Presented by Rob Lith at The Asterisk Community Conference Africa 2016

1. Onsite and Cloud
based PBX
– making the right decision
for your business.
Rob Lith

2. Introduction
• Rob Lith – Business Development Director at
Connection Telecom
• Involved with Internet services since 1994
• Co-founded Connection Telecom 2004
• Initially started providing on-premises PBXs till
2009
• Now predominantly hosted PBXs for last
seven years – so I may come across slightly
biased to hosted!

3. Transition from premises to hosted
• The transition of analogue and digital systems to CBX/IP
Telephony intersected in 2010 and today IP Telephony is
greater than 90% of systems
• Hosted PBX and Unified Communication has moved well
beyond early stages and is the only area of any material growth
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Legacy PBX
CBX/IPT

4. Conclusion
So the future is IP – that question is answered
The question is Hosted or Premise based?
Some of the following common points have
been the main points of differentiation in the
past… I’ll go through these as relevancy remains

5. On-premises PBX
• Higher initial cost and set-up cost
• Potentially higher maintenance costs
• Usually costs per feature – IVR, Voicemail, etc.
unless you’re choosing an Asterisk based system
• Lower monthly cost after expenses are covered –
except BRI/PRI’s can cost more than IP circuits
• Ability to SIP trunk to get lower cost calls
• Local PTSN port provide quality calls – but not HD
• Complex to provide redundancy

6. Hosted PBX
• Lower initial set-up cost
• Full PBX features available
• Lower maintenance costs - PBX provider maintains
provisioning of features and handsets made available to all
• Lower monthly service cost – network cost less than
traditionally over provisioned PSTN lines
• Easy to add extra lines / voice channels
• Upgrades and new features are included
• Extended features, like conferencing, call recording, chat,
mobility and contact centre applications are easily added

7. Negatives of on-premises PBX
• On-premise IP-PBX needs a provider who can
maintain & manage it
• Expansions may result in complicated projects
depending upon the provider
• On premise PBX manufacturers obsolete
equipment and support forcing upgrades or
replacement
• Technicians generally need to be called out for
upgrades and patches to software
• Loss of power or PBX failure will result in callers
not being able to get through

8. Negatives of Hosted PBX
• Poor voice quality as a result of Internet
connections with no Quality of Service for voice
• Loss of Internet can result in loss of phone service
if no redundancy planned
• Customization of features may be slow or
unavailable depending on provider
• Fees can be increased and cancellation fees can
be charged
• Stability and uptime of provider may vary

9. Pros of on-premises PBX
• Current carrier does not have to be changed
• SIP trunks can be added to save on calling costs
• Server ownership reduces expenses over time
• Responsibility is more easily defined
• Customer can determine their own timelines for
changes, adding features and functionality
• Not susceptible to the whims of the hosted
platform provider to change or drop features.

10. Pros of Hosted PBX
• Hosting providers have more resources and new feature sets are
able to be frequently and rapidly deployed
• Scaling up or down is easily achieved – adding or decreasing users
for seasonal demand
• Moving a phone system is easy, only an IP connection needed
• Future proof - upgrades of serves and applications are ongoing
• Loss of Internet or catastrophic event has no effect on operations
because calls can be sent other operations or remote users
• Numbers can be ported to provider of choice
• Other hosted services are easily accessible, CRM, call recording
storage and many more

11. Bigger picture!
That is what was.
Now there is a much
bigger picture to
consider with the
advent of new
modern delivery
platforms

12. The next wave
• A world of opportunities is now opening with
new technologies making thousands of
services available to hosted platforms that are
developed rapidly to take advantage of new
services developed extremely fast – agile
deployment sprints can be as frequent as
weekly

13. for all browsers

14. Multi channel services
• Multi channel service support can now (truly) be
delivered – email, chat, voice, video, social media
• “Context” is here – customer aware
• Rich value can be added with micro services
available – example IBM Watson Speech to Text
service with sentiment analysis
• Many other micro services can be added for
validation, payment, CRM info - applications are
as far as the imagination can go

15. Hosted vs. Premises
• So based on the future of cloud platforms
delivering rich & powerful, multi channel
services for hosted PBX and contact centres,
the question should be
– Why not hosted?
• did I mention I was biased…

16. Hosted vs. Premises
Thank you.