That leads to the question…

If the market makers are putting all this time and money into cloud technologies, then why have some organizations been slow to adopt?  Well, that probably has to do more with fear and a lack of understanding than anything else.  You see, most people are afraid of change and the idea of moving their infrastructure off-site can be hard to swallow, especially when they just spent the last 15-20 years developing an on-premise or data-center environment for their business, and now may be faced with migrating their infrastructure and applications to the cloud.  Or they may be like millions of small businesses who think that the cloud is something that has a large price tag tied to it.  This could not be further from the truth.  Actually, don’t tell anyone, but the cloud starts off at $0.00 and works its way up from there, depending on the type of business tools you want access to.  Microsoft and other cloud service providers offer FREE Office Apps and an entire suite of tools on their Windows Live™ service that you can use for zero dollars and zero cents.  (We may be in trouble for letting the cat out of the bag.)   

We hope you found this information helpful.  Please remember to leave your comments below and share with your personal and professional network.  Make it a great day!

4C takes a quick look at Windows Live Hotmail w/ Office Web Apps and SkyDrive for online storage.

"Accessing and sharing documents online saves me a ton of time. Here’s how to do it."

— Matt Fleckenstein, Director
Office Product Marketing Group

We hope you evaluate and enjoy Microsoft Office Web Apps. We think they are the perfect online sidekick to Office applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Using Web Apps, you can put your documents online and get to them from almost anywhere. Once you save your documents online, you can also share them with others.

Here are a few articles with step-by-step directions to help you access and share documents using Office Web Apps:

Access an Office doc from a web browser.

Learn how to view your Office documents online—or see those sent to you by others.

Share documents.

See how to share documents using a web browser,* so others can view and make updates to them.

Click Here – to use Web Apps

Watch the Getting Started video
Get free support at 4C Communications or Microsoft Answers

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How Does Office Web Apps Compare to Google Docs?

Here’s to doing more with your documents!

*An appropriate device, internet connection, and supported browser are required. Some mobile functionality requires Office Mobile 2010, which is not included in Office 2010 applications, suites, or Web Apps. There are some differences between the features of Office Web Apps, Office Mobile 2010 and the Office 2010 applications.

Need a more advanced set of business tools. Purchase Office 365 starting at $6.00 per user per mo. Click Here

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Business Advantages

For small and medium sized businesses looking to simplify management of their environment, both the Cisco OnPlus service and Windows Intune system management can provide a tremendous business advantage. Giving an outsourced managed service provider visibility and remote access to your local environment will dramatically reduce the cost of on sight IT personnel while shorting repair response times. Providing centralized management systems to internal IT personnel can free up time by eliminating the need to be in front of PC’s to diagnose issues or update Windows or third party software.

Cloud based systems also provide organizations with the ability to take advantages of future upgrades without paying for costly software or hardware upgrades. Below, we identify what’s new and what is on the horizon for Microsoft’s Windows Intune Cloud Service Offering.

What’s new — in Intune 2.0
The 2.0 version released in October added very welcome capabilities.

• Software distribution: You can deploy both Microsoft and third-party software through the Windows Intune service by creating software packages (in the form of .exe, .msi, and .msp files) and uploading them to a cloud storage space that is reserved for these packages.
• Third-party license management: You’re no longer restricted to managing just Microsoft volume licenses. It’s nice to now have a one-stop shop for all licensing.
• Improved hardware reporting: The new reporting options help you keep track of both hardware and software.
• Improved policy conflict: When Windows Server’s group policy conflicts with Intune policies, you can now resolve them through the administrative console.
• Remote task improvements: You can now initiate full or light malware scans, update signatures, and reboot the system.

Other new features include a better interface and a new read-only access role so that administrators can let other people run reports and such, without the ability to make any changes.

What’s coming in Intune version 3.0
I hope someone at Microsoft takes the hint and resolves the remote connectivity issue in the forthcoming Intune 3.0.

