Hosted VoIP And Small Business-A Natural

For a long time I’ve been a fan of the hosted model of voice services, versus the need for a lot of on premise equipment. A recent summary story in IT Business Edge seems to support that kind of thinking, which can only be seen as good news for companies like Covad, CallTower, XO.

This also is great news for early stage client company, Telephony2, whose CallButler product provides PBX and Centrex functionality, all running over .NET on a Windows XP box that doesn’t have to be dedicated solely for that purpose. In many ways, CallButler is to this era what the Merlin phone system was in the 80s in premise, but uses VoIP WITHOUT a hosted model to deliver Centrex and PBX functionality for pennies a day.

Since I’ve got a few PC’s laying around the office doing nothing, we’re going to be installing CallButler next week on one of them and adding CounterPath’s EyeBeam soft clients to everyone’s laptops. It will allow me to create the first true Comunicano phone system and actually allow my team, which is mostly virtual to all be on one “phone system” where we can conference easily, transfer calls and talk as if they are all in one place.

In my thinking, with my new OQO I’ll also have a very cool “phone” that’s part of my own network, anywhere I go….as well as having my personal phone via PhoneGnome also accessible to me, on one device.

Note: TMCnet also references the same stats.