Have you been curious about the Fonality trixbox PBX but haven't been able to get away from the office to come to a Lunch and Learn? Fonality trixbox is a full featured, cost effective VoIP PBX that brings enterprise level phone system functionality like presence management, call queues, and CRM integration to the small to mid-sized businesses. Let us come to you with our monthly webinars. Webinars will last about an hour, starting at 11:30.
Location: LightBound Data Center
731 W. Henry St, 2nd Floor
Indianapolis, Indiana
Dates: June 23, 2010
Contact Email: events@lightbound.net Contact Number: (317) 777-7165
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
So what if you aren't the biggest operation out there?
You should still be able to present a professional image at an affordable cost. That's what Orion Logistics, a third party logistics service provider, believed. After a quick Google search uncovered Fonality, Orion was en route to replacing its failing phone system with PBXtra. Low cost and feature rich, PBXtra has improved customer service and employee efficiency all while making the company look great to the outside world.
Making a Move; Orion Logistics Takes PBXtra Along with Great Results
Orion Logistics, Inc. is a third party logistics service provider offering services to companies that want to outsource the physical distribution of manufactured products. When the company began planning to move its operation to a new 100,000 square foot warehouse, management was debating whether to invest in moving and reprogramming their existing phone system, which didn't provide the advanced features they needed, or go shopping for a new phone system.
Moving on Up for Less than $10K?
At the time, Orion, which has 15 employees, had regular phone lines and an AT&T Partner phone system that was purchased in the late 1990s. After looking at the cost of moving its existing system and what features they would ideally like to have in a phone system, Orion decided to look for a new system. "We wanted our phones to be automatically answered, have good voicemail, transfer calls to employees in the warehouse and conference calls together," said Jim White, IT manager at Orion. "We also wanted to purchase and install our new phone system, without hiring a phone guy or relying on other expensive outside consultants."
"I found out about Fonality through searching on Google," said White. "The PBXtra system was very attractively priced and had all the features we wanted and more. We did not want to make a five figure investment in our new phone system. For not much more than moving our broken phone system, we could implement our new advanced PBXtra system. Plus, we didn't want to have to dedicate staff to the ongoing function of our phone system and with PBXtra we wouldn't have to." Orion liked the fact that Fonality provides automatic software updates and can administer its server remotely. The one time, in 14 months, that Orion needed help, Fonality support was able to look at its server remotely, see immediately what was going on and fix the problem.
Improving Employee Productivity and Customer Service
Since Orion is a warehouse operation, employees are often out in the warehouse rather than at their desks. With Fonality, employees can easily have their cell phones configured as extensions, which makes it possible to transfer calls to them while out on the warehouse floor. This feature has made a huge difference for Orion. Employees now answer calls that they weren't able to before, which saves time, increases productivity and allows Orion to provide better service.
"When I went through the steps to start configuring people's cell phones as PBXtra extensions, we all thought it was incredible," said White. "With this feature, we don't have to keep customers waiting, there is no need to install phones all over the place, and people can keep working while they take calls from customers, dispatchers, suppliers, etc. It is a big time saver!"
White is impressed with Fonality's ability to forward voicemail to email, which allows employees to listen to voicemail from their computer either remotely or at their desks. He also likes the ability to administer the phones from a web browser, which "saves time and give us better control."
"We aren't a huge operation, but we did want our new phone system to give us a really professional presentation to the world. We need to answer phones and be responsive to customers, suppliers and partners. PBXtra allows us to do that and a lot more."
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
I spoke with a potential customer this week who is interested in hosting SQL, Sharepoint, and smart mail servers at our data center using the LightBound Virtualization services. Initially they were interested in only managed server hosting, but realized the hardware cost and maintenance would be a challenge to maintain. I was able to provide a solution using our virtualization and cloud services that would meet both his performance and budgetary needs.
Dont' forget LightBound Lunch And Learn June 16, 2010 11:30 to 1:00 at our 731 W. Henry location. We will be covering LightBound Hosted IP service with Fonality. Come see hands on our VoIP PBX solution hosted in LightBound state of the art data center. http://www.lightbound.net/company/events.php
LightBound and Fonality are providing the best of both worlds with our VoIP PBX solution
that can be either hosted in our Cloud, in the cage in the datacenter or on premise. Services is expandable from 5 to 99 users. Both solutions include Fonality HUD (Heads UP Display) that gives customer full view of everyone who is on the telephone, enterprise level chat and point and click capability.