In version 3.0, Microsoft has already said it will help Intune connect with other servers and manage additional systems. For example, Microsoft plans to let Intune connect with an on-premises System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) deployment, as well as with Forefront Endpoint Protection and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Already, for $1 more per user per month, Intune 2.0 lets administrators use the tools in MDOP, including virtualization capabilities like MED-V and APP-V. Microsoft also plans to integrate Intune with Office 365 and some mobile devices.

I’ve liked Intune right from the beginning. The pricing is sound and the features, which continue to improve, are exactly what’s needed for a small business — except for that remote desktop connection hassle. I hope Intune 3.0 works out that kink.

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Q: 4C Communications is different from most companies: Tell us how the model developed?

Ok…well it started when my brother and I were working together on a project in Napa. We were working with an ISP, helping them adopt and integrate a hosted communication platform that included SIP and Voice Over IP technologies, and some other hosted applications. This was pre-cloud, but still the cloud. It had been the first time, in four years, that we had worked together on a project and it was an exciting new time for both of us. What I discovered during this time was interesting; first was that internet technologies was a growth industry and second, we both had a passion for contribution. My brother was big into sports all through college. He wrestled and did quite well in high school and in college. I had a heart for contribution for years and had supported nonprofits, like the American Cancer Society, in my free time. So, we started to work on figuring out how we could tie our passion into our business so that we could support our community as we grew. That is how 4C was born. It is structured as an L3C, which is a legal form of business entity considered a low profit limited liability corporation. Now, don’t get me wrong, we are committed to making a profit however, what we are committed to over and above making a profit is creating programs that impact our community and the world around us. An L3C, which most people are not familiar with, is a bridge between nonprofit and for profit companies. Our fiduciary responsibility is to create socially conscious programs first and profits second, whereas most companies responsibility lies in creating profits for their members or shareholders, which can place some decision makers in compromising situations. If you take a look at what has happened in business over the past several years, you can get a feel for what I am talking about. So, you see, down to the way that we are structured, our focus is our community and what we can do to improve it rather than just making money.

Q: Can you give a one-minute version of your business presentation

The thing that really sticks out for me, and why I am so excited to offer our products and services to other businesses, is that I use the tools every single day. Over the past several years, my wife has been ill with kidney problems and would be bed ridden for days at a time while she was recovering from a hospital stay. These medical challenges were coming every 1-3 months, so it would pull me out of the office for 3 to 5 days at a time. The challenge was that we never knew when she was going to be hospitalized, so there was no planning around it. So, I went to work on creating an environment where I could work from home in support of my wife and our four girls while remaining engaged with what was going on in the office. What I realized was that without the mobility and suite of business tools that we developed through 4C, there would have been no way for me to keep up and be productive at work. It was a hidden blessing to have been forced to use and adopt cloud technologies long before most businesses had considered them. What I experienced was something that I knew most companies would need and want, a set of business tools that could be accessed from virtually any device and give companies and employees the ability to work from virtually anywhere.

Q: What do the 4C products look like?

We have a suite of services that companies can subscribe to that are delivered through the cloud. What we are doing is taking what we earn and learn and putting it right back into our community with our Donation-4-Nonprofit program. Our suite of products are picked only if they support companies with reducing costs or increasing mobility, agility and productivity within the organization. They range in functionality from communication to electronic record management, managed firewall or managed Linux or windows servers, to accounting and file sharing. We have a broad array of products and services delivered in a low monthly subscription model. Again, the key is to get these tools into businesses owners’, managers’ and IT professionals’ hands at as low a cost as possible. The byproduct is the removal of support, maintenance and upgrade costs of the application. We also remove the need for specialized personnel or training and provide a suite of on–demand business applications that companies can pick and place within their organization to meet the needs of their business.

Q: You mentioned the 4C Donation-4-Nonprofit Program, what is that?

