Page 22 - Telecom Reseller August-September 2016

22 Telecom Reseller MULLIGAN continued from page 17
purchase date with proof of purchase. As an example: 2409-820-105_20/11/13 is a Jabra BIZ 2400 which carries a three-year warranty, so with the three-month shelf-life extension, the out-of- warranty date will be around 02/20/2017.
VALUE
is is not so easy. Some models, regardless of cost, are in higher demand and yield a higher trade-in value than more expensive, less popular models.
Also, costs vary widely depending upon supplier and so you may have paid $200 for a $100 headset, so a $10 trade-in credit will not be as appealing to a customer who only paid $100. Google the model number, compare the prices for used headsets to the trade-in credit o ered by your supplier. Keep in mind that, like cars, a used headset’s value drops dramatically, and if you purchased an unpopular model, you may not get more than $5 each, regardless of age or cost.
At this point, you should be proud of yourself! You’ve determined the headset’s model, warranty status and the value. Now you need to decide which ones you will be repairing, recycling or trading-in.
It’s your call, however, my advice would be to repair in-warranty corded and wireless headsets, consider repairing or refurbishing popular models worth $100 or more used, trade-in those with value and recycle the rest. n
August/September 2016
Adopting The Cloud: Smaller Businesses And Access To Advanced Phone Systems
I
f you call a large corporation’s main phone line, you’ll likely be asked to ‘enter the extension of the person you’re trying to reach.’
BALASUBRAMANIAN
by Venky, co-founder of Plivo (www. plivo.com)
phone lines. Cloud communication platform vendors optimize performance and cost - at any given time, these providers are hosting tens of thousands calls on their servers. ey also use sophisticated algorithms to control bandwidth allocation - called bandwidth throttling - in order to minimize congestion in peak times.
With a VoIP phone, businesses can make calls to landlines, mobile phones, and computers - more, one can dial in and receive calls for anywhere with a solid internet connection.
Whereas with traditional PBX phone systems employees would have to be glued to their desks, VoIP phones allow people to work remotely - and when about 35% of people in the US currently
do some work from home, that’s an important feature.
MOVING AWAY FROM HARDWARE
Go to a trade show, and you’ll still see traditional PBX phone system hardware for sale - organizations that haven’t adopted cloud-based so ware still rely on them. According to a 2015 study by Cloud Security Alliance, many companies are still wary of the cloud. Forty percent are moving in on cloud services with caution, 15
percent are still investigating, and 11 percent aren’t making cloud a priority.
But if you haven’t considered cloud yet, you should. Enterprises need to move with the times and adopt cloud services - or else get le behind. According to IDC, worldwide public cloud service spending is set to double - it is predicted to reach $141 billion by 2019. is makes it likely for telecommunications hardware players, like Cisco, to step away from hardware all together and shi to online cloud-based systems - it’s an important move, especially on the heels of the major hardware provider’s 5,500 person layo .
Take a look at the most recent telecommunications acquisitions, and you’ll see the shi is already beginning to happen. Cisco acquired Tropo, a provider of a cloud- based API platform, in May to advance into the communications platform as a service (CPaaS) market.
Cisco also partnered with Apple to integrate
its API technologies into the upcoming iOS 10 so ware. Another larger telecommunications company, Vonage, bought CPaaS company Nexmo for $230 USD in May.
All telecommunication systems will be web- based in the future. And they kind of need to be - workplaces have shi ed their cultures to promote telecommuting, and existing hardware infrastructures don’t support the shi . So the introduction of VoIP phones not only helps smaller businesses to access advanced phone systems, but it is something all corporations should consider adopting in changing times. n
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And if the organization hasn’t switched to the cloud, these extensions are quite an expensive feature to have - the infrastructure, called Private Branch Exchange (PBX) phone systems, can easily cost over $10,000 for the most simple setup.
e phone systems manage incoming and outgoing calls for a business. ey consist of internal and external lines, a server that controls call switching and routing, and one big, blocky phone that enables users to manually transfer between lines. Traditional PBX systems are a pretty old infrastructure, but are o en o limits for small to medium businesses because they are just too big of an investment.
But now with cloud services, smaller organizations have the ability to move in on this technology. Today, they have access to VoIP ‘physical’ phones, which do everything
a traditional PBX system does, but through
an Internet connection. is lowers costs considerably. Plus, calls over the web rely on infrastructure that’s hosted by the service provider, so businesses no longer need to set the infrastructure up themselves.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF
PHYSICAL PHONE
Although it may look like an ordinary telephone, a VoIP phone (or an IP phone) allows users to make calls over the Internet, instead of using physical