News Category: Blog Posts

As enterprises move their applications into the cloud and enable their mobile workforce to consume cloud applications, they need a network that is responsive to this migration. Greg de Chasteauneuf, chief technology officer at Saicom takes a look at software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and the risks businesses face from not making a timeous switch.

The benefits of SD-WAN are convincing. It allows organisations to regain control of their wide area network and internet connectivity; deploy and configure or re-deploy a site within minutes and obtain insight into the network as to which users and applications are consuming resources and to prioritise, block or throttle traffic.

In fact, Gartner believes that by the end of 2019, 30% of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branches, up from less than 1% today.

According to de Chasteauneuf, businesses risk missing out on the opportunity to capitalise on cheaper bandwidth and to future proof their networks if they don’t make the switch to SD-WAN.

“The risk to businesses is that they won’t be able to take advantage and quickly adopt the downward trend of low-priced internet connections,” he says.

From a legislative perspective, there is a compliance risk around the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) and the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) if data encryption is not Payment Card Industry 3 (PCI) compliant.

SD-WAN offers instant value to an IT administrator, whereas the chief financial officer is looking for an immediate saving. An initial capital and operational expenditure is required on a network.

“SD-WAN doesn’t offer a substantial saving upfront, but it does allow a business to grow into additional available bandwidth and flexibility on its network over time and it will see a return on its investment within a three year period,” he adds.

The local norm in terms of wide area networking is MPLS WAN with a number of firewall vendors in the mix, but they are application not connectivity aware, which means they’re unable to change their policies dynamically as the network conditions change, on a minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour basis.

SD-WAN requires an investment, but the reality is that enterprises are moving their workflow, accounting, sales and human resources applications into the cloud and these tools are less centralised. The ability to provide business priority on the application links in the MPLS network becomes impossible, because MPLS by its very nature is very static.

“SD-WAN empowers IT administrators to prioritise these applications very quickly and on the fly, and as network conditions change, so too will the policies. This is certainly not the case with MPLS, which over time will no longer be able to facilitate cloud migration,” de Chasteauneuf says.

SD-WAN is well suited to a multi-branch environment and especially the retail space, where stores are often quick to open, close and relocate. “A simple Edge device with everything in one box will have a site rapidly up and running and completely compliant, and when it is time to move, the box can simply be picked up and plugged into one or many broadband links,” he adds.

Companies are looking at three to five years to completely exit an MPLS network contract, so a hybrid model of MPLS and SD-WAN is advisable. “Such a model offloads traffic onto the SD-WAN network and over time lets the MPLS network fizzle out as contracts expire,” he says. The deployment to SD-WAN with a greenfield network that doesn’t have an MPLS network is less costly and provides an immediate return on its investment.

Access to reliable high capacity internet is a key enabler for business and SD-WAN allows organisations to not only prioritise traffic, but also does so by utilising cheaper broadband internet links.

SD-WAN aids optimised performance to cloud and centralised enterprise services. “Making the switch to SD-WAN is about future-proofing a business’s network to ready it for when inexpensive off-the-shelf bandwidth becomes available and to start using it within a few weeks instead of months,” he concludes.

Post written by Greg de Chasteauneuf
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Saicom Voice Services

Business decision makers usually have sleepless nights about aspects of their business they
can’t control, but making the move from legacy to current technology should never be one of
them. In fact, it should be an easy decision, a no brainer if you will.

No need to change if it works

The reality is that several businesses are not ready to make the move to current technology.
Many decision makers use the saying ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, whereas others get
nervous when confronted by the unknown.

When technology isn’t working, the switch to another or newer version is easy, but when a
solution is working, there is no reason to move, unless the new technology offers substantial
value.

For vendors, it becomes a value and cost saving discussion, which in itself gives IT decision
makers even more sleepless nights as they don’t want to be the ones agreeing to an
implementation that promises more, but in the end delivers less.

That said, the driving forces to switch to a new solution are often different for the business
owner, IT professional and financial officer. Yet, businesses shouldn’t underestimate the
pressure coming from their own staff.

Pressure from unexpected sources

The person who is experiencing pressure from staff is the IT professional as the company’s
workforce is using applications that are not within his / her control. For CFOs, it is about cost
cutting and if they do decide to spend more, they’ll need buy-in from the organisation to
enjoy the full value of the application. For example, if a unified communications (UC) solution
is implemented, but it doesn’t have buy-in from users, it becomes a plain telephone. Buy-in
is critical to ensure that a new implementation is successful.