4C commitment runs deep. We believe that our success will be directly proportionate to the amount of people we help, so our goal is to help as many people as possible. One of the ways we are doing this is through our Donation-4-Nonprofit Program. We give our customers the ability to designate a nonprofit or club of their choice and, upon approval, 4C will donate 5% of proceeds subscribed to by the individual back to their nonprofit beneficiary. We also give customers the ability to pick one of our existing nonprofit beneficiaries or nominate one of their own. In addition to the 5% donation from an individual’s subscription services and other customers supporting the same cause, 4C donates another 5% back to all of our nonprofit partners, for a total of 10%, into community nonprofits to support programs that our customers are passionate about.

Q: What would you like people to know about your business?

We are passionate about what we do. We believe that business technology is the great leveler in business, and companies that embrace technology, automation, workflow and mobility will have an advantage over businesses that do not. We want to educate, to encourage people to know their history and to remember where we came from and what has happened in the past 20 years. The greatest indicator of the future is the past, and the rate at which technology and the global economy is changing is accelerating. Be prepared for when the economy turns around. If you are ready when the world takes notice, you will be able to handle the growth and scale your business and you will be able to capitalize on the new globalized economy. If you are not ready, it will not matter if the world takes notice or not, you will continue to do what you are doing today. Cloud technologies and applications will give companies the ability to get and keep more customers, which is the primary objective of most businesses. If you have been waiting for things to get better, STOP. They already have. While most business owners sat back and waited, the wealthy got wealthier with billions earned in bailouts, the poor hunkered down and the gap between the classes grew. Small and medium businesses make up the majority of the innovation and income in this country. It is time to get committed to having it be different, and the transformation starts today. This is our commitment…

One of my favorite quotes is, “What is the difference between inspiration and motivation?  Motivation is where you grab hold of an idea and run with it.  Inspiration is where an idea grabs hold of you and takes you to heights that you never dreamed possible.”

So, what inspires people?  What makes them excited to get up early, go home late, and love doing it?  It is a cause, think about it.  When you think that you are working towards a higher cause, then you have energy that you never thought you had.  You can be and do more than when you feel lost or in limbo.

Inspiration is powerful and companies can benefit from developing their organization around a cause.  By tying products and or services to worthy causes and rallying their employees behind those causes, companies can add excitement, enthusiasm, energy, and, most importantly, inspiration to their workforce.

4C has spent the last several years researching how internet technologies can impact businesses and, more importantly, impact the communities in which we work.  Our intention is to create something unique in the market place;  to create a technology company that is less about what the total cost of ownership is (TCO) and  more about what we can be and do in our local community to make it a better place with what we know and love.  You see, when you focus on something, it expands and our focus has always been on our community, contribution, and commitment to the people we work for…our customers.

This has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunity in the nonprofit community, giving us access to work with great companies like Napa Valley Education Foundation, Grants For Good Foundation, CRUSH Inc. and The Crosswalk Community Church, just to name a few.  One thing all these great organizations have in common is great causes.  These cause driven organizations have people that work joyfully each day and do it for little or no pay.

Now, I’m not talking about cutting employee pay, quite the contrary.  I believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to work for a fare wage.  What I am talking about is developing a cause driven organization to improve employee performance and morale.  For -profit companies can learn a lot from the nonprofit business sector about what inspires people.

4C demonstrates this focus with our Donation-4-Nonproft program, where nonprofits can receive free hosting and email services and gain access to our team of Technology Coaches to support them with the challenges they face every day.  This holiday, we have also been actively working with programs developed by Comcast, CRUSH, and The Home Depot to support our local community with everything from discount internet services, discount PC’s starting at $149 , home improvements, food programs and services for families and children stricken by poverty and abuse.  For information on the 4C Donation-4-Nonprofit program  or our other community programs, please visit and like our Facebook page at facebook.4c-comm.com Please join us this holiday season and into the new year as we commit to raise $100,000.00 for charity.  Happy Holidays from all of us here at 4C.  Please remember to share this message with your network.

The small and medium sized business landscape is changing…and changing far faster than expected due to the adoption of internet technologies, aka, The Cloud. Although most of us believe this is a new technology trend, cloud technologies have been around since 1997 when Yahoo first introduced their web email application, Yahoo Mail to the public. The growth of the cloud & computing is expected to create 2.4 million jobs in the next four years in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, according to Cloudtweaks.com. The prediction comes from a report released by IT company, EMC and a United Kingdom think tank.

