The document discusses the shift from traditional VoIP to cloud-based telephony, emphasizing its advantages for growing businesses, including cost-effectiveness, advanced features, and improved productivity. Cloud-based telephony addresses key business needs by providing a reliable, feature-rich phone system without the burden of upfront equipment costs, thus enabling better cash flow and management of communications. Overall, it positions itself as a necessary evolution for companies aiming to maintain a competitive edge in a rapidly changing environment.

1. Moving Beyond VoIP
to Cloud-Based Telephony
White Paper • March 2011
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 877- FONALITY

2. Dynamic, fast-growing businesses like yours know a lot about staying ahead of
the competition. You have to move fast, keep things simple, please your customers,
and most of all use your resources wisely – including financial, human and technical
resources. VoIP (Voice over IP) technology can help you do many of these things,
bringing you a lot of benefits legacy phone systems can’t. That’s why you’ve likely
given VoIP serious consideration. In fact, if you’re not using it, you probably will be
soon – analysts say some 79 percent of U.S. businesses will use VoIP by 2013.
But VoIP by itself no longer gives you much of a competitive edge. Today there is a
huge variety of equipment and services based on VoIP to choose from. These range
from expensive IP PBX’s installed on your premises to cut-rate calling services
running over the Internet. That means that many if not most of your competitors
are likely to have a VoIP solution of one kind or another, or will be getting one soon.
It also means that finding a solution that will give you a real competitive boost is a
major challenge.
; Choosing the Right Solution
The best way to meet this challenge is to move beyond conventional VoIP to cloud-based telephony,
a solution particularly suited to the needs of growing businesses. Cloud-based telephony brings you a
full-fledged business phone system that runs on the provider’s infrastructure, so you only pay for the service
rather than buying equipment. It provides a unique combination of cost savings, powerful features, increased
productivity, flexibility and simplicity. And it has significant advantages over both legacy systems and existing
VoIP solutions.
In fact, you probably already know some of the reasons cloud-based telephony is right for you. A recent survey
conducted by Webtorials identified the top priorities of small and medium-size businesses related to phone
systems. The survey found that:
• 88 percent of SMBs surveyed said maximizing working capital or cash flow is important
• 83 percent said minimizing total cost of ownership via services as opposed to in-house systems
was important
• 81 percent said they wanted to improve their ability to manage their business communications systems
Cloud-based telephony is ideally suited to helping you meet these priorities. But it also brings a number of less
widely-recognized benefits. Add them all up, and it becomes clear that cloud-based telephony fills many if not
most of the communication needs of rapidly growing companies. Here are the most compelling reasons cloud
telephony could be exactly right for you:
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 877- FONALITY

3. 1. Savings Without Sacrifice
Cloud-based telephony is more cost-effective than other solutions, but doesn’t sacrifice either power or
reliability. To start with, it lets you make better use of your capital and cash flow than three competitive
solutions:
• Even though it provides 100 percent of the features of legacy phone systems,
it costs at least 40 percent less
• Because it requires no upfront equipment purchases, it is also more cost-effective
than premises IP PBX’s
• Since it doesn’t even require the purchase of IP phones, it is more capital efficient
than conventional hosted VoIP services as well
Yet despite the savings it brings, cloud-based telephony rivals the capabilities of the most powerful enterprise
systems, whether legacy or IP PBX-based. And it offers more features than conventional hosted VoIP services.
Key capabilities of cloud-based telephony include:
• Sophisticated call-handling and routing capabilities, from music on hold to dial-by-name
to ring groups to voice mail-to-e-mail to Find Me/Follow Me mobile integration to onscreen
call-handling interface
• The ability to integrate with CRM systems to make customer history information available
to employees when they answer calls
• The availability of call center capabilities with advanced queuing and monitoring functions
At the same time, cloud-based telephony is reliable enough to keep your business running with near-zero down
time. While reliability remains a common worry with conventional hosted VoIP services, Fonality’s 99.99 percent
SLA amounts to less than twelve minutes of downtime during normal business hours over the course of a year.
And 24/7 customer support resolves issues that do arise in short order. All in all, cloud-based telephony lets you
communicate as effectively, professionally and consistently as the largest enterprises, but at significantly less
cost than with other solutions.
2. Dramatic Productivity Increases
The enterprise-grade features of cloud-based telephony by themselves help your employees communicate
more effectively, work more efficiently and keep customers happier. But another powerful function boosts
productivity to another level entirely. That function is unified communications, or UC, and it combines voice,
e-mail and IM chat in a single application, accessible through onscreen call-handling software. Making and
transferring calls is a simple matter of dragging and dropping, and seeing who is available to take calls requires
nothing more than a glance. Employees can chat with each via instant messages even while they’re talking with
customers on the phone.
The impact of UC can be dramatic. The aforementioned Webtorials survey also found that the average
knowledge worker in a small or mid-size business spends more than four hours per day trying to contact
customers, partners or colleagues, finding information, scheduling meetings, duplicating information and
dealing with unwanted communications. By using unified communications, the survey found, such workers
could reduce the time spent on each activity by between 25 percent and 75 percent, thus helping them recover
nearly two hours per day of wasted time.
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 877- FONALITY