However, the most practical approach is for staff to drive the move. When a young workforce
uses applications in their personal lives, such as instant messaging, and have the desire to
make use of them in an organisational context, their urgent requirements will push the
company to adopt new solutions much quicker.

The drop in bandwidth prices and the fact that so many business applications are moving to
the cloud are two additional driving forces that make the switch to current technology that
much more attractive for companies.

Stay relevant and ahead of the competition

Currently, we’re seeing mobility as the big driver for making the switch to cloud telephony,
but there is no doubt that UC will see a massive uptake locally. Businesses in developed
countries without UC are often considered irrelevant by their customers.
Companies need to take their networks and communication solutions from the 1990s to
2016. They have to be current with their technology or else risk losing customers because of
a poor communication experience.

In the short term, new solutions may cost business decision makers a fraction more, but they
can be certain that they’re at the cutting edge, giving them access to new found value in their
IT systems. New solutions, such as mobility, create efficiency from day one as well as a
competitive advantage. Ultimately, decision makers who future proof their businesses will be
better off than their competitors who turn a blind eye and choose to stick to legacy
technology.

Post written by Kyle Woolf
CEO
Saicom Voice Services (PTY) LTD

Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) promise mobility, productivity and scalability, but why should business owners and IT managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) care and what are the real business benefits to them right now?

One of the biggest efficiency challenges faced by businesses today is scattered communications. Ineffective meetings and fragmented workflows are causing productivity to drop as staff switch between multiple applications, tasks and devices.

This is where Unified Communications (UC) steps in. The term describes the integration of real-time enterprise communication services such as Instant Messaging (IM), presence, voice, video and data sharing with non-real-time communication services such as e-mail.

Communication is rapidly moving from a fixed line infrastructure to the mobile handset through UC, aiming to make the workforce as mobile as possible.

The fact that employees want their cellphones to be the centre of their world means that tools and applications, both from a personal and professional perspective, need to sit on a central device. If they don’t, employees will figure out a way around a company’s systems to meet their communication and productivity needs.

Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report for South Africa 2016 found that executives see the redesign of organisations as a critical priority. The report states that companies are moving their structures from traditional, functional models toward interconnected, flexible networks of teams to become more agile and customer-focused.

This trend is fuelled by the need to adapt and innovate to stay closer to customers in the face of digital disruption, by changing talent demographics, including the influx of Millennials in the workforce, and the growing number of contract and part-time workers.

The need to communicate is always there and companies now do this through UC. However, the way we communicate is changing. With UC, presence status enables staff to know exactly what someone’s current online status is. Having IM means staff don’t have to escalate to a voice call as quickly as they would have in the past.

The 2016 edition of Deloitte’s predictions for the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) sectors states that while there is a decline in the proportion of people making voice calls on smartphones, IM has seen the most rapid uptake among consumers since 2012. The proportion of adults using IM has more than doubled from 27 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2015 and volume has increased from 7 trillion in 2012 to 43 trillion in 2015.

But what is the real impact of UC&C to SMEs with 50 to a 100 users?

UC&C enables mobility and efficiency, as staff are not required to come back to an office environment to be productive. They can function as long as they have internet connectivity.

As businesses expand into other regions and markets, a mobile workforce allows a business to have a very soft landing in a new territory, and there is no longer a requirement to acquire an office or hosting space for a new division that doesn’t have a track record yet. A business can employ one or two people that work from home, allowing it to gauge the market and consider what can and can’t be done.

Twenty-first century SMEs are required to have bold appetites for change. They need to say goodbye to legacy systems and embrace new technologies and processes that will enable them to improve their interactions with their customers.

UC’s next step is to integrate enterprise messaging, cloud applications, contextual intelligence and other real-time communication and collaboration services, to empower teams to reach new levels of productivity from any network, device, and place.

Business owners and IT managers with the flexibility to adopt new technology now, will future-proof their companies for the next bout of change.

Post written by Kyle Woolf
CEO
Saicom Voice Services (PTY) LTD

Many organisations are starting to realise the benefits of Unified Communications (UC) as an essential tool that allows knowledge workers to collaborate using voice, video, desktop sharing, instant messaging and presence.

However, as these organisations begin to recognise the operational efficiencies these tools bring to their business and plan to implement it, their IT departments are left in the shadows to support, standardise and secure these deployments.

Today’s workers demand UC solutions and will find ways of achieving UC, even if they have to do so unofficially. This has resulted in a “shadow IT” concept whereby workers use services without explicit organisational approval or process which has left IT departments in a position where control and security are compromised.

