MegaPath has introduced a new voice service called Enterprise Shared Voice targeting multi-site businesses that need to share call capacity, calling plans and voice technologies throughout all of their locations.
One of the key benefits of the new service is reducing costs.
A multi-site business customer can use the service to leverage cloud-provisioned voice services, including concurrent capacity and calling plans, across all of its locations, regardless of the voice technology that's used at each location.
"One of the decision points a business has to make with their providers, and this is really the case for most of our competition as well, is 'do I want to want to go down that trunking route or the hosted route,' especially when you start talking about legacy infrastructure," said Paul Marra, Director of product management, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "Enterprise Shared Voice is our next step in combining the two approaches so you really have no restrictions."
Unlike traditional VoIP solutions that require customers to purchase capacity based on the number of users or estimated call volume at each location, Enterprise Shared Voice enables customers to share, pool and manage their communications resources across their organization, meaning they can avoid wasting unused toll-free and long-distance minutes. Business customers can also allocate minimum and maximum concurrent call sessions to defined groups or locations, according to the company.
Marra said customers that opt for this service is that they are buying cloud capacity that's based on usage across an entire enterprise.
"If you had a 1,000 dollar stores, and each one of them has a couple of phone lines what you're doing is basing that call cloud capacity on what's the peak you have at any one time," he said. "What you find in the distributed enterprise is there are 2,000 POTS lines across these 1,000 stores, but there is never more than 100 calls up at the same time."
Another benefit is that it does not require a fork lift upgrade of an existing voice service. Since many businesses are at different stages of their IP migration, Enterprise Shared Voice supports various handoff types such as Hosted Voice, SIP Trunking, PRI and analog lines.
MegaPath said by enabling the service to operate in an existing network environment, business customers can "avoid or delay costly investments in equipment purchases or upgrades."
While the product works well for large enterprises, it is also applicable to smaller businesses that have implemented either TDM-based PRI or SIP Trunking.
"If you have 10 sites with IP PBXs, any one of those 10 sites can have access to all 100 concurrent calls in the cloud, share the call paths of the analog lines or the hosted seats and all you do is just pay a management fee," Marra said.
Enterprise Shared Voice is another element of MegaPath's growing cloud strategy that can accommodate enterprise, private and hybrid options.
For more:
- see the release
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Updated article on Jan. 16 with quotes from Paul Marra, MegaPath's director of product management.