Cloud Phones!

Had a great meeting this morning with Andy Moore from Pink Connect, who provide a full range of telephony and broadband services to businesses, and it got me thinking about how phones can be run 'in the cloud' just as much as software can.

Traditionally, if you're a small business wanting to get a professional telephony solution, you'd probably invest in an expensive phone system and as many physical phone lines as you needed. The availability of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology, combined with increasingly reliable broadband connections (in towns at least, have a chat to Andy if you're in a rural area with rubbish or non-existent broadband), now mean that you can get a very powerful hosted phone system at a very reasonable price.

The idea is familiar to anyone who's used Skype - your computer turns your voice into a stream of ones and zeroes which are sent across the internet and decoded by the software at the other end. The difference with a hosted phone system is that you have a proper phone on your desk (although computer-based 'softphones' are also an option), which connects over your broadband connection to the VoIP server 'in the cloud'. Your call is then routed via the normal phone network, and as far as you're concerned you just pick up the phone and dial as normal.

Apart from the cost, the great thing about this kind of cloud service is that it is very flexible: you can set up phones to ring in a certain order, forward to your mobile or to a different voicemail box depending on the time of day, and your voicemail can be sent to your email, from which it can even be pulled into your CRM system (where potentially the date and time of all calls could be logged under the contact). And if you move offices (or want to work from home), you just plug your phones into your network.

It's all a bit of an improvement on having to contact BT and wait a few days just to make a tiny change to your phone service....