One of the most beneficial features of using Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) in your workplace is that it allows organisations to regain control of their IT activity while still allowing workers to maximise their user experience when using UC and other cloud based services.

How does SD-WAN achieve this?

It optimises, yet simplifies, the use of multiple public and private links 


With the promise of UC comes the burden on IT departments to provide high capacity branch links to support high definition video, voice and desktop sharing. Routing this traffic over traditional MPLS WAN’s constrains the organisation both commercially (high OPEX costs associated with MPLS links) and operationally (long deployment times for links and even link upgrades) leaving the knowledge workers unable to adopt UC tools to increase operational efficiencies.

SD-WAN allows organisations to unlock the power of UC by making use of multiple public and private links. With technologies like per-packet loadsharing, forward error correction (FEC) and jitter buffers, using “off the shelf” Internet Broadband links to provide a high quality of experience for UC has finally become a reality.

Separates data, control and orchestration plane and delivers network-wide policy and security

Managing the Quality of Experience (QoE) for UC (and other cloud applications) throughout various sites whilst making use of high-speed broadband links becomes an almost impossible task without a centralised orchestration plane.

SD-WAN allows the control and data plane to operate separately allowing the network administrator to centralise policy control for security and ensure QoE for real-time applications such as UC.

By separating the data and control plane, SD-WAN allows for central control of network-wide policy and security. From a central point, traffic can easily be blocked or demoted via a cloud-based orchestrator. Gone are the days of having to spend hours or even days building QoS polices to match traffic based on ports and IP’s.

With SD-WAN the policies are modified based on predefined polices (e.g. YouTube HD, Facebook Video) and deployed to all edge devices that subscribe to these policies.

Reduces recurring and capex costs of wide area networking 


Access to reliable high capacity Internet becomes a key enabler to your UC adoption. However, the cost of backhauling this over your MPLS WAN becomes somewhat commercially prohibitive, as you will inevitably need to increase the size of your site access links to accommodate for this traffic, especially in order to enable video conferencing in your UC app.

The other thing to consider is that you will be paying an increased OPEX cost for video, which is not utilised 24×7. SD-WAN allows you to not only prioritise UC traffic over other less important traffic, but also does so by utilising cheaper broadband Internet links. Offloading this traffic off your private MPLS network starts to make commercial and technical sense. This is a key contributor as to why Gartner believes that “By the end of 2019, 30% of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branches, up from less than 1% today.”

Simplifies wide area networks with zero-touch deployment 


Deploying new sites, either over MPLS WAN or Internet, can become technically complicated and costly. Most deployments require complicated static configurations which require engineering resources to not only deploy but also maintain and make changes when inserting new services.

With SD-WAN, this is as simple as shipping a factory default device to site and enabling the site by one click provisioning. The onsite device will register with the orchestrator, download and activate its configuration based on centralised security and business priority policies, with SD-WAN your site is up and running in minutes not days.

Simplifies Insertion of services

Network service insertion in a MPLS WAN or Internet can be a very tedious and even expensive task. Adding say Salesforce.com or Broadsofts UC-One as a business priority application on your network usually means consulting with your ISP to make these changes across your entire network. Not only does this take time, but some providers charge for these QoS changes, and in my experience rarely get it right the first time.

SD-WAN not only allows for one-click service insertion and prioritisation but also allows optimised performance to cloud and centralised enterprise services and quick integration into cloud security services such as ZScaler and Websense.

Post written by Greg de Chasteauneuf
Director / CTO
Saicom Voice Services (PTY) LTD

So you have your company’s email, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and firewall in the cloud already? In which case, is it so hard to believe that you can take your telephony system (also known as a Private Automatic Branch Exchange or PABX for short) to the cloud as well?

For many years, IT as a Service (ITaaS) has enabled enterprises of all sizes to leverage off of the specialist skills, software and equipment of service providers with Voice being the prominent exception.

Recently IT decision makers have been under increasing pressure to justify the monumental spend on telephony every couple of years when everything else is available, at arm’s length, as a service, month-to-month. The traditional arguments of onsite reliability and buying an asset that can be sweat for years no longer hold water.

So what is the new school of thought?

Why are organisations taking their telephony in the Cloud as a Service so seriously?

