OnSIP is Google Voice for Business

e-Week is reporting that Google has big plans for VoIP in 2010. This is great news. Really great news. SIP-enabling Google Voice a la Gizmo5 would be a huge shot in the arm for SIP, solidifying its appeal to the masses. However, it still does not address the needs of business customers. Small and medium businesses are flocking to cloud computing in general and hosted VoIP specifically, but Google Voice is ignoring this segment of the market completely. Here are the top three reasons a small business should use the OnSIP Hosted PBX by Junction Networks instead of Google Voice: Extension Dialing SIP addresses are great. Mine is sip:mike@junctionnetworks.com. Put that address into your phone and my phone rings. Very cool. The problem is that business desk phones are still number pad based. If I want to call another Junction Networks user, it is far easier to dial their extension - which our system translates into a SIP address behind the scenes - than it is to type their SIP address into the phone via the number pad. For a business to use a VoIP system as an internal PBX, you must have extension dialing. Google Voice has no support for extensions. Currently, to reach a Google Voice customer you must dial their phone number. With the integration with Gizmo, that will expand to SIP addresses, but still no extensions. PBX Functionality If you have only one or two people in your company, then Google Voice is a good choice; mainly due to its cheapness. However, once you have five or more, you'll need services like attendant menus ("Hello, welcome to Acme Corp, press 1 for sales and 2 for customer service."), voicemail boxes, and dial-by-name directories. None of these features are currently supported with Google Voice. By contrast, the SoHo package of the OnSIP Hosted PBX includes three Attendant Menus, three ring groups, five voicemail boxes and one dial-by-name directory. That's everything a small business needs to get started. Integration with Google Voice Most VoIP providers make their service a walled garden. You may or may not be able to call outside SIP addresses, but very, very few allow you to add external SIP address to the PBX. OnSIP is different. We allow you to put external SIP addresses into your PBX and fully integrate them, even to the point of giving them extensions and using them in applications like the attendant menu. In this way, you can integrate Google Voice users into your corporate PBX. For example, if you have freelance developers with Google Voice accounts and SIP addresses, you can add them as extensions on your OnSIP Hosted PBX and get the best of both worlds. To be fair, Google Voice is not targeting the small and medium business. Their purchase of Gizmo5 clearly shows that they are going after the Skype market. But the fact that they will be giving out SIP address further validates our reliance on a full integration of SIP. We are always happy to see big players adopt SIP.