4. ACTIVITIES THAT IMPACT THE PRODUCTIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE WORKERS
Trying to contact customer, partners or colleagues 74 Minutes
Trying to find key business information 67 Minutes
Duplicating communication with
multiple channels (Email, phone, etc) 39 Minutes
Attempting to schedule meetings, etc,
33 Minutes
with other people within our organization
Dealing with unwanted communications
(SPAM, calls you wanted to avoid, etc.) 29 Minutes
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
3. Speed, Ease and Flexibility of Deployment
Cloud-based telephony lets you respond as rapidly as your competitive environment demands. To start with,
it lets you get your business phone system up and running more quickly and cheaply, and change more rapidly,
than do legacy or IP PBX-based premises systems. Deployments that once may have taken many days or
even weeks can now happen in a matter of hours or days. Furthermore, adding users doesn’t require buying
or upgrading equipment or software, it’s a simple matter of adding user licenses. And you can add specific
features for even a single user or small group of users – there’s no more need to buy expensive new hardware
or software to get specialized features only a handful of employees really need.
4. Simplicity of Acquisition, Operation and Management
Cloud-based telephony simplifies the process of acquiring, using and managing your business phone system.
It relieves you of the need to make complex calculations about amortization, warranties, upgrades,
obsolescence and all the other issues you have to deal with when you purchase equipment. All you need
calculate is the fixed monthly payment for the number of users you want to support. Moving, adding and
changing users is simple, requiring no expensive technical expertise. There’s no need for your employees to
spend a lot of time and effort on support activities unrelated to your core business expertise. An intuitive Web
interface makes monitoring and managing employees’ calling activities simple and straightforward. Managing
telephony features and capabilities is equally easy and intuitive.
; Making Your Choice
It’s likely that already know that there’s a business phone system that can help you stay ahead of the
competition, even as VoIP becomes a mainstream technology rather than a way to gain a competitive edge.
The same Webtorials survey that measured the concerns of SMBs regarding capital/cash flow found that
78 percent of those same businesses were aware that cloud-based telephony and unified communications
solutions were available. Knowing the specific financial, productivity, deployment and acquisition/management
benefits will make the choice of such solutions easier.
To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 877- FONALITY

5. Fonality, Moving Your Business Forward
Fonality is North America’s fastest growing business communications
company and a leading provider of cloud-based VoIP and Unified
Communications solutions for small and mid-size businesses.
With a unique software model approach, Fonality provides all the
features of legacy providers without the cost or complexity.
Founded in 2004, Fonality has delivered more than two billion phone
calls across the cloud while enabling more than one million users of
open-standards based communications software. Investors include
Intel Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Azure Capital Partners.
Visit www.fonality.com for more information or call 877-FONALITY.
5601 Granite Parkway, Suite 500 • Plano TX 75024
1-877-FONALITY • fonality.com