VoIP in the Cloud and Cost-Analysis

An overwhelming majority of companies in a recent survey said that they are pursuing a cloud adoption strategy with the primary goals of improving IT efficiencies and reducing costs. According to a Dimensional Research survey, 92 percent of those surveyed said that cloud—be it private, third-party private, public or hybrid models—is a strategic initiative going forward in order to help their businesses run more effectively from an operational standpoint. That’s not to say that they haven’t embraced the cloud already. More than one third of those surveyed have a quarter or more of all services in that model. Interestingly, a full 72 percent of respondents indicated that tracking cloud usage and costs is extremely or very important to their IT function. Respondents’ top features on that wish-list include: Improve IT forecasting (57 percent), expand on-demand/self-service access to the cloud (34 percent), and the ability to better match allocation vs. utilization (30 percent). Star2Star’s scalable cloud communications platform offers flexible functionality and a variety of service options, allowing companies to use the communications features they need without having to pay for those they don’t. Executives have different communications needs than secretaries, and secretaries have different communications needs than the sales force. Star2Star’s system can provide different telephones with different capabilities so every employee has the tools needed to get their job done efficiently and cost-effectively.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

VoIP the Next Era of Unified Communication

Star2Star was able to reduce 10,000 analog phone lines down to 3,000 virtual lines for a major retail chain. How much can Star2Star save you? Answer 4 simple questions and find out http://stwb.co/erauph

As voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) continues to replace traditional phone systems across the business world, the way companies communicate has become much more flexible and personalized. Gone are the days of having a single desk phone with a single phone number that only rings to that line. Now, users have many devices and methods to choose from: a desk phone, smartphone, home phone, laptop, softphone client, instant messaging, fax, email, videoconferencing, conference calling, and more. More importantly, users want to be accessible from all of them in a centralized way.

The best way to centralize business communications is through the implementation of a unified communications (UC) solution. As the name implies, UC solutions unite various communications methods and devices into a single system. The best UC solutions even make everything accessible from a single interface or user portal. While UC can be adopted painlessly and quickly, problems can develop if a business isn’t fully committed. Research firm UCStrategies points out that when implementing UC solution, management issues can often get in the way of realizing the true potential of moving from a line-centric to a user-centric world.

“This wide range of capabilities and devices has meant that the traditional line-centric [management] approach doesn’t work anymore,” the firm noted. “[For instance], where change used to happen only when a user moved offices, now a multiplicity of user and business events through the lifecycle that drive change, which can result in ten or a hundred times as many changes.”

Although smaller organizations may utilize fewer business communication tools, UC adoption still can be very challenging, as there are often separate configuration and management interfaces for different tools. These challenges are exacerbated for those companies that have either a very small IT department or no dedicated IT staff.

Many organizations do not have a plan in place to manage this dramatic increase in sophistication or fully utilize the powerful new tools they have at their disposal, and instead simply continue to use the methods they have in the past. These methods include manual processes where trained and experienced individuals perform sophisticated configurations based on business rules for each event after receiving a work request to do so. A particularly difficult challenge to overcome is mindset and comfort. Many employees, including those in the highest levels of management, may be resistant to change or unwilling to learn a new system. They may consciously choose to continue doing things the way that they’ve always been done, without seeing how a few small changes could dramatically improve the way they do business.

Although theoretically designed to eliminate these problems, UC vendor management systems are typically little better; UCstrategies explained that they’re still device-centric and limited to capabilities such as simple directory integration. Luckily, there are ways to ease UC adoption and make it faster and easier for users to take full advantage of the many advanced features that are only possible with UC.

Star2Star Communications has made significant strides in this area through the development of specialized communications hardware. Star2Star’s StarBox™ Cloud Communication Manager takes the place of a typical edge device, while also providing numerous additional features like built-in quality-of-service and call control, security, and granular management and reporting.

Technology like the StarBox™ Cloud Connection Manager makes it possible for an entire system to be managed end-to-end with integration into the full lifecycle of events. Management and integration eliminates a number of problems, including excessively high costs, over-provisioning of resources and licenses, failure to decommission unused assets, frequent updates and cost for minor changes to system integrator-provided solutions, and increased staff overtime.

Other methods can also be utilized to make a UC solution more user-centric. A single, easy-to-use interface that provides access to all features is critical. Accommodations such as key-system emulation that make a system operate more like older systems with which users are familiar can make the transition much simpler. 24/7/365 system monitoring and technical support both reduce the likelihood of problems developing and quickly resolve them in the unlikely event that they occur.

Advanced communications solutions can transform a business by dramatically reducing costs, simplifying processes, improving efficiency, reducing IT demands, and improving how employees connect internally and externally. However, these benefits can be realized only if the solution is deployed and operated in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Organizations need to make sure that they choose a solution that meets their needs and solves their problems, and they also need to commit to making the internal changes necessary to fully utilize it.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

SMBs Cite Presence Information as Major Need

AccuVoIP Services LLC

Don’t let disaster strike your phone system. Find out why so many companies use Star2Star solutions as their safety net and never lose communication continuity.http://stwb.co/clpparaccuvoipservices.atworkweb.com

Picture this: It’s the eighth inning of a baseball game. The manager calls the bullpen for his relief pitcher, but he’s nowhere to be found. As a result, there is no one available to help the team at a critical moment.