LightBound is also offering fiber conductivity to many major office buildings in the downtown area. Let us show you how you can combine your PBX solution with voice and data on a high speed fiber network. Backup and virtual services are also available.
We will also be providing tours of the data center.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
I know that people think of Asterisk based VoIP PBX solutions like Fonality are for small organization.
Having evaluate Fonality trixbox Pro Unified Agent (UAE) edition and Call Center Editions, I can tell you that they are full featured Call Centers that can expand to over 100 plus Agents. UAE
and Call Center Edition include a very full featured supervisor tool as well as very extensive reporting.
UAE integrates with SalesForce.com and SugarCRM with customizations available to integrate with many other packages.
Call Center has high level features like
Skills-based Routing
Assign each agent a priority and your queue will distribute calls to them accordingly. This means you can pass more leads to your star-closer, or pass fewer leads to your underperformers. trixbox Pro offers an additional layer of prioritization based on agent order. This means similarly skilled agents can receive calls in an ordered, round-robin fashion.
Graphical Queue Reports
View graphical reports on every detail of your queues such as: abandoned calls, completed calls, hold time, average call length, agent productivity, and much more. Also view graphs of call volume and call completion by day, weekday, or even hourly averages. These averaged reports are great tools that allow you to better predict optimal call center staffing levels!
Barge Report
With the ability to barge calls using HUD Agent, your call center manager can now run reports on these barged calls from the CDR Reports page.
Agent Call Recording
Record your agents' calls -- automatically. Schedule up to 50 calls per agent. Call recordings capture agent name, agent extension, date, time, Caller ID, DNIS and file size. Using the Web-based interface, you can then listen to calls through your computer speakers or download them to your local drive.
Agents on Cell Phones
Remote agents on cell phones or analog home phones can now seamlessly participate in your queues. This means that callers will never know if the answering agent is on an IP phone in your office or on a mobile phone in another part of the world!
Agents Shared across Sites
Have a Call Center that spans multiple offices? With trixbox Pro's Linked Server Software and trixbox Pro CCE, you can have agents across several branch offices participate in the same queue.
Real-time Queue Stats
Want to know how many callers are in your queues? Need to know which agents are logged in? Need to know which of your agents is already on a call? The trixbox Pro Web-based control panel answers all of these questions, helping you to manage your queues with real time stats.
Light Bound can be your Virtual Service Provider. We help you answer that email and return the telephone call without worry.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
Robust feature set. Check. Pure VoIP capabilities. Check. Simple Scalability. Check. myShape was bursting at the seams and in desperate need of a new phone system. This online women’s clothing retailer already had its phone system requirements down pat. With PBXtra Call Center Edition, myShape found a solution that fits like a glove, right down to the easy deployment and quick addition of more handsets.
With PBXtra Call Center Edition, myShape found a solution that fits like a glove, right down to the easy deployment and quick addition of more handsets.
myShape is an online women’s clothing retailer that is committed to helping customers find sophisticated clothing to fit and flatter their individual body shapes. As a rapidly growing ecommerce organization, the myShape management team firmly believes in using technology to advance its business objectives. When the company relocated from a business technology incubator facility to its own office space, technology drove its decision to deploy Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center phone system.
Shopping for a System
With a growing staff overcrowding its current location, myShape needed to move. One of the questions it had to answer beforehand was which phone system to select for its new location. The business technology center, where myShape started its operations, had provided the company with a phone system, so there was no legacy system to take with them when they moved.
With 60 employees and an aggressive growth strategy, myShape co-founder, John Dmohowski, and the IT staff began searching for and evaluating phone system options that would meet the company’s needs. “Cost was not a primary driver for us,” Dmohowski said. “It was more important to find a solution that could scale and deploy easily, and provided a robust feature set.”
The team decided that PBXtra Call Center was the best system for myShape. “We could run PBXtra Call Center as a pure VoIP system, which, as a technology company, was important to us,” Dmohowski continued. “I knew VoIP could provide the capabilities we needed when combined with sufficient bandwidth and would be less painful than working with traditional carriers that couldn’t move fast enough for us. We didn’t have the time to set up an appointment with the carrier every time we needed to add a phone!”