Welcome to the information age!

The internet has led to a new age in business…the information age and the birth of the information worker. Today we access and are exposed to more information in one day than a person in 1890 was exposed to in his/her entire life. As Americans, we are exposed to the equivalent of 200 newspapers every day worth of information. This has grown 600 times since 1986 when the internet first began transmitting information over the world wide web. In 1993, it was estimated that the internet carried only one percent of the information flowing through existing telecommunications channels. By 2007 the internet is estimated to account for ninety-seven percent of all telecommunications information. This is why more and more companies are flocking to the internet to get and keep more business.

So how does this affect my business bottom line?

What this does is accelerate the learning process and in response the evolution of business. The worker of the modern age, and well into the foreseeable future, will be the information worker. That is a person who doesn’t necessarily have a tremendous amount of experience, but has the tools and know-how to get and assimilate more information than their coworkers. With the economic slowdown, globalization and other pressures forcing small and medium sized businesses to innovate and collaborate with their teams more effectively to stay competitive (with the right tools), the information worker will be able to get and use more information than their once more experienced more qualified predecessors. The new worker won’t be the most qualified or knowledgeable, but the one that is able to assimilate the massive amount of information that will be thrust upon them in this new age. Companies can adopt cloud technologies or Hybrid Cloud technologies to provide a more user friendly environment for their information worker centric staff. Whereas three to four years ago, these type of environments were only reserved for enterprise organizations.

My Staff… What should I expect?

The eco-boomers are here.  They are tech savvy and are loyal to themselves, not your company. They are more likely to switch jobs every 1-3 years than any other generation before them. What does this tell us…invest in your onboarding and training process, automate and streamline everything to insure that you don’t spend a moment more on training new staff members than you need to. The eco-boomers are called this because their size rivals the baby bomber generation, their predecessors that fueled the industrial revolution and created companies like Johnson & Johnson, Ford, and GE. This group is entering the workforce at an incredible rate and looking for the tools that they are used to using in their everyday life. They are a generation of gadgets and applications, they are used to sharing on the fly and being mobile and accessible. Our recommendation is, give them what they need to be productive and they will turn into some of the best players on your team, leave them behind or fail to engage them and they will move on and up to a company that can service their instant gratification mentalities.

Related Links

Cloud in 2012: The awkward teenage years are upon us, How to avoid chaos in the cloud, Cloud Computing Provides On-Demand Computing, Consultants in the Cloud, Symantec reveals cloud survey results, Hosting providers aim to challenge cloud leaders, LogMeIn Adds Cloud Service to Top-Selling ‘Ignition’ App, Apple Races to Expand Cloud Services, Microsoft’s New Cloud Strategy: Windows 8 and SkyDrive

Last month Symantec, makers of Norton security products, revealed the results of their 2011 State of the Cloud Survey, which examined how firms are adoption cloud computing. What they found is that less than twenty percent of companies were prepared or extremely prepared for a move to the cloud. This is due to the lack of experience in cloud computing, although research found a high level of interest (71 to 87 percent) in how the cloud could impact their business. This is par for the business course with the adoption of cloud technologies. A lack of understanding of business cloud technologies or a misunderstanding of how secure or accessible information is leads to hesitation or misunderstanding of the technology. Another key factor is a disconnect between the IT department and executive leadership within an organization. How many times have we seen a business decision maker open a business, develop a key business process, then call on the IT department to support a mission critical application that runs the entire business. It seems to end in the IT department, but more times than not, it does not start there.

What Can Cloud Computing Do For My Business?

Cloud computing can lower both OpEx and CapEx costs. The billing model for cloud computing is pay as you go, where a traditional IT environment  would have you over subscribe to resources so you can prepare for an increase or decrease in personnel. A cloud IT environment can purchase only what they need based off the number of users.  This provides cost predictability and tighter budgeting for IT resources.

Going Green?

