“Board level decisions on IT strategy, as fundamental as perusing an in-house vitualisation policy for servers and applications versus cloud based outsourcing, now dictate how companies wish to provision their business communications,” says Robin Hayman, Director of Business Management at SpliceCom.
When combined with a company’s financial direction - do they prefer to fund their IT requirements through capital purchases or operational expenses? – the path for voice delivery, be it on-premise or cloud based, becomes close to a default choice. Only hybrid – combining the best of on-premise and cloud based architectures, not to mention payment options – has the ability to move the goal posts and threaten the status quo here. “As such, it’s of critical importance for resellers to offer a portfolio that covers all the bases. In the best case scenario this will be from just one supplier, otherwise try to choose as few as possible,” continues Hayman.
A true hybrid architecture allows any of the system components – IT apps, voice switching, business management, call recording, secure mobility gateways, call centre, etc - to reside either in the cloud, or on premise, or any mix of the two. “Hybrid voice architectures provide system redundancy with full local survivability in the event of primary IP link failure,” states Hayman. ”They also enable any-to-any cloud connectivity, allowing investment in existing analogue phones and legacy PBXs to be protected whilst customers’ migrate to a full IP communications infrastructure as and when business needs and budgets dictate. The key to hybrid deployment is unparalleled customer choice. The architecture guarantees that system deployment will always fall in line with a customers’ IT strategy, whatever that might be, greatly easing and shortening the sales process, “ concludes Hayman.