Yes, there are still business systems called “PBX’s” out there. These are on-premises business phone systems that basically just did calling in and out of a building, offered voice mail, could perform an audio conference call, could forward a call, and had a some ‘advanced” calling features like ring groups, or sending group messages (i.e. recording a message, and then sending it to a group of people – like an email but you recorded the email), or call screening. The phone system that ran the business if you will.
And they ruled the roost at one time. You learned many of the intricacies of these systems to be the most effective communicator out there, augmenting your email with these phone systems features.
These systems are out there still. Not all have been upgraded yet. But they are old, and many of these systems are even out of maintenanace. Still chugging along…until they are not….
As VoIP marched on and the internet networks became faster, other communication modes such as chat and video entered the fray, and the need to have the systems on-premises dissipated. Today’s UCaaS systems were born.
And with it it came newfangled terminology. No more analog and digital. Seats, bandwidth, Unified Communications, trunking, hosted, cloud, multi-tenant, single-tenant, collaboration, single sign-on, UCaaS, mobility, and CPaaS are now typical words used.
But this doesn’t mean the requirements of the PBXs of 25 years ago are different. The need to have a phone system that “runs the business” is still there. And I’ve had some prospects / customers kind of wondering what is going on – “can’t we just get a phone system?”. And these prospects have not upgraded since it’s kind of confusing to them. They want to, because they know the “chugging along” at some point will simply stop, but they don’t want to make a mistake, or buy something they won’t be able to work well.
The answer is “of course you can get a phone system”. I’ll talk about this more in my next blog.