While I wish I were considered as relevant as Bill Gates, at least at this point in time, we share a common vision of the end of the PBX. Microsoft recently unveiled their unified communications offering. At the launch in San Francisco, Gates stated "The transformation to software-based communications is going to be as profound as the shift from the typewriter to word-processing software."
Hey, we feel the same way. Wikipedia defines a PBX or Private Branch Exchange, as " a telephone exchange that serves a particular business or office, as opposed to one that a common carrier or telephone company operates for many businesses or for the general public." We agree that large hunks of hardware, sitting in telco closets, serving individual silos or organizations are a thing of the past. We also agree that the future of unified communications is software based. We are headed in different directions though on our implementation of the PBX replacement.
Microsoft's unified communications services are embedded in existing Microsoft products that generally need to be managed in silos on a company by company basis. For some, this model makes sense. Junction Networks, on the other hand, delivers unified communications services as a service, with no managed software on the client side. The funny thing about delivering unified communications services as a service is we are still calling it "Hosted PBX" for marketing purposes because that's what customers understand.
The fact of the matter is, the Junction Networks hosted infrastructure is so far from anything that acts or looks like a PBX, it is almost painful for us to call it a PBX. If anything, it is much like any web infrastructure, with routers, switches, web servers and db servers. This model is far more scalable, redundant, reliable and cheaper than any per customer or per server model that was typically the model of the traditional PBX.
Much like web or email hosting, the future of unified communications holds two options for a business:
- Do It Yourself: Buy, install, manage and deploy software, such as Microsoft's products, with your own staff and resources.
- Communications as a Service: Engage a service provider, such as Junction Networks, for a pay-as-you go service with little or no upfront investment or internal resource needs. Both are valid models and which way a business goes depends on a particular organization's appetite for control, skill set of technology folks, and capital availability to name a few factors.
Happy to be on the same (or similar) page as Bill!