April 17, 2006

For the past two years, Vonage has offered a VoIP (Voice over IP) telephony solution that was popular. Many B2B companies as well as individuals rode the wave. An example of this would be C360 Solutions, a small software developer that makes add-ons for the Microsoft CRM (customer relationship management) software program.

"Vonage's solutions were put to the test and seemed to have worked with some degree of satisfaction at first," says Jeremie Desautels, CIO of C360.

"It worked for a while but as soon as we had more than 4 to 5 of those Vonage lines, the quality really suffered."

Desautels says "with Vonage, C360 had no effective way of transferring calls, and administration was a headache". "It was a nightmare for me to manage. I had to remember five user names and passwords while making configuration changes."

That's because, in Vonage, each user has an individual login to his or her control panel. That works fine in the consumer world, but C360 rapidly outgrew it.

However, having tasted the joys of VoIP, the company didn't want to go back to traditional telephony. It ended up getting an enterprise VoIP solution from specialty vendor Zultys, which sold C360 an IP PBX box. "It's about the size of a pizza box. We screwed it to our server rack and connected it to our T1; 48 hours later, we were up and running," recalls Desautels.

Zultys can be managed centrally, meaning the quick configuration and addition of accounts. Plus, C360 finally gets call forwarding ("Before, you had to know someone's exact number to reach them," says Desautels) and a kind of intelligence built right into the telephony experience.

Zultys works with client software on every employee's desktop. Employees get a pop-up on their screens when the phone rings. They can right-click on the pop-up and forward the call to another employee or to voicemail, or put the call on hold, without even touching the phone.

The Zultys system even lets C360 make calls by plugging in USB phones into their laptops. "I've conducted regular business and made and received calls despite being three states away," says Desautels. "As for quality, you can't tell the difference."

C360 maintains one Vonage line for international calls, as Vonage gives better outbound foreign rates than those provided by C360's incumbent phone service provider.

Source: Line 56