Just as a baseball manager needs to know his players’ availability at all times, you need to know where your employees are when they're on the clock. When it comes time to summon help to complete a task, you shouldn’t have to search the office or dial three different phone numbers trying to connect with someone.

As indicated in a recent survey from Software Advice, this is currently a widespread problem at the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) level. About two-thirds of end users at the SMB level currently have no way of viewing their associates’ presence information. Despite the widespread use of computers and networking technology, there is often no way to determine a connected user’s availability on the network. This means that many businesses are held back by missed opportunities and diminished productivity.

If your business is experiencing these problems due to a lack of visibility into employee status, it may time to embrace presence management technology - one of the most helpful Unified Communications solutions for streamlining employee collaboration. Using presence tools, all the members of your organization will have the ability to see who is available, and on what device, over a variety of channels including chat, text, voice and video.

With Star2Star’s StarScope2, employees can monitor and control all of their communications in one place. In addition, users gain access to helpful features including favorites and recently called lists, an integrated company-wide directory and a multiparty Instant Messaging chat client. In other words, presence simply helps bring people together.

Click here to learn more about how you can enhance your business’s communications with Star2Star today.

Data and graphs courtesy of Software Advice, an online telecom comparison firm.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

Enjoy the Highest Possible Call Quality with No Delay, Echo or Distortion

AccuVoIP Services LLC

Don’t let disaster strike your phone system. Find out why so many companies use Star2Star solutions as their safety net and never lose communication continuity.http://stwb.co/clpparaccuvoipservices.atworkweb.com

Every customer counts. As a VoIP reseller, this means always providing your customers with quality VoIP service so they don’t turn to your competitors to correct problems such as delay, echo, or jitter.

If you are hearing continual grumbling from your clients, you can assume your service is suffering from problems such as the following:

• Best-effort (packet-switched) networks: Packets travel by different routes, and packets can arrive at their destinations in a different order than they were originally sent, or be lost altogether, unless your system is best-in-class. Have you ever felt like the party on the other end of the line was uttering nonsensical statements? It could be because of packet loss.


• Delays caused by propagation, handling and queuing: Speech degradation is caused by a combination of propagation delays (caused by fiber networks that transmit electrons slower than the speed of light), handling delays (from forwarding frames through the network), and by queuing delays (where more packets are sent out than the interface can handle at a given time).


• Inadequate router: When an Internet connection is used for both voice and data without a router prioritized for VoIP traffic, call quality can be impacted by other applications on the network..


• Poor Internet connection: Most ISPs provided utility broadband connections that don't account for the quality and reliability requirements of real-time voice packets.

How can you resolve these issues and keep your customers satisfied? Maybe it’s time to choose an industry-leading business VoIP solution like Star2Star that prioritizes call quality and quality of service above all else.

Our StarBox Cloud Connection Manager connects over the Internet to our network of data centers, where we manage and monitor the quality of your phone system, around the clock. The StarBox Cloud Connection Manager adds end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) information to Internet traffic so that time-sensitive traffic is prioritized over other data traffic, resulting in clearer, more intelligible calls. In fact, your clients will experience 75% less latency and benefit from 24/7/365 monitoring failover.

For more information about how our StarBox Cloud Connection Manager can help you better support your customers’ VoIP communications, click here.

Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.

VoIP Telephone Provider in Wisconsin

A new year has arrived, bringing with it a clean slate and an opportunity for new beginnings. If your business is still using a legacy telephone solution, migrating to a VoIP system with unified communications (UC) features is a surefire way to make 2015 more productive and profitable than last year.

If you're on the fence about making a change to your communications infrastructure, we'd like to offer a few advantages that should tip the scales toward UC adoption:

Ease of Use: Best-in-class UC solutions offer users the capability to enjoy a variety of functionality from a single application screen. From that single interface, your employees can point and click to access UC features like:

• ·        Chat/instant messaging
• ·        Digital faxing
• ·        Presence management
• ·        Videoconferencing

Increased Productivity: Access to the aforementioned features allows for enhanced collaboration throughout your organization—including with mobile or remote employees—which increases productivity across the board. Your workforce will spend less time digging through your internal system for contact information and trying to track down colleagues, and more time completing mission critical tasks.

Reliability: A leading cloud-based UC provider can offer reliability that was unachievable with legacy telephony. Star2Star Communications, for instance, uses a unique and intelligent Blended Architecture that allows us to confidently guarantee 99.999 percent uptime on a system that has not gone down for even a second since 2011.

Need More Ammo? We’ve provided some compelling reasons to switch to a UC solution this year, but we also understand that some decision makers like to investigate down to the smallest details. So, if you would like some more information about why adopting UC makes good business sense, click here to watch our new video. VoIP phone systems bring positive cash flow during your very first month. We also offer financing for new equipment, saving you money even after you factor in the cost of lease payments.

Bring up to a dozen colleagues into the conversation today when you contact our VIP VoIP experts. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 to learn more about small business video conferencing.