Basic Tips for How to Select a Hosted Service Provider, Get Right VoIP Equipment

Telephony services are perhaps the most important service to any business. Most VoIP service providers offer basic capabilities, such as voicemail or call holding, but may not give offer advanced features, service options or scalability that an organization needs. Here are some guidelines on selecting a hosted provider as recommended by Ramon Perez in a blog posting from VoipSupply.

The service provider

Evaluate the service provider and system integrators’ capabilities in terms of breadth of services and flexibility of offerings. There is value to a business when it selects a range of services from one provider. IP Telephony services will require an IP connection. It is also sensible to use the same circuits/network to provide other services. Remember, the cost of managing separate suppliers is much higher than dealing with one.

Ensure that the vendor is financially stable and committed to the business over the long haul. There are a large number of providers in this market. Some have significant venture capital funding that has to be repaid, often by selling the business. A large proportion of the rest are operating on a shoestring and some fail every year. Both of these situations leave you exposed to the risk of no telephony services or one that is altered and not fit for purpose.

The company’s network management facility

Tour the company’s network management facility and meet the people who will monitor the network. When you buy a hosted telephony service, typically the only thing on site are the phones. Take advantage of any offers to visit the service provider’s data center and/or network management center.

Select a service provider that has business continuity and disaster recover capabilities. Some providers cut corners, especially when they are in a setup or rapid growth phase. They don’t have the resources to deploy services at two or more data centers. They have single points of failure in their hardware, software or network. Building resilience into the platform adds cost initially but it is vital to ensure that the service is always available. If an entire data center is lost, what happens to the customer data, call recordings, voicemails? If these are important to you, they should be important to the service provider.