Well, there are a number of unbeatable benefits:

It’s about the money.
Whether you’re a small business required to commit thousands or a large enterprise looking to commit millions of Rands to an onsite telephony system, you’re tying up cash that could be put to better use.
Due to the fast pace of technology, your onsite PABX will need to be maintained and upgraded every 6-12 months by staff and all the integration done on installation will need to be updated and maintained. All of this adds a significant operating cost to the initial once off capital expense. Tin no longer has any value other than its weight as recyclable material.

The promise of cloud is zero capital expense with a fully inclusive and predicable operational expense.

It’s about the flexibility.
Does your telephony system need more functionality? In this instance, you can pay for more functionality. And, if you don’t need all the bells and whistles as you thought you did, it’s not a problem as you can downgrade easily and pay less.

Or perhaps you’d like to try out a new reporting feature, without taking formal ownership? Then you have the flexibility to have it deployed in the cloud FOR FREE for a trial period.

It’s about the scalability.
Cloud serves and provides a huge benefit to the small business by providing enterprise grade telephony features to the two or three extension business. At the same time, cloud serves the large corporate too by seamlessly scaling from one branch to many.

Queue your calls in the cloud and deliver them anywhere where you have spare capacity. You can also spin up a new branch or business in days or close down or consolidate a non-performing business unit without worrying what you are going to do with the infrastructure spend onsite.

It’s about reliability.
Your service provider has a vested interest to ensure that their platform is robust and reliable, more so than you’ll find you have on your existing telephony system. An outage on a hosted platform affects all clients, not just a single site so your provider will ensure they watch it like a hawk! Providers hosting in reliable data hosting facilities (such as Teraco in South Africa) will guarantee power, security and ensure high capacity Internet access via peering facilities such as NAP Africa.

The current Fibre land grab in the South African telecommunications market has driven the price of fibre connectivity lower than ever before making carrier grade IP connectivity a reality for many organisations in all segments. Furthermore, with the uptake of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and more specifically VeloCloud delivered Software Defined-WAN (SD-WAN) the ability to implement service provider independent connectivity, load balancing, and link redundancy has put the power in the enterprises hands.

It’s about the commitment.
Or lack thereof. An on-premise telephony solution is sticky. Moving to cloud gives you the freedom to walk away from a bad service provider and switch to something better. The ball is in the providers court to provide a rock solid service, if they drop it, they lose you; it’s that simple.

It’s about leverage.
Moving to the cloud allows you to leverage off of the best hardware, software and people in the industry. It allows you to choose and ally yourself with the service provider that best matches your business’s technological needs.

It’s no longer a question of whether you should move your telephony to the cloud, but a question of how and when. Today there are more Cloud telephony options for organisations to choose from than ever before. The market is on fire! The secret to successfully migrate your telephony to the Cloud is by pairing your company with the service provider that has the goldilocks mix of leading edge technology, industry expertise and rock solid support that you require.

Post written by Greg de Chasteauneuf
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Saicom Voice Services

As more and more enterprises migrate their data across to cloud data centres, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure they will inevitably begin to realise how the adoption of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (Software-as-a-service) will result in a serious relook at their current WAN architecture.

Enterprises moving to SaaS applications are realising the benefits over on-premises hosted applications and is largely driven by one of or a combination of the following:

• Enabling a more mobile workforce for your business.
• There are major cost savings to be made.
• It will make up for the restrictions in acquiring or retaining skilled IT staff.
• Preference to short-term contract software services which can be upscaled, downscaled or cancelled as and when needed.

What are the repercussions in making this move?

As an enterprise moves their data to SaaS applications, whether this is a centrally controlled move by their IT department, or a more sporadic, less controlled and decentralized “shadow IT” move, the effects on the enterprise’s security, bandwidth and control can be very disruptive.

This strategy to migrate application data to the cloud by leveraging SaaS is disrupting the WAN as we know it. An organistation may try its best to mitigate any resulting risks, but unfortunately there will still be some that are uncontrollable.

The move is happening… What can you do to try make the transition as risk-free as possible?

You need to ensure that you are able to take advantage of cheaper Internet connectivity in order to offload your SaaS applications at the edge of your network whilst regaining control and security in a centralised policy engine. Abstracting the control plane from the data plane will naturally become a logical consideration when assessing various architectures to cater for such challenges.

SD‐WAN, as a network overlay, will enable your application traffic to be carried independently of the underlying physical or transport layer. Multiple access links (e.g. MPLS, LTE, 3G, ADSL, Wireless and Fibre) from different, disparate service providers can now be pooled together at your branch edge enabling your organisation to benefit from faster and cheaper bandwidth alternatives allowing you to transition to Iaas and SaaS while improving agility, performance and control at the same time.

