Moving away from private branch exchange (PBX) telephony systems is a big deal for most businesses, especially given the huge time commitment and expense that go into such a move. Nevertheless, organizations are being encouraged to shun PBX in favor of cloud-based telephony–all in the name of cost reduction and improvements in efficiency.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a bit frustrating. Fortunately, there’s always the hybrid approach, which leaves most of the legacy system in place while taking advantage of the latest and greatest in networking hardware. At the heart of it all is the session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking solution, which is designed to allow the implementation of cloud-based telephony over existing PBX infrastructure.
What’s the ROI?
The first thing that any reseller should do over the course of overseeing such a migration is to review how much of a return on investment (ROI) an extension of PBX to a future hybrid system offers. Companies can make quick and useful cost comparisons by comparing the costs of maintaining the current system versus implementing a hybrid system with SIP trunking.
Moving to SIP Trunks
Resellers also can do their part to make the transition to cloud-based telephony services by converting existing long-distance carrier circuits to SIP trunks. This way, resellers can place much of their focus on reducing the overall costs of the conversion process. Further reductions may occur through natural downsizing of vendors and the reduced necessity of several redundant SIP trunks.
Deploying E-SBCs
Enterprise session border controllers (E-SBCs) also play a role in the migration process. These devices are instrumental for managing voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) communications as well as mitigating hostile attacks. It’s important to have a sufficient number of E-SBCs deployed to cover a wide variety of potential cloud services.
Transition from UC to SIP
Another aspect of SIP trunking deployment involves transitioning existing unified communications (UC) services to SIP trunks. Resellers can play an instrumental role in guiding and overseeing the transition from existing UC services to those based on the SIP trunk infrastructure.
How It All Stacks Up
It’s important to take a snapshot of the company’s dedicated access costs (along with long-distance calls) prior to SIP trunking and after the migration process is complete. This gives the company a clear picture of its savings and a chance to inspect areas of the SIP trunking migration where improvements in cost-effectiveness and efficiency can be made.
Migrating to the cloud can be an adventure in its own right, fraught with a variety of challenges for businesses to overcome. However, the hybrid method of SIP trunking migration can help ease and simplify that process to a significant degree.