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Applications Featured Articles
May 05, 2008
VoIP Increasingly Adopted in Small Business; Speakeasy Enables Small Business to Appear Larger
By Susan J. Campbell TMCnet Contributing Editor
Hosted Voice services are being increasingly adopted by small businesses in an effort to support remote workers at less cost than traditional phone systems. At present, 84 of Fortune’s “Best 100 Companies to Work For” allow employees to telecommute or work from home at least 20 percent of the time. This is a strong increase from 25 companies as recently as 10 years ago.
Nemertes Research has reported that more than 80 percent of companies have at least some employees who work away from their supervisor and/or workgroups. On average, these companies classify 27 percent of their employees as virtual. A Best Buy Company, Speakeasy (News - Alert) is a provider of voice, data and IT solutions. The company finds small businesses with distributed, non-traditional workforces that benefit most from Hosted Voice (VoIP  ) technology.The Speakeasy Hosted Voice service enables a small business to give the appearance of being a larger company, uniting any number of locations and telecommuters without an enormous capital investment. Hosted Voice’s Remote Office feature enables all incoming calls to a business phone to be routed to an employee’s number of choice, including a mobile phone or home phone. At the same time, a call made from a home or mobile phone appears to come from a business office. Newport Communications Group, a magazine publisher for trucking and its allied industries, uses Remote Office to service multiple work locations. Speakeasy enables Newport to keep traveling employees connected, while also providing employees with access to phone system features from their home offices. "Speakeasy Hosted Voice is a much more flexible and effective system than a traditional business phone system," said Chris Odor, Information Technology Manager, Newport Communications, in a Monday statement. "It allows us to tie all our sales offices, editors, and other employees into one system. We save on long distance and have the appearance of one unified company." Upfront costs proved to be less than 15 percent of a traditional phone system, and no expensive maintenance for the system is required as it is hosted offsite at Speakeasy. Monthly distance costs were found to be 40 percent lower. "Traditional phone lines are restrictive for small businesses with a remote workforce," said Bruce Chatterley, Speakeasy president and CEO, in Monday’s statement. "Speakeasy's Hosted Voice service can bridge the gap between virtual offices and create a stronger connection to increase workflow." Speakeasy's excellence in Hosted Voice led to selection as one of Business Computing Magazine's Top 10 VoIP Providers of 2008 and Communications World Magazine's VoIP Product of the Year. Businesses of all sizes are turning to VoIP for the flexibility, scalability and cost savings that it can provide. For smaller businesses, solutions such as those offered by Speakeasy are essential in not only offering the capability that companies need to support a remote workforce, but also the ability to enable a smaller company to appear as big as their larger competitors. Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page. |