Before selecting PBXtra Call Center, myShape evaluated 10 different solutions and met with four vendors, including Fonality. myShape even considered a hosted VoIP offering from Vocalocity, but decided against it because they wanted to have more control over their phone system than a hosted solution could offer. Besides, Dmohowski had faith in Fonality’s ability to produce upgrades and product extensions.
Trying Fonality on for Size
In the end, Dmohowski determined that Fonality was the right fit for myShape for many reasons: “our Fonality sales rep was terrific, the company’s recommendations for how to integrate technologies were very solid and PBXtra Call Center was clearly the superior technology. With Fonality, we don’t need to rely on the phone company — we are in charge of our own communications. Our IT staff can add a phone in two minutes and have a staff member up and ready to go. I can’t express how important that is to a growing business.”
Adding and moving handsets quickly were of particular importance to myShape since this was the first time the company actually was able to deploy phones to all of its employees. In its previous location, myShape didn’t have enough handsets for every employee, which impacted efficiency. Staff members had to send email messages rather than place phone calls, or use their personal cell phones for business calls.
“The move provided office space for all of our employees, and PBXtra Call Center made deploying phones fast and simple,” Dmohowski added. “Fonality makes it extremely easy to order and install new phones. I just call them and two days later the new phones show up, already configured. All we do is plug them in and we get an instant dial tone. I can’t place a value on that.”
Dmohowski has also found that PBXtra Call Center’s feature set does not require endless training for his staff. “We move too quickly to spend hours on employee training. PBXtra Call Center is nice because it does not get in the way. The phones work like the devices people have been using their whole lives, which is not entirely true of all new products that are supposed to make our lives easier.”
A Well Dressed Solution
In the end, Dmohowski felt his requirements for a VoIP phone system were simple: “it had to work, it had to scale, it had to be easy to deploy and it had to be painless to add and move handsets. PBXtra Call Center met our needs and then some. We’re happy because when we pick up the phone we know we will hear a dial tone. That may sound elementary, but for a young company, it’s extremely important.”
Dmohowski is eager to test PBXtra Call Center to its fullest capabilities. “There is tremendous value in knowing PBXtra Call Center can do more for us. We purchased the system knowing that we wouldn’t use all of the functionality right away, but I’m relieved to know that the system will meet our needs as we grow.”
Now that sounds like a well dressed solution.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
Please keep an eye on the new construction of our new state of the art data center providing Indiana with an elite Data Center for all of your Virtual Network Services, Business Continuity, Cloud Services, Storage as a Service, Software as a Solution and VoIP PBX Solutions.
Cloud services providers offer hosted virtual servers and they can also offer Storage as a Service. At LightBound we offer both. A customer can opt only for storage as a service, and to this can add server virtualization services. There are two technologies we leverage to maximize cost savings, which we in turn pass on to the customer - thin provisioning and tiered storage.
Definition: A LUN (Logical Unit Number) is a single storage unit on a SAN (Storage Area Network), mapped to a server which then corresponds to a hard drive letter, like C:.
Thin provisioning is the ability to leverage available storage space from the total "pool" of storage, regardless of the number and size of LUN's. In other words, it's over subscription. The space isn't consumed when the LUN is created, but when it's actually used. So you can create twenty 1TB LUNS on your 10TB SAN, and as long as the aggregate consumption across all 20 LUNS is less than 10TB, all is well.
At LightBound we investigated how we might provide this cost savings garnered from thin provisioning directly to the customer. We found, however that for a number of reasons, it just wasn't going to be practical. First off it's a billing nightmare - customers want many things, and one of those is a consistent bill. To charge only for the actual usage would mean a substantially higher cost per "consumed" gigabyte to cover our costs, and every month an analysis of the consumed disk would have to be reported on for accurate billing. Also, how do you determine a months usage if the data ebbs and flows through the month? Maybe 95 percentile, or prorated down to the day, but again, a huge billing ordeal and often an inconsistent and potentially an unexpectedly high bill to the customer.
