What are the benefits of switching from traditional phone service to hosted VoIP?

Just ask The New York Blower Company, which manufactures premium-quality, engineered fans and blowers for the industrial and OEM marketplace.

The company just recently deployed VoIP organization-wide using Appia’s hosted VoIP service. As a result it is reaping huge savings on its telecommunications costs – and benefitting from the operational efficiencies and improved employee productivity that VoIP brings.


But making the switch took a huge leap of faith for New York Blower. The company had known about VoIP since 2000, but was apprehensive about deploying it in-house for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the cost of installing and maintaining an on-premises system.

“We were leaning toward staying with our current provider,” said John Mearns, NYB’s manager of information technology, in a recent case study released by Appia. “But we knew that would mean another major upgrade in three or four years, and another full replacement in eight or 10.”

 

Specifically the company needed a VoIP solution that could support wireless communications in its expansive, multi-site facility. Up until the switch it had been communicating with, and supervising, employees in these facilities via cell phone.

“We wanted supervisors on the shop floor supervising, instead of being tied to a desk,” Mearns said. “We needed mobility, but we were also looking to scale back our cellular expenses.”

The company, which already had an existing relationship with Appia partner STRYD Technologies, shopped around for some solutions – but when STRYD recommended Appia’s hosted VoIP service and gave a demonstration, the company’s management was immediately impressed.
 

“Out of everything we looked at, the first 12 months of the Appia/STRYD solution cost about 15 percent less,” Mearns said. “But over time, eliminating the cycle of update and replacement costs made the real difference. Over the expected 10-year life of a purchased system, this could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hosted solution came out far ahead of anything else.”

Hosted VoIP offers small to medium sized businesses a slew of advantages over on-premises systems. For one thing, hosted VoIP helps companies avoid the cost of having to purchase new equipment and network architecture. In addition there is no need to shell out capital for expensive software licenses – all that is really needed is a high speed connection, the computers and the phones. The service is delivered much the same as a utility – hosted VoIP is typically offered on a per-minute “pay-as-you-go” basis or as a flat monthly or annual subscription. That means the cost of the service can be represented neatly as a single line item ion monthly expense reports.

Another advantage of hosted VoIP is that the service provider manages the service, including both the software and infrastructure, so a company’s IT team doesn’t need to be burdened with installation, configuration and maintenance and troubleshooting of the system. At the same time, most VoIP services offer a Web-based customer portal where customers can make changes to their service without the need to contact the provider directly. Yet another advantage of hosted VoIP is that customers get software upgrades and new feature sets automatically as part of the service.

NYB later expanded the implementation to include all three of its sites in La Porte, Ind.; Willowbrook, Ill.; and Effingham, Ill. The process included a full network equipment refresh and configuration for over 200 phones.

 

“We were able to lower NYB’s equipment costs because of our relationship with Cisco (News - Alert), and because a hosted solution requires less equipment overall,” Morse said.

 

The refresh included dedicated Appia T-1 connections, giving NYB a truly private network for far less than it had been paying to use the public Internet.

 

“We used to have to handle this separately through another provider,” Mearns said. “The Appia Private Network is much cheaper, and it’s faster, even with phone traffic on it. Our users tell us they have noticed the improvement in performance, and we like that our business traffic is off the public Internet.”

 

NYB also took advantage of two of Appia’s network services, WANNet, which provides round-the-clock network equipment support, and WANCare Management, which is Appia’s 24/7/365 network monitoring and management service. The staff at Appia’s network operations center monitors NYB’s network and provides reports on its performance and health. If there’s ever a problem, Appia’s engineers work issues through to resolution.

 

On the shop floor, WiFi (News - Alert) access points and mobile IP phones replaced the cumbersome and costly cellular contracts, giving NYB both the mobility and cost savings it had been seeking.

 

“We have five different buildings at our La Porte location, and we’re able to move seamlessly between all of them,” Mearns said. “We’re all on the same phone system whether we’re at our desks or not.”

 

Mearns said the implementation “has worked out very well.” The company is now able to separate business traffic from Internet browsing traffic, “and we have redundant connections configured to kick in automatically in case of any outage,” he said.

 

As a result of the migration, NYB now enjoys features such as a common voicemail system and four-digit dialing between sites, fostering a single corporate identity and lowering calling costs.

 

“We’re also saving a lot of time,” Mearns said. “We no longer have to be telephone managers. When it comes to the phones, we just plug them in and answer any emails that come in to the support center. We’re free to focus on other tasks.”

 

New York Blower reportedly plans to expand the system to include other sites in the near future.

 

Traverse City, Mich.-based Appia, which names Cisco among its technology partners, offers managed IT and telecom services to small and midsize companies in the Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New York and St. Louis areas, as well as other markets in North America and Europe. The company claims its managed solutions help customers reduce costs, enhance employee productivity, improve customer care, and compete more effectively against larger enterprises. Appia was named to Inc. magazine’s list of America’s fastest-growing private companies in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and was named one of the world’s Top Five Managed Service Providers on the 2008-09 MSPmentor 100.

Appia made news back in July when it announced that it had seen significant growth with its hosted IP-PBX (News - Alert) services, which are gaining in popularity as companies discover the many advantages of hosted VoIP.