Talk Fusion - a company born four years ago out of necessity in a market where converged communication was a hit-and-miss affair, especially in the SME sector.
The senior executives, Grant Oliff and Michael Kissoglou, formed a relationship over eight years ago when they felt the next logical progression in the telecoms market was unified communications, and were told that it was just a 'buzz word'.
Today one cannot sit in a telecoms meeting without VOIP, or IP telephony or videoconferencing over IP being raised. This is great for companies with the infrastructure, or the budget to replace infrastructure, but what does it mean for the average South African SME enterprise?
The SME (organisations with less than 200 employees) market makes up the bulk of the South African PBX market. It is often these organisations that can benefit the most from IP-based PABX platforms, due to the flexibility that these systems offer and the low cost of advanced features on such systems.
The IP market, however, is inundated with companies offering both open source and embedded solutions. Many of us have seen horror stories at clients that have chosen to go for an IP based solution that was not properly 'specced'. The sad reality most often is that the SME's PBX budget has already been spent on the initial sale and not on a traditional PBX with a full migration path to IP at a later stage which would have suited the company better.
“I feel that a company's voice budget would much better be spent if they initially opt for a better known platform as opposed to a lesser known platform that offers more features for less money. 'Bang for your buck' is more often than not the wrong ideology when it comes to your company's communication budget,” says Talk Fusion's Michael Kissoglou.
When implementing a full IP-based platform, there are a couple of key obstacles that the man on the street has to overcome. Obstacles like: The price of quality bandwidth. What is the 'correct' LAN infrastructure? What is the correct WAN infrastructure? Will the cost of bandwidth and a decent infrastructure be offset by the savings offered by a company's VOIP service provider and IP-based inter-branch communication?
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