Over time, centralised breakout of your Internet data will become a thing of the past and hosting of applications within your network will be considered outdated and inevitably, overtime your need to ship traffic over your private MPLS WAN will diminish as you begin to realise the benefits of SD-WAN. SD-WAN will allow you to operate in a more flexible de-centralized model whilst still retaining control!

The impact on your business

You’ll see phenomenal cost savings in your operational expenditure and a significant reduction in your TCO, whilst enhancing flexibility, capacity, availability and quality. You’ll begin to see a triple benefit TCO saving in services costs, IT Resources or Outsourcing and Network Infrastructure.

Post written by Greg de Chasteauneuf
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Saicom Voice Services

Good communication at the heart of every successful hotel?
Get Hosted Hospitality PBX to ensure that.

Good communication is at the heart of every successful hotel. And whether you’re a small hotel, a global hotel conglomerate, a famous luxury establishment or a boutique B&B, it should be one of your most important considerations.

If you haven’t done so already, investigating options to get a PBX installed at your establishment should be a key priority. If you’re an old establishment, it’s going to be a bit trickier as you’ll be challenged with an existing system which no doubt makes your newly renovated room look like something out of Bates Motel! We call this a legacy PBX. But if you’re new, or have just done a refurb, and there’s nothing in place yet, then it will be easier to get your PBX set up and running.

Why is choosing an efficient PBX system such an important task?

Well, it’s going to have a huge impact on:

• Reliability

When dealing with guests, everything matters. Guests are not going to be very forgiving when they can’t get through to Reception to request an eviction from the non-paying rodent in the bathroom.

• Voice Quality

Being able to hear and understand your guest’s requests is critical. Imagine your guests surprise when they request room service over the phone, and your staff turn up at their door with a broom in hand.

• Scalability

There’s no doubt your main objective is growth. So, you’ll need to make sure you have a PBX system in place that’s flexible when it comes to adding additional rooms and phones (without having to go through the pain of replacing your PBX system each time).

• Top notch features

If you’re going to stand out amongst the competition, make sure you implement a system with world-class features.  Features which will not only make your guests stay more pleasant, but also features which will enable you to increase the operational efficiency of your staff.

• Management

It will reduce heavy CAPEX expenditure. Instead, you’ll have a far more manageable as-a-Service OPEX model.

• Centralisation

With an efficient PBX system, you can centralise PBX control, billing, management and standards.

• Property Management System (PMS) Integration

Your new system must allow for seamless integration into your hotels existing PMS system. This is a key aspect of ensuring a seamless experience for your guests.  There is nothing worse than having to log into separate systems to manage things like wakeup calls – this must be done from your central PMS system.

So what are the challenges when choosing your new PBX system?

As we mentioned earlier, if you’re moving from an existing system, to a new one – there are going to be some challenges and teething problems.
Chances are, as your establishment has grown over the years, you’ve accumulated a whole host of legacy PBX’s, often different models with lots of software versions, and, even worse, multi-vendors and support contracts!

The problem with continuing with this way of working, is that it no doubt comes with a high cost for maintaining this infrastructure, and on top of that, it’s inability to integrate into your PMS system.

How is Hosted Hospitality PBX system going to help?

By making the move, it will eliminate and assist in mitigating many of your establishment’s risks:

• Reliability

There’s so much choice out there when it comes to cloud telephony providers. It can be quite confusing! To help choose the right provider, you should think about the following:

• • Make sure that the provider you choose is running on a rock-solid, highly resilient Cloud PBX platform.
  • Find out which vendor the service provider is using for the underlying Cloud PBX offering… make sure you check out their track record too! The vendor’s background is just as important as your new service provider. One cannot operate without the other!
  • Also, you must check out the provider’s track record for operating a carrier-grade Cloud PBX platform. Don’t be afraid to ask them direct questions and ask for references.

• Voice Quality

You need to have a provider who understands how to prioritise Voice over data protocols. They need to understand the reasons for doing it this way, as well as the mechanics on how to do it. For example, if your voice traffic runs over the same link as your guest Wi-Fi WITHOUT Quality of Service (QoS)… both yourself, as the establishment manager, and the guests (using the Wi-Fi) are going to get a poor service.

• Scalability

Your new provider should give you the functionality to ‘scale up’ (so add rooms and telephones) but also allow you to ‘ramp up’ new hotels without massive CAPEX investment and IT complexities.