What we did instead was to take consideration of the average LUN usage (about 75%), and provide that cost savings to the customer. This provided for a competitive price point for disk, and a consistent and simple bill for the customer. But wait there's more - we actually figured out a way to allow the customer to leverage that extra space - snapshots.
Almost all customers utilizing storage area network solutions, including those paying for storage as a service, want to utilize snapshots. Snapshots provide point-in-time recovery capabilities of the critical data. Snapshots are freezing the data, and storing the changes (or deltas) in a different container. Thus even though the data isn't being copied, there is some consumption attributed to these snapshots. Thus the cost of snapshots is not in the number of snapshots, per say, but in the amount of disk space they consume. So here's the cost savings, and I'll apologize up front that it's a little complex, so bear with me. The customer can leverage the space they have not [yet] consumed in their LUN towards snapshot space. Here's an example:
Let's say a customer knows that they will have about 750GB of data, so they lease a 1TB LUN. Why not lease 750GB you ask? Because most operating systems don't react very well when their drive is completely full. You need to instill a little wiggle room, so 1TB it is. Now we invoke the snapshot retention schedule, which is what determines when and how often a snapshot is taken, and how long to retain that snapshot. So let's assume for the sake of discussion that we end up taking and retaining snapshots that total 200GB in disk consumption. The customer bought 1TB, used 750GB, and used another 200GB for snaps. That's only 950GB, less than 1TB, and so less than what the customer paid for. Voila! The customer doesn't have to pay for the snapshot consumption. Now, if the total of the two (data & snaps) exceeds the initial total allotment, then they're some fees, but not until then. So use that extra "wiggle room" for something fruitful like snapshots and in doing so you don't lose your wiggle room!
This was a long one, so I'll save tiered storage for next time.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
One of the most important aspects of Cloud Services that will greatly contribute to its market adoption and growth is the removal of the complexities. Companies of all shapes and sizes, most not offering a technical product or service, are simply not interested in Storage Area Network Solutions, Hosted Virtual Servers, or Virtual Storage. What they're interested in is bringing their products and services to market in the simplest most seamless means possible. Enterprises have always cringed at not only the costs of ever growing data centers, but also all the complexities attributed to every request made of their IT department. I'm not saying that IT is made up entirely of a bunch of naysayers, although there's a few out there (you know who you are). There have been many times in my career when I've had to clarify that I'm not making it complex, it is complex. But Cloud Services, or more specifically Software as a Service, is going to help simplify the process of providing to business units, and yes even end users, the services that they need without complexities involved in the underlying infrastructure.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
HUD Heads Up Display only with Fonality VoIP PBX Solutions. Is a terrific desktop application for the Fonality VoIP PBX solution. Here are some of the cool things:
Employees can send instant messages on your own private chat network. This feature is perfect for companies that have turned off external chat as a time-saver and call centers that want to text-whisper to agents while on the phone. All chat messages are encrypted by industry standard SSL 128 bit encryption.
Chat with your external Google contacts directly from within HUD. Users are able to either add a single Google Talk contact, or import their entire Google Talk contact list into HUD.
HUD just got a facelift, errr a face. Once a user uploads their photo via the Web User Panel, you will now see their gorgeous mug whenever you interact with them in HUD (calling, conference, voicemail). In addition, we now support the Outlook 2007 photo feature to show pictures for calls to/from external numbers.
Wherever you HUD, there's your voicemail! The new visual voicemail component enables users to play, delete, and flag their voicemails, in addition to calling the user back, initiating a chat with the user, or adding the user to Outlook. HUD Voicemail also supports Photo Caller-ID, allowing you to see that befitting smirk while they are yelling at you.
Desktop alerts show the phone number (if available) or names of people stored in your Outlook contacts for all incoming calls to your extension. Answer, ignore, or send the call to voicemail directly from the desktop alert. You can also choose to display this alert when making outbound calls.
Instantly place a call by selecting a phone number in any file or application and dragging it into HUD.
Outlook Integration
Inbound Calling: When your phone rings, the Caller-ID will be analyzed against your Outlook Contacts. If a match is found you will see the person’s name pop-up!
Call from your Inbox:
Right-click on a contact or email message to call. Your phone rings and you’re connected!
