The Future of the PBX

Media: Comms Business

Date: June 2011

SpliceCom see Hybrid Voice as the future for the PBX – and the voice channel. Typified by SpliceCom’s Spectrum Architecture, Hybrid Voice offers consistent, best-of-breed connectivity whatever the customer’s preferences, might be; on-site CPE or hosted/cloud, in-house or out-sourced managed solution, traditional “tin” IP-PBX or virtualised application, CAPEX or OPEX payments.

“Spectrum’s Hybrid Voice architecture allows our partners to provide identical features and functionality, be it deployed on the customer’s site in a “blue box” or as a virtual server in their data centre, a hosting facility, or somewhere else in the “cloud” ” says SpliceCom’s Director of Marketing and Product Management, Robin Hayman. “The licences are the same whatever the implementation, allowing resellers to install a traditional CPE system today, but, should the customer’s needs change, be able to migrate this to a Hosted or Fully Managed solution in the future whilst delivering identical functionality.”

The flexibility of Hybrid Voice even offers advantages over the latest virtual PBX implementations. “Today’s virtual PBX offerings from our competitors take their traditional PBX feature set and allow them to run as a single image on a server in the data centre, delivering a one-to-one service, suitable for Enterprise class deployment – yet not on-line compatible with their existing hardware platforms to allow for multi-site, mesh networking.  Hybrid Voice allows both one-to-one and one-to-many services to be implemented, alongside the ability to run multiple PBX images on a single server. This makes it ideal for Hosted and Managed Services as well as SME and Enterprise requirements.”

Hybrid voice also addresses the Achilles Heel of today’s Hosted deployments, namely the ability to provide resilience in the event of the IP link to the Hosting site failing. “Hybrid Voice allows an optional, fully resilient Local Survivable Gateway to be deployed in a Hosted environment, whenever its required,” explains Hayman. “This Gateway delivers full PBX functionality, with local breakout to either ISDN or SIP, ensuring that a business remains fully functional, even in the event that the IP link to the main Hosting site fails. And in a traditional on-site CPE deployment, cost-effective dual-processing can be provisioned, without the need for extra “resilience” licences.”

At SpliceCom we’ve always been of the opinion that voice connectivity solutions are sold, rather than bought,” says Hayman. “Whatever the PBX looks like in the future and wherever its located, it will need to be both profitable and easy to sell and support by the channel if it is to be truly ubiquitous. For example, the concept of Hosted IP Telephony as it stands today is a good one, however, in reality it hasn’t succeeded as a mainstream channel product because it asks established resellers to change their remuneration models, from a single large payment up-front to smaller monthly payments over one or two years – or more. This has necessitated most of the main Hosted players migrating from a channel model to a direct sales approach over time. An all-encompassing PBX solution must engage the channel to be truly scalable,” concludes Hayman.