This is a big advantage over internal IT infrastructure. Hosted environments with shared resources use about 60% less power than distributed models. This leads to less energy consumption as a whole.  In addition, companies may opt to travel less and perform more online meetings with video conferencing to save money and collaborate with customers and vendors more frequently.

Available in Cloud or Hybrid Cloud Model (Subscription)

Communications, IP-PBX, SIP, Video Conferencing, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Office 2010, Storage, File Sharing, Hosting, PC Management, Network Security, Data Backup, Anti-Virus & Malware Protection, Electronic Medical Records Management (EMR), QuickBooks Pro, Remote Server Mgmt., SBS 2008 / 2011, SBS Premium 2008 / 2011 w/ SQL, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011, Accounting, Finance, Inventory, Sales, Purchase, Point of Sales, Manufacturing, Costing, Job Costing, Payroll and Branch Management.

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Now, it has happened once before, and I may be wrong, but based off my research, the popular comparison between Google Apps and Office365 does not hold water. I have been reading article after article about the comparison of price and features between Google Apps and Office 365 and working hard at keeping an open mind. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Google, in all their genius, have propagated a Harry Houdini or Criss Angel. You see, they were and are masters of illusion, and most illusionists practice distraction to pull people’s attention away from a primary point so they don’t see the pink elephant being dropped into the room.

It seems that all the past comparisons talked about price more than anything, and how Google Apps was more competitively priced (Ranging $5-$4096 Yr.) compared to Office 365’s monthly subscription ($6-$27 per user per month) . This is like comparing apples to oranges. You see Google Apps is a 100% hosted environment, but Office 365 is a client/ server environment where the clients are the Office programs that you know and love and the server is where you collaborate on your office programs and access advanced functionality and sharing; very different environments, and you should be clear about what you are subscribing to.

My first piece of advice is to stop listening to all the marketing hype and business fodder that is being produced by self-serving software providers. Then, if it was my company…and that is how we treat every project, this is what I would do.

First, I would look at Office Live http://officelive.com for your comparison of Google Apps http://google.com/a . After I compared the free version of Office to the more costly Google Apps, I would then evaluate the Office 365 suite for advanced business application development and advanced business messaging. Office 365 extends the functionality of Microsoft Live and Google Apps to your physical office, providing integration of your business PBX system with Microsoft Lync (on premise deployment) to improve communication and reduce overall OpEx charges for phones. In addition to the advanced business communication tools, the Office 365 suite is designed to help streamline business process, improve sales, support, marketing, database, accounting and other line of business application development.

The key is to not get sucked up into the marketing hype created to distract from the reality, that is for your basic collaboration and communication needs, Office Live and Google Docs will do the trick but, if you are looking to develop your business and streamline your customer, vendor and employee experiences, then you would use a more robust suite of services.

If you found this informative or if you don’t agree, join the conversation by leaving a comment below. Or share this with your social network and see what your peers think. ~ Cheers JRz

After recently finishing a project with Napa Valley Education Foundation , I was fortunate enough to learn about their mission and vision and why they have taken up the proverbial sword against the education gap.  I started to do some research on the apparent gap in resources in California and more importantly, my very own backyard.  Around the county between wealthy communities and communities who are filled with underprivileged kids, what I found was astounding.  Study after study, research paper after research paper,  found that counties with lower income families perform at a lower level than children who have access to better tools, teachers and curriculum.

                    Related Topics

• Thousands of pupils suspended for classroom attacks 29 Jul 2010
• Coalition ‘misled public’ over academies 29 Jul 2010
• Private and state school gap ‘widening under Labour’ 04 May 2010
• Labour has failed to reduce ‘Neets’, say MPs 08 Apr 2010
• Ofsted: Labour school reforms ‘not working’ 24 Feb 2010
• A-level results show education gap widening 14 Aug 2008

Here at 4C we don’t see an immediate solution to this challenge.  Organizations like the Napa Valley Education Foundation work diligently to level the playing field.  However, we did find an interesting program from Comcast that we believe is a step in the right direction.  Comcast is offering internet access bundled with a PC at an affordable rate to give underprivileged children access to the internet and information to help them learn more quickly  and access information that they would not otherwise have access to at home.  “The goal is to have children career and college ready before they graduate from high school”, says one Comcast spokesperson.  This is totally cool.  Since 4C is an internet based company that provides business internet technologies, we believe in this program.  If information is power, and the future of business is the information worker, then the only person that will be left behind is the one without access to information.  Until now, this was the lower income families with no internet and no PC.  The key words are “until now”.  Comcast has made it very affordable with their Internet Essentials program.  For more information on the Comcast Internet Essentials program, visit http://internetessentials.com/index.html.