Contact Import: Users are now able to import all HUD Contacts into their Outlook
Outlook 2003 or above is required
Place a call directly from HUD by typing in the desired phone number and clicking "Call". HUD will call your extension first, and then connect you to your outbound call.
Mobile presence provides a visual presence to other HUD users when a contact's cell phone is connected to the system. Users are prompted with the Busy Ring-Back™ dialog when attempting to call a contact who is on their mobile.
Ever need to know who was on a conference call quickly? With the visual Conference Component users now are able to see the all the participants in a conference bridge, in addition to the option to kick, mute, record, email, and chat with other participants in the bridge.
Click the mobile phone icon to instantly call any other employees on their cellular phones. The phone number is pulled from your PBXtra company directory.
HUD provides your employees the ability to record their own calls with the press of a button. Call recordings capture agent name, agent extension, date, time, and file size. HUD also comes with an extensive permission system that lets you decide exactly who can record their own calls and who is allowed to record others’ calls. HUD is critical for quality control within your call center!
Initiate a web search or CRM lookup based on caller’s Caller ID and know all about the caller before you pick up the phone. When you have PBXtra Unified Agent Edition, you will even be alerted of the deal size before you pick up!
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
When SunPorch, the leading manufacturer of ready-to-assemble sunroom kits, needed call center capabilities it thought outsourcing was the only option. Fonality said no way! Beating bids from Avaya, Cisco and 3Com, Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center and HUD Agent improved SunPorch’s marketing and customer service programs while saving the company 100K in advertising costs. Oh yeah, it saved the day after Hurricane Ike and also paid for itself in three months.
SunPorch is the leading manufacturer of ready-to-assemble sunroom kits. To provide better customer service in its Westport Connecticut-based sales office, SunPorch needed call center capabilities that would allow calls to be routed to the appropriate person or department, and cost-effectively scale as its staff grew. SunPorch selected Fonality’s PBXtra Call Center and HUD Agent software to replace its legacy PBX system.
Outsource? No Way.
“Initially we thought that the only call center solution we could afford was to outsource to a third party,” said James McFarland, IT director at SunPorch. “With PBXtra Call Center we were able to keep our call center operations in house, which meant we could provide higher levels of customer service and maintain better control of our sales and marketing efforts.”
In addition to Fonality, SunPorch also looked at call center systems from Avaya, Cisco and 3Com. According to MacFarland, “the main driving factor for purchasing Fonality over the alternatives was essentially lower costs. PBXtra Call Center paid for itself in the first three months by eliminating the need for expensive consultants to set up and administer the system. Fonality does an awesome job of pre-configuring the system and the phones— all you have to do is plug everything in. I had the whole system up and running in less than one day.”
Saving $100K on Advertising Costs
The Fonality phone system is delivering significant value to SunPorch’s advertising programs. According to Leo Mueller, director of marketing at SunPorch, “because of Fonality, we can be much more nimble and responsive to our market. PBXtra Call Center helps us maximize the return on our advertising expenditures by reducing sales leads not associated with a lead source. We can quickly and easily assign a different phone number to each ad, which allows us to automatically record where a caller learned about SunPorch without having to ask them.”
This simple approach to tracking advertisements has returned some significant returns. SunPorch now clearly understands how specific advertisements are performing and can easily make decisions that directly impact the bottom line. “Thanks to PBXtra Call Center we’ve been able to more accurately target our advertising dollars and have reduced our annual overall expenses by $100,000,” said Mueller.
Additionally, Mueller recognizes that PBXtra Call Center has indirectly improved SunPorch’s sales program. Since the Fonality call center system has been providing the company with better data and management has been able to make more accurate and focused decisions about where to advertise, SunPorch has increased its lead acquisition by 10 percent. “It’s amazing. Even though the downturn in the economy is impacting customer purchasing decisions, we’ve still seen an increase in the number of home owners interested in our product.”
New Revenue and Better Customer Service
PBXtra Call Center has also helped SunPorch define new revenue-generating marketing campaigns, including new offerings to its existing customer base. This previously untapped group was the ideal candidate for product upgrades, but SunPorch couldn’t move forward on this type of campaign without Fonality. With PBXtra Call Center, SunPorch was able to set up specific call queues for current customer marketing programs that rang into five remote phones at its factory and then rolled over to the Connecticut headquarters when calls to the factory could not be answered. These capabilities made it possible for the company to efficiently sell to and support its most important audience.
