Hosted Services
Hosted Voice
Communications Australia (CommsAust) is currently working with our communications system vendors and service provider partners on a hosted voice offering. Due to launch early next year, this will allow customers with a requirement for business grade voice to have it delivered over a resilient high speed data network from a remote data centre rather than having to host the PBX equipment themselves. It will include options from basic dial tone through to fully featured IP Telephony running on the latest fully featured handsets, which can also act as a platform for various business applications (See below). Full redundancy options could also be provided. These could range from almost full-feature operation in the unlikely event of a WAN failure, to less expensive options chosen for some or all users, if that is better suited to the customer requirements. Existing telephone numbers can be retained (where allowed by the Service Provider) and this can be coupled with extra capacity made available on a shared or dedicated basis whilst still taking advantage of features made possible by the IP core, allowing connectivity to one or more partner organisations similarly equipped.
Self-service portals will allow customers and end users to manage as much or as little as they want within the solution, from simple personal address book updates, to ordering service upgrades and even extra handsets.
A range of purchasing or financing options will be made available for our Hosted solutions, just as we have for our on-premise managed service offering, allowing customers to choose how they license and pay for the service. This could include the traditional monthly fee per user plus calls, flat rate options, or even a custom licensing scheme based around usage itself.
Hosted Unified Communications
In a later phase, CommsAust will be adding Unified Communications (UC) capability to allow customers to take advantage of more advanced features, whilst still allowing part or all of the solution to be hosted away from their premises. Traditional voicemail or Unified Messaging can be added to the voice service, Presence capabilities can be added to either the phone or desktop or both, and mobile phone integration could allow calls to either extend to the mobile device or even allow the mobile device to replace the traditional desktop phone completely.. Furthermore, Smartphones could run the same business applications (which can be custom built by CommsAust or picked from our standard offerings which will also be hosted, again lowering deployment costs) as the desktop phones.
Even the core email system could be hosted and brought into this model, allowing further benefits through cost saving and outsourcing for organisations without dedicated IT staff, whilst allowing tighter integration into the applications now available through UC.
All of these capabilities, and more, could be licensed either separately or bundled. This ensures the services are almost tailor made to fit each individual business, whilst still allowing all the benefits of the hosted model and removing the limitations of the more traditional hosted voice offerings.
Hosted Contact Centre
The last of the hosted offerings will revolve around multimedia contact centres. Although another extension of the Hosted Voice offering, a significant advantage here is the lower start-up costs than usually associated with building any kind of contact centre from scratch on the customer's premises. As all the equipment is offsite, and shared between multiple customers (whilst still maintaining the high level of security both expected and available when on-premise) the cost of the infrastructure and initial software licensing is far less. A further benefit of the CaaS model is that agents can be added and removed far more quickly than in traditional deployments, whilst the flexibility in licensing ensure that they are charged only for the period they are in use! This means that extra campaigns that generate exceptionally high call volumes for short periods of time, are far easier to plan for and manage, yet still cost effective."