• PMS

Once you’ve chosen your new Cloud PBX provider, your next step is to integrate it into your existing PMS system. Following this, you can then really start to open up what you can offer to your guests in terms of services. Whilst there are some basic features like wakeup calls and mini-bar replenishment and billing via the room phone, some more advanced features will allow you to start offering your guests the ability to receive their in-room voice mails in their email inbox for the duration of their stay.

• Top Notch Features

Now that you have your new Cloud PBX provider implemented, you can take advantage of all the technology enhancements. These allow for better features within the Cloud PBX, and you’ll have direct access to these.

Seeing the benefits of PBX?

Well, you can take it a step further by centralising all your IT infrastructure into ‘The Cloud’
– It will allow you to control your budget and telephone spend more accurately.

What else should you consider?

If you’re going to go the full hog, then you should consider implementing a PMS system that will integrate into your new Hosted Hospitality PBX system.

It will benefit you massively! For the following reasons:

• Enable in-room guest features (like wake-up calls, voicemails to emails).
• Manage voice technology and services for financial returns.
• Provide Centrally Hosted Call Accounting Services.
• Provide Call Accounting Services for VOIP.
• Personalise Phone Pricing for Groups, Guests, and Loyalty Programs.
• Provide Virtual Prepay Phone Services to Groups and Guests
• Centralise Your Monitoring and Management of Voice.
• Audit Telecommunications Costs and Revenues.
• Improve the Productivity and Effectiveness of Telecommunications Audits
• Converge Your Pricing for Voice and Internet Services.
• Reduce the number of call accounting systems you manage.
• Optimize Your Carrier Relationship.
• Provide Guest Pricing Transparency.
• Provide in room guest features.

Now who do you choose to be your Hosted Hospitality PBX provider?

While there are many providers out there, you need to go with one you can trust. Saicom is a leading VoIP provider, and one of the largest in the country. Since 1995, Saicom has become a household name in the South African Telecommunications Market.

We’ve mentioned that it’s challenging to integrate a new PBX system into an already established legacy system, however, here at Saicom, we’ll make the transition as easy as possible for you.

We’ve successfully rolled out cloud-based, scalable voice solutions to some of the largest call centres around South Africa. We will focus on understanding your business and provide customised advice and support to suit your establishment’s specific needs.

Give us a call today 010-140-5000 or leave an enquiry and we’ll get back to you.

Post written by Greg de Chasteauneuf
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Saicom Voice Services

As technology advances Cloud PBX continues to prove itself as a reliable, future proof and cost effective telephony solution. Those who remain unconvinced as to the benefits of using a Cloud PBX system need only read further.

The Benefits of Cloud PBX

• Cloud PBX systems are ideal for businesses of all sizes and can scale from one extension to thousands.

• Ideal for multi branch environments, the cost of putting down a PBX at every branch and managing each individual device becomes exceptionally costly and complicated.

• Cloud PBX allows for centralised management, changes are made centrally and pushed to each site requiring the change or update.

• Upgrades can be done on the fly. If you require more users, it’s a simple change on the main cloud system. Additional phones can then be plugged into the network and no onsite work is required.

• Cloud PBX is future proof. It will always use the latest technology. You may only need Cloud PBX to begin, but as your organisation grows it starts to demand UC (Unified Communications) this is a simple feature upgrade.

• Feature add-ons like automated attendant (IVR), voicemail to email, video and call recording can be done swiftly and easily.

• The central Cloud PBX is typically carrier grade; it’s built to be incredibly reliable so the chances of the main device breaking are minimal. The biggest potential point of failure would be the connectivity from your site to the main cloud PBX. For this reason it’s advisable to use a reliable internet service provider who understands how to run voice correctly over a share data link.

• Installation times and deployment of cloud are up to 5 times faster than a hosted system. No complicated work needs to take place on site making it extremely quick and efficient.

• Small businesses now have access to the features and functionality of an enterprise system, which traditionally was only available on the high end on-premise systems.

• Cloud PBX is the best solution to load shedding. The main system is housed in a secure data centre, often with different power feeds, backup generators and UPS. If the power to your main site fails, the Cloud PBX can forward the calls to different numbers or cell phones.

• The risk of theft is minimised if the PBX doesn’t reside on site.

With all the benefits of Cloud PBX, it’s easy to understand why so many companies are switching over to Cloud PBX systems. Saicom is among South Africa’s most reliable, competitive and flexible service providers, why not get in touch now to switch to Cloud PBX!