Cisco's Small Business SPA9000 provides enterprise level VOIP telephony for SMEs

VOIP-enabled communications systems have traditionally been the mainstay of large enterprises with huge budgets that are capable of weathering not only the cost of installing new hardware, but also the set-up of an often complex new IT voice environment.

With the arrival of Cisco's Small Business SPA9000 Voice System, all of the benefits brought to the table by VOIP are now available to buyers on a budget.

Marius Vermeulen, Cisco technical specialist at Tarsus Technologies, says the SPA9000 is cost-effective to procure and set up, and a cinch to maintain.

“The best part is that it's capable of growing and adapting as the business does,” he says.

“In fact,” he says, “the business doesn't even have to have a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk available to begin using the SPA9000. Since the solution can be connected to the public switched telephone network via a highly reliable traditional FXO line, organisations can start with traditional telephony and transition to VOIP when it makes financial sense for them to do so.

“When they're ready to make the move, they simply sign up with a local IP telephony service provider and can immediately begin making use of the best of both the traditional public switched telephone network and VOIP network, on a least-cost routing basis,” he explains.

The benefit of this, Vermeulen adds, is that traditional voice-based devices such as fax machines, answering machines and media adaptors can continue to be supported in the VOIP world.

Regardless of which route they choose at the outset, customers will gain immediate access to enterprise-grade services such as voicemail, transfer, conference, hold, hunt groups, and automated attendant, from the word go.

Although the Cisco Small Business SPA9000 will work with any SIP compatible IP telephone, Cisco's Small Business IP Phones, such as the Cisco Small Business SPA901, SPA921, SPA922, SPA941 and SPA942 unlock additional features in the SPA9000.

“Powerful configuration capabilities enable the SPA9000 to support a greater set of advanced features with these telephones, such as shared line appearances, hunt groups, call transfer, call parking lot, and group paging,” Vermeulen says.

“Furthermore, through its support of integrated voice response, the SPA9000 can assist in the routing of calls to the correct party,” he adds.

“All of the solution's features are configured from a Web browser or through a SIP-enabled handset - it really couldn't be simpler,” he says.

Looking at provision for growth, Vermeulen says that the SPA9000 comes pre-configured for use with four SIP-compatible IP phones. This is, however, easily upgradeable to 16 IP phones with an easy-to-obtain licence key upgrade.

“There really isn't a more cost-effective route for SMEs than to start with an SPA9000 and scale from there,” he concludes.