First posted on VoIPReview.org - August 22, 2017
For today’s increasingly connected businesses and employees, work is no longer a place but an activity. The adoption of cloud communication technologies, mobile devices, and social media has removed the boundaries of traditional workplaces and enabled organizations and their teams to achieve greater flexibility in how, when, and where they work.
To further empower modern businesses and their mobile workforce, trusted cloud Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider OnSIP recently unveiled its first business softphone for Mac and Windows. Free and feature-rich, OnSIP’s new desktop app offers users another way to access their business phone and make work calls anywhere or anytime. In this article, John Riordan, the Co-Founder and CTO of OnSIP, talks about their latest offering and shares with VoIPReview.org why OnSIP for desktop is a must for bringing modern teams together.
In the past, when people talk about business phones, they often refer to the physical phone sitting on one’s desk. Today, however, with the advent of the cloud and VoIP technology, business phones no longer just mean dedicated office hardware. They can also refer to softphones or soft clients, a type of software or application installed on a computer, laptop, or mobile device that allows users to place VoIP calls and easily carry out other phone functions.
Softphones are significantly cheaper than desk phones and are much quicker to install. They also offer greater flexibility to users, since only an internet connection is needed to access all features. While softphones have long been a popular option for many users, not all solutions available on the market serve as a complete desk phone replacement. Seeing a gap in the market, leading innovator in enterprise communications OnSIP created a solution that took softphones up a notch.
The provider first launched the OnSIP app, a free Unified Communications browser app, in March 2016. With no downloads or plugins required, the OnSIP web app offered teams a business-grade phone on the go. The web phone lets users quickly make voice and video calls, check voicemail, manage contacts, and more, in one interface--even if the computer is not their own. Over time, OnSIP built more features into the app and, after reviewing usage of the app, realized that they needed to give their “power users” something more permanent than an open browser tab. Thus, the birth of the OnSIP desktop app for Mac and Windows.
"We originally created the OnSIP web app because we saw it as an opportunity to innovate and satisfy a growing business need,” said Riordan. “ As it became more popular, we saw a shift in behavior - some customers were using the web app on a regular basis, in place of a hard phone. Others relied on it for remote working. Our desktop release gives these users the ability to access these features from a native application instead of opening a new browser window and logging in for every session," he explained.
Free for OnSIP customers, the desktop app is a fully functional business phone with a single, user-friendly interface, specially designed for the flexible and mobile worker. Currently, the desktop app is only available for Mac and Windows operating systems. However, according to Riordan, a Linux release is slated for later this year.
According to Riordan, OnSIP stands out from other soft clients available today as it builds upon the flexibility of their existing web app and offers users a complete replacement for their business phone.
“Our new desktop app enables a user to have a softphone integrated right into the computer’s operating system. This allows for some performance enhancements: users can access the softphone from a desktop or dock/system tray icon, while incoming calls will prompt a desktop popup notification that provides caller ID info,” explained Riordan. In addition to enjoying the reliability of a native desktop application, OnSIP’s new app for Mac and Windows also offers the following:
So far, the response to the new OnSIP softphone has been positive. Customers have noted many benefits from using the desktop app, particularly in the flexibility and mobility it grants users. “The desktop app is perfect for people who travel from location to location for work," says Bryan Katz, VP of Engineering at toXcel. "For example, I rotate between two different offices in the same town and travel quite a bit for work. Therefore, the desktop app is much more convenient for me when I’m away."
To learn more about OnSIP’s enterprise communications solutions and how they are pushing businesses forward, please visit OnSIP’s website.
OnSIP offers simple yet powerful communications solutions for modern organizations, which enable them to collaborate with each other and connect with customers while saving time and money. Founded in 2004, OnSIP is trusted by over 80,000 customers accounts. The company was named by leading analyst firm Gartner as a Cool Vendor in Unified Communications (UC) in 2015 for their innovative solutions.