It may seem like the only good thing about an End-of-Life (EOL) Notification is the advance notice to find a new solution — such as VoIP technology. After all, it would be worse to see the legacy PBX gasping one last gasp and leaving the company without phone systems.
Nevertheless, there is another positive to consider. A manufacturer’s EOL notice warning it will no longer support the PBX hardware represents an excellent opportunity to upgrade to a business VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone system.
Certainly a PBX phone system may last beyond its EOL. Manufacturers too often decide to retire a system before its actual operational end-of-life. But without manufacturer support of the hardware, the business could be looking at additional maintenance costs and functionality or compatibility issues.
Legacy business phone system problems could include:
- System bugs that will now go unchecked as the manufacturer has already moved on.
- Fewer technical resources to support the existing system.
- Upgrade costs for patches, spare parts, and more to keep the system functioning.
- Not meeting business need to be where the consumers are, communicating with them flexibly.
Instead of increasing an investment in a legacy system that is no longer doing all that modern telephony offers, consider the reasons a VoIP system might work better.
Advantages of the VoIP Alternative
Even as the PBX hardware has been aging, business phone systems have been making great strides. Today, small and mid-sized companies are finding that many of the phone system features once available only to enterprise-sized players can now be theirs too.
VoIP service offers ease of deployment, scalability and customer-friendly features, and is already in use by 36% of the businesses surveyed by Software Advice in their 2015 buyer report.
These advantages are driving VoIP technology and business phone system market growth. In 2012, the VoIP market’s corporate consumer segment registered 98.9 billion subscribers, accounting for US $43.27 billion in global revenues. Future Market Insights (FMI) forecasts an increase to around 204.8 billion corporate consumer users by 2020, accounting for US $86.20 billion in global revenues.
VoIP technology enables phone to phone, computer to computer and computer to phone access across industries including healthcare, hospitality, retail, government, education, transportation and more. In fact, research firm Infonetics predicts that the number of seats for hosted VoIP and unified communications services will double between 2016 and 2018.
In selecting a cloud-based VoIP solution, the business can typically integrate the VoIP phones with current phone systems. This makes the transition to a new phone system even more simple.