The next setup is to get schools to adopt a collaborative learning environment, putting administrators, educators, students, and parents on the same page to create a highly productive learning environment for the children.  What would it look like if everyone was working together to help accelerate a child’s education and everyone was aware of exactly where that child was excelling and where they were needing additional attention?  If your school is not yet online, it will be up to you as a parent to push them to get there.  If you find this informative, please comment below.  Remember to share with your network to be tweetastic!!

So, maybe you’re not like the team at 4C, jumping into the cloud with both feet.  Let’s face it this is our business; communications and collaboration tools that are subscribed to on-demand instead of on premise or, as some people like to categorize it, Software as a Service (SaaS).  Even if you have not joined the thousands of businesses to adopt the newest offering from Microsoft Office, you soon may be and, before you do, developing an understanding of what you are getting into is very important.

With billions of copies sold #Office is Microsoft’s most popular business application and has recently entered the Microsoft Cloud lineup, replacing the popular Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Microsoft Office 365 offers small, medium and enterprise businesses access to a suite of communication and collaboration tools (Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, Lync, & Office Web Apps) without having to pay for an on-premise infrastructure to run and maintain it.  Instead a business can subscribe to this on-demand suite of services for a fixed monthly cost ranging in price from $6 per user per month (small businesses user license) to up to $27 per user per month (enterprise user license).  Companies can also take advantage of Microsoft’s 30 day risk free trial and FREE Microsoft Cloud Partner benefits online at the official Office 365 Website.

(To take advantage of FREE MS Partner Support:  After your FREE Trial sign up, Login to your Office 365 Trial Account –> Go to “Admin” –> “Subscriptions” –> “Manage” –> Select Your Subscription –> Under Partner Information Select –> “Add” and enter the following ID –> “ 2803174”. For software compliance and compatibility, please visit Office 365 Online Help Page – Here)

Office 365 offers an alternative to expensive on-premise equipment and software and reduces the need to hire specialized staff to maintain it.  By providing its subscribers an interface that is easily accessible via the web and manageable by an average user, businesses can subscribe to business tools that once cost thousands of dollars to maintain.

Some enterprise IT professionals are still reluctant to take advantage of public cloud offerings.  With  concerns still looming about reliability and security, and with substantial investment in on-premise solutions, enterprise adoption of cloud technologies has be slower than small businesses or startups.  Companies who are looking for a low cost way to manage their IT infrastructure and business communications while providing their employees the tools they need to remain productive will want to evaluate the Office 365 suite of services.  Although a slow adoption of cloud technologies is more prevalent for enterprise size customers, the transition to a service based subscription model creates a win/win for both providers and customers.

Explore these great plans with a 30 Day Risk Free Trial & Unlimited Support From 4C.

Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan P1)
10 user licenses – Free Trial w/ 4C Support

Office Professional Plus Trial
25 user licenses – Free Trial w/ 4C Support

Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan K2)
25 user licenses – Free Trial w/ 4C Support

Microsoft Office 365 Trial (Plan E3) – Learn More
25 user licenses – Free Trial w/ 4C Support

“Small businesses today are looking for ways to improve productivity and collaboration while reducing IT costs  however, many lack the time and resources to obtain the technologies the world’s leading business use every day”, said Tom Rizzo, senior director of Microsoft Online Services. “Microsoft Office 365, which brings together Office, SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync in an always-up-to-date- cloud services changes all that.”   There has been a shift in the way small businesses can compete.  With tools available to the small businesses and startups that were once unattainable due to cost, they can create an on-demand environment that focuses more on information instead of innovation.  Companies that can assimilate and process information and use it to their advantage will outperform their competition.

