Southern Utah Business Magazine (Summer 2022)

Capturing the Important Evolution of Business Communication Technology

By Daniel Rhodes Digital transformation is the term being used to describe the massive shift from premise-based business hardware to cloud-based application software. The “business telephone system” has quickly become the technology industry’s (OP-X vs.

CAP-X) transformation poster child.

Traditionally, businesses with just a few users to businesses with thousands of users would purchase or lease communications equipment to be housed on location. The equipment would connect to copper/analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) or digital PRI (Primary Rate Interface) lines and require frequent firmware updates.

Even though these systems evolved from mechanical to software-based management, they remained limited in capacity and expensive to maintain.

Around the mid 1990s, a progression in the business communication industry that came to be known as VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) entered the arena. VOIP offered businesses the ability to reduce monthly measured long-distance charges by rerouting specified call traffic over a fixed-rate internet connection. Other VOIP benefits included the ability to transfer inbound calls to any phone anywhere in the world, which minimized or eliminated the need for multi-location companies to purchase or maintain expensive, wide-area networking circuits.

Since the processing capabilities of VOIP systems are cloud-based, businesses that have adapted VOIP technology no longer need to worry about outgrowing their systems or dispatching a service technician to their location.

Troubleshooting and system repairs can be done automatically or remotely from a 24/7/365 network operation center.

In the event a phone is rendered nonoperational, a replacement phone can be shipped overnight, preprogrammed and ready to go.

The next evolution of the cloud-based phone system has been identified as UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service). UCaaS grew beyond the idea of simply replacing the premise-based 36 Southern Utah Business Magazine :: Summer 2022