PBXtra Call Center’s call queues have been a big help in improving SunPorch’s overall customer service. “PBXtra’s call queues and music on hold with sales voice-overs reduce the number of abandoned calls we receive. The queues let callers know how much longer they have to wait, which makes it less likely that they will hang up, and music or sales information on hold helps keep them entertained while they are waiting,” said Mueller. He has also been impressed with Fonality’s reporting matrix, which helps SunPorch monitor call center performance and adjust accordingly to improve the customer experience.
In the Wake of Hurricane Ike
Mueller gained extra appreciation for PBXtra Call Center after Hurricane Ike knocked out power to the company’s Louisville factory.
PBXtra Call Center’s unique hybrid-hosted Anywhere Management feature enabled Mueller to remotely access the call center system and record an emergency greeting in less than 10 minutes without hiring an expensive consultant. PBXtra Call Center allowed SunPorch to quickly implement a professional recording in response to the emergency, which helped maintain customer service levels and ensured calls could be redirected to the company headquarters for handling.
“The remote management of PBXtra Call Center is terrific,” said Mueller. “It gave me so much flexibility to make sure our customers were taken care of, even during a natural disaster.”
PBXtra and HUD - Essential Business Tools
In terms of its technical abilities, McFarland has been equally impressed with Fonality. “There are so many great things about our PBXtra system. The voice prompts, call queues and powerful web-based configuration are all fantastic. HUD helps us to enhance communication within the office, since we know whether someone is on the phone or not. We also like HUD’s drag-and-drop call transferring capabilities and its integration with caller ID on the PC desktop. Also, the PBXtra system easily integrated with the rest of my IT infrastructure, something I couldn’t do if I was working with a proprietary phone system.”
Mueller sums up how SunPorch feels about Fonality. “It’s simple — Fonality enables us to better serve our customers. PBXtra and HUD are essential business tools for our company — I don’t know how we lived without them.”
LightBound utilizes Fonality for both our premise based VoIP PBX solutions and our Hosted VoIP services. Our managed services can be added like Shared Storage Server, Collocation services, Cloud Services and many more that make LightBound a leader in Virtual Network Services in Indiana.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound now has a direct fiber connection to the Chase Tower in downtown Indianapolis. The direct fiber connectivy enables tenants in the building to take advantage of LightBound's suite of services such as hosted virtual server, cloud services, hosted VoIP PBX Solutions, virtual storage, and off site data backup service. Customers can connect to the fiber for $995 per month which provides a 100 MB connection to the data center bundled with 10 MB of Internet with bursting capability. Hosted VoIP PBX solutions through Fonaliy are available starting at $34.99 per seat monthly for 5 users and as the number of users increases the prices drops to $18.99 per seat for 51-99 users! If you are a business owner interested in hosted voice service check out
Fonality for Executive video. This is a great service to help with business continuity planning as customers can either host their critical IT and voice services at the LightBound data center or backup critical data to Lightbound's storage as a service platform. LightBound also has a business continuity.disaster recovery center with 32 seats each with a computer and a phone that can enable a company to minimize disruption of business operations in the event their building is not available for use. Contact your LightBound account manager for more information on this new service!
Sun Apparel and Fonality Simplify Multi-Office Communications
Offices in California and Hawaii sound like a businessperson’s dream. But for Sun Apparel, multiple offices meant expensive logistical problems when it came to phone communications. Sun Apparel turned to Fonality PBXtra for a VOIP PBX system to make three offices work as one. Since deploying PBXtra, communications are up, long distance costs are down and the company’s offices are dreamy once more.
Sun Apparel manufactures and distributes t-shirts, casual sportswear, caps and accessories throughout the western United States. With three locations — its corporate headquarters in Fullerton, CA and distribution centers in Hayward, CA and Honolulu — the company’s management understands the pain points felt by a multi-office business. That’s why improved interoffice and external communications were top of mind as the apparel company prepared to move into a new corporate headquarters location. Armed with three shiny new Fonality PBXtra servers, the company was ready to say goodbye to phone system problems.