Microsoft has leveled the playing field for all of us.  With the right vision and understanding of how to leverage Software as a Service (SaaS) and the cloud, any savvy business owner can and will create business system that will rival any large corporate competitor.  For more information on the business impact of Office 365, look at these real word businesses examples.  If you enjoyed this article, please leave your comments below or, to join the small business cloud conversation, visit us online at Twitter.

Recent findings from Infonetics Research shows 2010 was a breakout year for SIP Trunking. Infonetics and No Jitterreleased some telling statistics.

• SIP Trunking revenue grew 143 percent in 2010
• The VoIP services market reached almost $50 billion in 2010
• Managed IP PBX business VoIP services revenue is expected to more than double from 2010 to 2015
• The fasted growing segments for the VoIP services market are SIP Trunking and hosted UC telephony
• Adoption of SIP Trunking services grew 220 percent worldwide in 2010
• SIP Trunking is in 75 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, as companies continue to complete their migration

As companies continue to research SIP Trunk technology and move further away from Time-Divisions Multiplexing (TDM), decision makers still have to answer some tough questions before making the transition to SIP.

Is SIP interoperable with my existing technology?
The short answer is yes! However, the failure rate is still higher than expected if migrations are not carefully evaluated and executed properly. SIP technology, although primarily standardized, still faces some issues with interoperability with older, aging telecommunications equipment. Although most of the SIP features have been standardized and implementation has moved from the bleeding edge to the leading edge, as a prudent telecommunications consumer, you want to make sure that solutions are properly vetted before cutovers are made.

Are service providers offering smooth transition services to move from TDM to VoIP services?
The answer seems to be yes however, as SIP continues to grow, major providers have either slowed the transition process or made it difficult for newer emerging communication companies to manage the transition process. This would include convoluted regulations governing the transition of customers from TDM to SIP technology. The key with this is to have a proper expectation for the process, understand that there are multiple parties involved and things don’t always work the way they should when people and ego’s get in the way. Our advice is, be committed to seeing a transition through to the end and plan, plan, plan. After the switchover, you will see how well you planned by how smoothly the transition goes.

As you transition, make sure your SIP provider takes precautions to prevent network issues, dropped calls, or other network performance issues that can pop up if you don’t plan your migration properly. Evaluate network performance, latency, codecs, and provider policies to insure that your migration is smooth and on time.

What are some of the advantages of SIP-based VoIP?
As most CIO’s say, the biggest advantage is savings. If you are paying $500-$1000 for a dedicated T1 line and a gateway, you can use SIP trunking to move that in to the cloud for far less money. It is not all about money though, SIP trunking can streamline your communications by linking offices that were once islands or communications together to share resources as if they were located in the same office. Additionally, SIP can dramatically simplify your network architecture and decrease the overall number of hardware components to manage and the workload of your IT personnel. This is the big savings, savings of time, time to focus on other pressing issues or business objectives.

How far should I go with my SIP & Virtual Communication Integration?
The answer is a simple one, “It really depends on your needs.” What experience has taught us is this; mid-sized and enterprise companies, that treat voice as an absolute critical application that needs to be up and running with no latency at all times, would benefit from having an on premise PBX system, with a SIP Trunk wired solution to the building to help manage costs. This would give the company full onsite control for rapid problem solving and network performance. For companies where voice services are less critical-that is where company employees rely heavily on tools such as cell phones, email and instant messaging-it makes more sense to use a virtual PBX or to outsource managing your voice platform to a vendor. Where we see a lot more hosted services is in small businesses that have less than 250 seats and that aren’t geographically dispersed.

For small businesses, they generally need the help of a hosted service provider since most small businesses don’t want to be wasting time babysitting their VoIP system. If you have less than 100 phones and you are paying for tech support or have a person on staff to manage your phone system, then you have the wrong system and you’re wasting your time and money.

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