While mobile phone communication has replaced traditional reliance on a fixed telephone for personal communication, fixed telephone networking remains stagnant in the office. Even today, when Information Technology is converging with the traditional telecommunication industry, fixed telephones are still essential. Just like a home, a business organization cannot exclusively rely on mobile phone communication both within and without its offices, whether because of cost or convenience. Essentially, therefore, most organizations still rely on a centralized internal telephone system. What may vary however is the infrastructural design of the internal telephone system.
Presently, there are two common types of such centralized telephone systems namely the more recent VoIP Telephone System and its precursor, the analog telephone system. VoIP Telephone Systems exclusively rely on an Internet Protocol Private Branch Exchange (IP PBX) configuration. The analog telephone systems relied on either a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system or Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX) system. The choice of either the VoIP telephone system or the analog telephone system, and the IP PBX, PABX, or PBX configuration is based on an organization's preference. This article briefly addresses the cost-benefit justification of why a specific telephone infrastructure is preferred by today's business organizations. Towards that end, nonetheless, it is important to first differentiate IP PBX, PBX and PABX telephone systems and their distinctive configurations.
Contextualizing PBX and PABX Systems in a Business Organization
In their normal setup, PBX and PABX systems primarily connect any office in an organization, not only with other internal offices, but also with all available public telephone networks without the organization premises. In their configuration, the PBX and PABX systems facilitate only a few separate lines for users in the organization for internal communication. In traditional settings, organizations had all available phone lines physically covered to a centralized port. As such, each telephone line was connected to the centralized port using a separate telephone cable.
More importantly for the present article, is that the centralized telephone system could be automatically covered either automatically or in analog form. The automatically connected systems (PABX) allowed more separate lines for internal communication than was feasible with an analog connection (PBX). Yet while organizations had transferred most of their centralized connections from the analog form to the automatic one, the feasibility of using a cable network for all telephone lines was not only costly, but also frequently faulty. The infrastructural cost, space, manpower, and maintenance needed was gigantic by today's standards.
Dynamic Competitiveness of the VoIP Telephone System
Thus emerged the VoIP telephone system, and organizations responded with zeal. The nature and volume of communication today via the telephone would make the use of separate cables for all telephone lines in an organization impractical. The IP PBX system introduced the concept of networking telephone connectivity using a limitless stack of internet network protocol. For the first time, all telephone lines in an organization were connected to computer units within a networked infrastructure system, where more telephone numbers allowed internal and external communication with minimal infrastructure. The impact was cost reduction and improvement of phone technology.
The use of the PBX systems, despite having a limited number of cabled telephone lines, was essential to facilitate connectivity to public-switched telephone networks outside the organization. Further, there was also the need to sustain internal communication in the organization. What IP PBX did was to eliminate these limitations towards an infinite potential, both for external and internal communication. Added to the communication potential besides the number of telephone lines available, was the reduction of infrastructural cost, sharing of available resources, added features of audio and video streaming, as well as the computerized instant messaging (via IP) all facilitated by a minimal networked infrastructure. It is therefore not surprising that such international service providers as Microsoft are now entering the competitive market of VoIP phone providers. Unique features in modern installations include:
- Instant messaging capabilities
- Timed call recording
- Vast voice mail recording
- Voice mail to email conversions
- Bridged conference calls
- Availability of Text To Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
- Automated call queuing and customer service voice-overs etc
Organizational Benefits of IP PBX in Modern Business
Today, most business organizations rely on the IP PBX system for their internal and external telephone needs. The choice of IP PBX for a modern business telephone system is ideally reflective of a cost-benefit analysis. On one side is the initial and progressive maintenance cost of the requisite infrastructure, and on the hand are the potential benefits accruing from the IP PBX system. Chief among these benefits from the perspective of modern business organizations include:
1. Reduction of costs and expenses when installing and maintaining an IP PBX system since the same infrastructure is shared and networked by all users
2. Creation of an intranet, using VoIP mechanics that combine PBX functionalities with networking advantages
3. Extremely low costs of international calls placed within their intranet, alongside browser-based calls and chat
4. The IP PBX system is available both as hardware and as a software solution making it relatively inexpensive
5. Added mobility within and without the organization without affecting the reach and quality of telephone access (mobility user functions)
6. Using a converged communication network, where both voice and data use the same infrastructure
7. IP PBX system may include additional features of Computer Telephone Integration (CTI), where telephone provides input and generates output form an organization's database
8. IP PBX facilitates Integration of the telephone and CRM software, expansive connectedness, and remote office access for organizations, thus empowering higher levels of productivity and effective operations
9. Enabling Interactive Voice Response (IVR) where computerized databases actively interacts with customers with pre-recorded human voice and their keypad inputs
In conclusion, numerous additional features besides those listed above complement telephone communication in the IP PBX system. What is of importance, however, is how the IP PBX has enabled modern business organizations increase their productivity through effective, timely, and highly networked communication, thus increasing their revenues. Further, IP PBX has helped reduce the cost of installations and maintenance of an organization's telephone system, to a level that is incomparable to the likely costs of traditional cable-based systems. IP PBX has helped facilitate and even inspire some valuable complementariness to the telephone service, such as instant messaging, video conference calls, voice mail recording, IVR, call queuing and many others as listed at the end of the last section. This does not even incorporate the likely savings in labor and expenses such features as Text To Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition provides modern businesses. Courtesy of IP PBX, contemporary telephone infrastructure for business organizations has attained commendable cost-benefit symmetry, and the future can only get better.