When shortlisting hosted telephony providers, there’s a wealth of different businesses to look at. Some specialise in WAN, some in hosted telephony. There are a few niche providers that have vast experience in both. This post looks at the key factors you should consider when assessing why you should use a WAN company for your hosted telephony.
Cost reduction
Consolidation of suppliers always leads to cost reduction. The obvious element here is buying power. The more services you procure from one provider, the higher a discount you are likely to receive. By packaging services together, customers can benefit from cost savings across WAN, telephony and peripheral services.
The unseen element of consuming WAN and hosted telephony services through the same provider is the network connections made behind the scenes.
When a WAN company runs their own voice platform, the charges for creating interconnects between the two is minimal. There is no supplier side requirement for rental of infrastructure and no charges for professional services for work to be carried out by third-party vendors.
“One throat to choke” becomes “One back to pat” as access to changes and new configurations is available first-hand to your hosted telephony partner. Whilst this is beneficial for any provider, the cost benefits are heavily reflected on your monthly bill.
Connectivity
A business can only perform as well as it’s weakest link. Be this your internet connection, network configuration or hosted telephony, having all components looked after by the same company means you can move all these services to be on par with each other.
By selecting a connectivity company for hosted telephony, they have access to ensure performance levels are at maximum capacity across the board. Hosted telephony comes with connectivity pre-requisites to perform at the levels you expect. By using a dedicated connection or separate VLAN for voice, your connectivity provider can ensure your telephony service is uninterrupted by other applications requiring bandwidth.
Performance and reliability are filtered through from your internet connection to your hosted telephony service. If your connection is down, your hosted telephony is down. When your provider hosts both WAN and hosted telephony for your business, you can set intelligent alerts and triggers to ensure business continuity. If your connectivity temporarily fails or dips below a set threshold, calls can be diverted to alternate destinations. In extreme cases, where power fails, or a natural disaster occurs, your connectivity could failover your voice services to an available connection that is powered by a different source.
Network Configuration
Poor network configuration affects voice quality. The network is a fundamental driver of voice quality. Voice quality issues can be hard to track down, especially when they are intermittent. But they can have a huge impact on the business.
For example, the CEO of an investment finance company told us they were having real problems with conference calls with high value clients. You need network level monitoring to help pin down voice quality issues. A hosted telephony service alone can tell you when the issues occur, but having access to both WAN and telephony levels prompts proactive changes. The impact of frequent drops in quality or connection – caused by your WAN – can have a detrimental bearing on the appearance of your business.
Ultimately, if your telephony performance is suffering, you want to know about it. Traditionally, an IT department is notified by issues in the form of tickets hitting your service desk. You’d then have to call your telephony provider and troubleshoot the problem. Once troubleshooted, the advice could be “consult your WAN provider”. Another round of troubleshooting begins and all the while your service is interrupted.
Monitoring
By using a WAN company for your hosted telephony, you remove the delay in troubleshooting. When you phone the support team, you know that you are through to the right people to remedy your issue.
Furthermore, if you use the same company for WAN and voice services, they have the benefit of network monitoring services. This means your service provider likely knows an issue has occurred and they are already working on a solution.
Most suppliers can see when a link is down. Some can see when it's over-utilised. We can tell you which application, user or device the root cause is of the problem and follow the path of an application across the network. And we raise 95% of issues proactively.
We have one of the best, if not the best monitoring and management platforms in the industry, giving you complete, deep and interconnected information about the network and about how your applications are performing over it. We show you the complete application path, so you can easily spot when and where problems have arisen and do something about it.
SCREENSHOT OF SAS' UNIFIED DASHBOARD
Scalability
Both WAN and hosted telephony are technologies that can be adjusted according to volume and changing requirements. Typically, as users are added or removed, WAN and telephony services are increased or decreased. By utilising the cloud and services like SD WAN, these are relatively simple tweaks to make. However, when the WAN provider and telephony provider are different, making these changes in unison creates an extra job for the IT Manager. Ensuring these two jobs happen concurrently is near impossible with two vendors making changes. This leaves the IT Manager acting as a project manager, network manager and fire fighter in case one change dramatically impacts the other.
With the introduction of SDWAN, the combination of hosted telephony and WAN becomes the most scalable solution possible to manage your business communication requirements. Whether seasonally or permanently, each time you need to make a change to your setup, your WAN company – who also looks after your telephony needs – can cater for your requirements. Simple, integrated cloud portals can request changes at administration level and modify anything on the back end. Where manual intervention is required, you have the peace of mind that the same team, and often the same individual is making the change.
By using a WAN company for hosted telephony, you are not just buying WAN and hosted telephony, but peace of mind.