Manageable, Open Source Telephony
As the move neared, a bid from its existing phone vendor missed the mark. “I was completely dissatisfied with the proposal from our previous phone vendor,” said Steve Gulsvig, Sun Apparel’s IT consultant. “The solution was antiquated and was going to cost almost $40,000 for just one location. It also required us to pay an expensive service fee every time we wanted to add a new employee, make a change or move an employee within the office.”
Gulsvig, an early adopter of IP phones for personal use, began searching for a new phone system that could help Sun Apparel communicate internally, as well as with customers, suppliers and other business associates. He was intrigued by open source PBX telephony but, “without a full IT department on staff, Asterisk was too much of a risk. I wanted something that ran on Asterisk, but that had a visual interface so that I didn’t have to write any code.”
A quick Google search later and Gulsvig found Fonality. “Fonality PBXtra is based on open source, but has a great user interface and a hybrid-hosted architecture that actually makes Asterisk useable — it was the clear choice for Sun Apparel,” said Gulsvig. “Fonality had a great track record and PBXtra’s price point for its extremely deep feature set was incredible.”
Fonality’s positive reputation in the IP-PBX market wasn’t the only thing that caught Gulsvig’s attention. “Deploying a PBXtra system was so simple! Since the phones come pre-configured from Fonality, we were able to get all of our locations up and running very quickly.” He was also impressed by the fact that he could easily add new long distance plans and VoIP accounts, and set up dialing rules to define when calls should use each of them.
Eliminating Inter-Office Long Distance Costs
Sun Apparel’s interdependent offices require that company managers frequently communicate about issues such as orders processed through the corporate headquarters or the amount of inventory that has been shipped to the Hawaii office. Before PBXtra, managers often wanted to quickly pick up the phone to confirm inventory or ask questions of colleagues, but avoided it because of the expensive long distance charges between the three offices. Instead, managers consulted the inventory application, which did a good job of keeping track of products and orders, but did not account for real-time changes.
That all changed when Fonality entered the picture. “With PBXtra, all calls between our offices run over our VoIP network, which has completely eliminated long distance fees between our offices. That’s a huge benefit for a company with multiple offices!” said Gulsvig. “PBxtra has also helped improve budgeting. Instead of a guessing game, our phone system is now a consistent line item every month. It makes budgeting so simple.”
Eliminating long distance fees wasn’t the only benefit specific to multi-office locations, according to Gulsvig. “PBXtra allowed us to seamlessly link together our three offices so that we operate as if we are in one physical location,” said Gulsvig. Because of PBXtra’s four-digit dialing, our managers and employees can communicate more efficiently with one another.”
Gulsvig’s overall thoughts on Fonality? “Fonality gave us 10 times the functionality of other phone systems at 10 percent of the cost. Our PBXtra system is so flexible — we can add phones, make changes or move extensions quickly and easily.”
Gulsvig is equally excited about the business results related to deploying PBXtra. “PBXtra has helped improve the relationships between our managers because it has allowed them to have constant communication and operate more fluidly. We are also able to project a more professional image to our customers and suppliers because, with PBXtra, it is so easy to upload custom messages about holiday closures, sales, etc.”
Gulsvig continues his praise of Fonality, particularly for multi-office companies. “Fonality PBXtra is a terrific product for any company that is looking for a feature rich communications system. Especially for growing businesses with multiple locations, PBXtra adds tremendous value for a minimal cost.”
