Rob Lith

How hosting enables customer responsiveness in small business  With instant gratification a fact of everyday life, a strategy of customer-centricity is a hallmark of competitiveness. Market leaders employ cutting-edge technologies that connect them more closely with their customers, enable a better understanding of their needs and allow shorter response times.  A few well-hyped technologies are […]

A great deal has been said about cloud computing – although companies still have a limited understanding of what it is and how it impacts their business. Simply put, the cloud is a set of services and technologies that enable the delivery of computing services over the internet in real-time, allowing end-users instant access to […]

Cloud-based communications has clear benefits, but whether those benefits will accrue to your organisation depends on a number of factors. If your enterprise answers to any of the questions in the checklist below, you may be in the market for a hosted PBX. Are you likely to expand? Entities with significant potential for branch-like expansion […]

When we adopted cloud-based telephony for our own communications in 2009 it was more than just a show of good faith. We were mindful of the fact that all organisations go through major changes, so it was with a view to accommodate future growth and displacement that we adopted cloud. Nothing stays the same Out […]

There can be no doubt that businesses have to employ technology if they hope to compete. When it comes to investing in cloud computing and virtualisation, the return on investment may very well be the ability to remain in business. VoIP and mobile telephony According to a 2008 BMI-TechKnowledge study comparing SA’s telecoms and broadband […]

Eliminates wasteful infrastructure practices and improves customer service Call centre satisfaction surveys – both from a customer’s and owner’s perspective – frequently point to frustrations that can be resolved with the use of sophisticated technology. In this regard, virtualisation deserves special mention as a crucial enabler of modern call centres. It allows flexible scaling of […]

Insist on “elastic” scalability and responsive provisioning at low cost One of the most topical issues in call centres currently is the “on-demand call centre”. It implies being able to grow and shrink your agent pool in line with the ebb and flow of demand, without being concerned with details like being under- or over-provisioned […]

As high mobile telephony and data costs are steadily whittled down by regulation and innovative Voice over IP-enabled communication models, exorbitant roaming costs are among the last remaining bastions of high mobile charges. A worldwide phenomenon, exorbitant roaming costs came about because of the price-making power of mobile market oligopolies. But even as these powerful […]

The three biggest current trends in telephony are all related. Along with the rise of mobile phones and mobile Voice over IP (VoIP), there is a related demise of landlines, with big implications for telephony (as well as broadband internet). This is true around the world. Global In developed countries, landlines have decreased by almost […]

Hybrid cloud/on-site PBX deployments best current assurance of quality, reliability On the rise Hosted or cloud-based telephony is undoubtedly on the rise. The rise is not yet stratospheric, but the fundamentals are sound. Adoption is top-down: At the high end of the converged (Internet Protocol or IP-based) PBX market, hosted telephony has made bigger strides […]

While the Internet Protocol (IP) has enabled multiple new service provider models (such as the bundling of IT services with telephony), less airtime has been given to its enablement of innovation in enterprise business models. Don’t pay for calls The main benefit of IP calls is that they’re free as long as they remain on-net […]

Things change, sometimes very quickly and not always out in the open. So it is with hosted or cloud PBX solutions. Since BMI-TechKnowledge published the latest South African PBX market report (April 2011), there has been a marked growth of cloud solution models and vendors in this space, pointing to an increasing need to accommodate […]