Why use SIP trunks? Thought you’d never ask!
Briefly, some key benefits are…
- Cost savings
- Agility, Scalability
- Simplify, Consolidate and Manage Telecom Resources Efficiently
- Maintain Business Continuity
Take cost savings for example. How many circuits do you have connected to your legacy PBX? Local trunks, a long distance trunk… then you have your Internet and WAN connections perhaps. Imagine if you could consolidate the local, long distance and Internet or WAN into a single data circuit. If you wish to add redundancy, which is always a good idea from the standpoint of business continuity, then add for that. As you consolidate and more efficiently utilize circuits and hardware, reduce overall hardware and all associated costs. Additionally, reduce or eliminate charges for long distance calls within the US.
Agility and scalability… SIP trunks are configured quickly and easily in software. They do rely on and are dependant on your data network’s bandwidth but they are quickly and easily scaled up or down. Almost instantly, incrementally and infinitely scale your business communications as the demand dictates. Pay only for what you need and add trunks quickly at any time.
Simplify, consolidate and manage resources more effectively…. consolidating circuits and hardware means less to manage and fewer bills. Having a truly unified communication system you may find you only need one vendor to manage both your voice and data network, a single point of contact for all your communication needs. Ever try to keep your phone numbers when moving using PRIs or analog trunks? If the new services come out of a different central office, you may find it quite expensive to to keep those numbers. You may be required to either pay for a point to point circuit between the old and new CO or need to pay for remote call forwarding. With SIP trunking, you are often able to keep your numbers, potentially having numbers from all over the country coming into your PBX. It’s a much more flexible system.
Business continuity… using a data networks distributed, scalable architecture you are able to make much more efficient use of resources and recover from a disaster much more quickly. Since calls come into your SIP trunk provider and you are often able to redirect those calls to alternate resources if your PBX cannot be contacted by the SIP trunk provider, you can direct calls in case of disaster to another site or to a call center or for smaller businesses even to a cell phone.
SIP trunking is a flexible cost effective way to manage your companies vital resources. It will make your company more agile and better prepared for disaster. If you’re a business owner, a CFO or an IT Manager, you should definitely be looking at implementing SIP trunks. Once implemented, as George Zimmer says, you’ll like the way you look!