is simply too critical or too complicated to put in The Cloud and an on-premise solution makes the most sense. In other cases, the level of service provided by an external service provider can’t match your business expectations or requirements. The answers to the questions will vary from business to business and from application to application.
The FAR Cloud
As a managed service provider, FAR provides its own “cloud” to our customers (The FAR Cloud, so to speak). We take the business challenges our customers face and put in place a seamless solution that combines on-premise and virtualized products and services with our boutique level of planning, execution, support and monitoring to meet their business requirements and to provide continuous improvement. We make sure that everything just works together.
That’s really the value that good information technology planning and execution provides (whether it’s in The Cloud, on-premise or a combination): reasonable peace of mind at reasonable cost. What FAR provides customers is that peace of mind extended to the whole of their information technology requirements. Over the next several blog entries, I will be giving you some of FARs most common answers to these questions and how The Cloud can be an effective part of your business.