The market pressure in voice, like every other aspect of IT, is towards the cloud. As internet connections become faster, geography becomes increasingly irrelevant allowing organizations to outsource almost everything they previously did in-house.
Companies of all sizes are realizing that managing their own infrastructure is a costly headache and not core to their business. Recently I've been surprised how many relatively large organizations have asked for a voice solution but do not want to manage it. The smaller the organization, the less sense it makes to "do it yourself". I've seen far to many "home-brew" Asterisk based solutions installed in small businesses where there is nobody to support them and the poor small business owner's entire business is jeopardized by a failure of some kind (btw, this isn't unique to voice, the same applies to email servers). Of your 4 points in favour of on-site PBXs, I would very respectfully say that I don't agree with them. 1. "more features" - Hosted and on-site should have the same feature set. Perhaps there is a specific example you are thinking of but by and large the features should be identical. 2. "Bandwidth is much less" - This is technically true but with a decent internet connection this isn't a roadblock. 3. "Distributed network" - An on-site PBX does not have a distributed network nor does it typically have any redundancy. In most of the Free-PBX installs I've seen, It's typically a crappy Dell single server with zero redundancy. 4. "Off-site Backups" - I've actually never encountered a home-brew FreePBX system where there were _any_ backups at all, never mind off-site. But just for the sake of argument lets assume they exist. This still is a far cry from the kind of redundancy and resiliency you get from your typical hosted solution. Just to provide some balance to this discussion, I still do recommend on-site solutions in certain situations. Specifically: - Client does not have access to a decent internet connection (still an amazingly common problem even in urban areas). - Client's expected call volume exceeds what can affordably be put on their internet connection. - Client can not obtain number porting to hosted service (typically rural customers do not have any CLECs in their area). - Client has a special regulatory requirement which effectively prevents hosted solutions. Regards, John