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
LightBound is an Indiana VoIP provider that is now offering a complete hosted VoIP service service. If you are looking for VoIP PBX Solutions and don't want to invest a lot of up front capital this is the service that you have been looking for. A hosted VoIP service is a great part of a Business Continuity solution that can help keep your business up and running in the event of business disruption at your office. The LightBound hosted voice fits directly inthe Cloud Services model that many customers are looking for today. If you have been looking at outsourcing management of services to a provider of virtualization services, replication of critical data to a off-site virtual storage or off site data backup service, why not consider moving your phone system to a provider of hosted VoIP PBX solutions like LightBound. The service starts at 5 users and will scale up to 100 users. The hosted service uses Fonality trixBox Enterprise Edition which provides an award winning user interface, HUD, to help improve productivity. See
HUD for Employees or
HUD for Executives for all the productivity enhancement the your business can benefit from. If your organization outgrows the hosted application and you need an on premise VoIP PBX Solutions its an easy transition to a dedicated Fonality VoIP server for your business. LightBound can simplify the operations of your business by being a single source for Internet Service Indiana
Infrastructure as a Service is definitely going to become a commodity offering and with economies of scale, virtual network services will be a high volume, low margin product. Cloud Services providers are already offering Hosted Virtual Server, Storage Area Network Solutions, Off Site Data Backup Services, and even Storage as a Service combined with Server Collocation for pennies on the dollar compared to legacy physical network and server infrastructures. That being said, the leading contributor to competitive advantage in the Virtualization Services and Cloud Services market is going to be how the service is differentiated from the "commodities". What are those differentiators? Depends on the customers your targeting, including their size and type of business, their vertical, and other numerous variables. In my next blog I'll talk more about how LightBound is setting itself apart with added value beyond the base Infrastructure offering.
Go Cloud!
Sam Newberry
Cloud Computing and Cloud Services represent one of the most significant shifts in information technology likely for many of us to see in our lifetimes. Embracing virtualization services, your enterprise's computing requirements being provided as a utility has great potential, promising innovations we cannot yet imagine. With this great potential, however comes great responsibility. (Thanks Aunt May) For starters, let’s talk about privacy. Here are some tips for considering cloud computing with regard to privacy:
1. Pay attention to the cloud services provider’s user agreement – look for “right to use, disclose, distribute, etc”
2. Should you decide to extract your data – does the provider retain rights to your data?
3. Put your data to the litmus test – if you wouldn’t want the government or other legal body to see your data, maybe the cloud isn’t the best solution.
Go Cloud!
Listed below are the answers to the questions I posed in Part 5 as applicable to LightBound's Shared Storage Server (s) and Hosted Virtual Server.
1. Where is the data?
All shared storage server (s) are managed within LightBound's secure datacenters in central Indiana.
2. Who owns the data?
The customer owns the data. LightBound has no rights to in any way modify, share, disseminate, or otherwise manipulate the data without the express permission of the customer.
3. Is the data backed up?
All LightBound Storage Area Network Solutions incorporate a thorough analysis with the customer to ensure that critical data is protected through backup and replication processes, aligned with the customer’s needs.
4. Can the data be extracted?
Yes, the customer is provided the means to extract their data upon request.
5. Are the data and servers volatile?
No, servers can be inactive or restarted at any time without loss of data or virtualization services.
6. Who has access to the data and servers?
Access is restrictive to only the customer and their affiliates. Unless providing managed cloud services, LightBound does not nor have access to the customers critical data.
We talked with a customer that currently has 8 analog telephone lines and LightBound DSL(Asyncronous Digital Subscriber Line). Customer was upgrading his CPE based PBX to an Avaya system with a PRI card. Customer asked us for a T1 with Internet and T1 with a 23 Channel PRI (Primary Rate Interface). This is a very expensive solution for a small company. Customer more Internet service then the DSL service that he currently subscribes to. Customer did not need all 23 lines for his PBX solution.
We recommended getting a 3MB Voice and Data circuit with LightBound with only 8 Channels or SIP Trunks. This is what the customer needs are currently, but the circuit and equipment gives the customer the ability to add SIP Trunks or PRI Channels. These terms are interchangeable with or system. Customer also had 3-4 fax lines. We were able to deliver these through an analog ports off of their PBX system. We also recommended the customer look at our fax to email service which would reduce the amount of fax service on their analog fax machines.
LightBound, your Virtual Service provider, can combine your managed services, voice and data services to provide you with a seamless Cloud Service that is economical and provides the business continuity that all businesses require regardless of their technical expertise.
I just read a great article about Cloud Services. Check out this
link. LightBound is a Hosted Virtual Server provider offering custom cloud services. What do I mean about in reference to custom cloud services. LightBound's cloud service offering has controls for security to meet government and industry compliance that many others don't offer. If you are looking for some more details on Virtualization Services that LightBound offers come to our Lunch and Learn on April 14, 2010 to find out more. You can register at
LightBound's web site. We also offer server collocation if you want to bring in your own equipment.
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