VoIP, or Voice-over-IP (Internet-Protocol), is a better and more affordable way for businesses to communicate. Using high-speed Internet connections to make and receive phone calls, our business phone systems offer features unavailable with traditional phones – and can save you money on long-distance and international calls.  All businesses who take advantage of VoIp Phone Systems will see significant benefits including:

Cost-effectiveness–
VoIP Phones utilize your current computer network and avoids the infrastructure costs associated with the purchase and maintenance of a separate voice communication systems. VoIP systems provide companies with quality phone systems and all the typical phone features without requiring investments into expensive hardware. You no longer need to purchase or lease costly hardware nor wait for wiring to be installed. VoIP helps companies to avoid those stressful moments spent reviewing monthly telephone bills filled with erratic and unpredictable charges. Maintenance costs are also included in your contracted monthly service payments thereby decreasing the operating costs associated with traditional phone systems.

Continuity–
VoIP provides continuous service and will remain operational despite electrical outages or other forms of service interruption. If your organization losses its’ connection all communication can be routed to another location or phone. Our VoIP system also provides consistent, predictable fees that are negotiated to include local, long distance and the chosen phone service features.

Consistency–
Using a Cloud-based/Hosted VoIP solutions will provide consistency in your business communications. VoIP systems will integrate your email system with your phone system. This allows all users to obtain voicemails in the emails and emails in their voicemail.

Centrality–
The Cloud based dashboard  allows you to easily connect all your business locations into one central system. Everyone is connected no matter how many offices you have, have many physical locations are involved or how many clients you have overseas.

Do you remember when making a difference meant everything to you in your job, career, business? No…not just going through the motions because you are experienced and feel you can predict what would happen prior to it occurring. A time when you were concerned with every line item of profitability. Do you remember those days?

Were those days recent? Were they so long ago it’s hard to remember? Ever wish it was that way again? Did you ever feel back then, that you operated as if you had nothing to lose? Yet, every penny was precious no matter what the risk?Why does a “nothing to lose” state of mind work? Well, the answer is because it’s only when we’ve lost something that we can truly gain something better.

Excepting Complacency.

Have you ever said, “that just the way it is”, or “there’s nothing we can do about it”? Have you ever wondered why your people haven’t found the things you feel aren’t right about your operations or what could be improved?

Bigger question is…” If you could do something about it….would you?” Would you seek outside assistance? Would you look for a better way?

And if you did…would you feel you are doing an disservice or stepping on the toes of those in your company who you feel did not meet their responsibility of seeking workplace improvements?  You think they “should be doing” , or that “you hope they are doing” something (like you did when you cared about every penny and every nickel of profitability).

Goodbye Illusion: Hello Truth

What about the truth? Can you…or do you want to “handle the truth”? And do you feel something or someone wiser than your team could assist you in working “behind-the-scenes” to unveil your illusions and therefore help you improve? It may seem jarring to you, but really, it is quite gentle (gentler than you can ever imagine). So are we fearing the truth?

Or do you feel the crumbling of the illusion of your company’s efficiency will cause you too much pain? At LT~CRS we believe the truth never hurts. The truth only heals. In human nature, we are prone to want to hold on to things, but once there is nothing to hold on to, we can’t help but realize that the only thing we can truly hold on to is the truth. That’s why we hope you believe that somewhere in the Losing, there is a much greater Gaining.

So the question is, would you rather face the pain of breaking illusions and in the long receive amazing gains, or stay in the illusions and in the long run suffer?

www.limitlesstechnology.com

Using a contingency based~no risk model,  we specialize in reducing companies

telecom and technology monthly recurring expenses by removing inaccuracies, 

obtaining credits and negotiating better go forward contract rates.

BOTTOM LINE…We Improve BOTTOM LINES.

Answer from a tenured CFO to my question: Why wouldn’t you perform a shared savings based no risk telecom/technology audit?

If you are reading this you may be as curious and perplexed as to why any “cost minded and profit responsible” business owner, Managing Member or C-Level executive wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to have a contingency based no risk audit of any kind performed for them?

I of course, providing this type of service to businesses of medium and large size, thought the same…why wouldn’t you? Well here are a few reasons why there were objections:

• It’s not that we shouldn’t do it, I just feel that my people responsible for that portion of the business, should already be handling this capability or responsibility.

• I am leery of services that cost me “nothing up front” when I know there is a cost to provide the service.

• It just sounds “too good to be true?”, so since perception is reality…it must be.

• I just don’t like not knowing “what my exact cost for the service will be”.

• How much work will this be on my people, and how disruptive will it be with all we have on our plates?

Okay, while taken back a bit, I saw the realism in this CFO’s eyes and the quandary over:

• Employed expectation

• Lack of trust

• Misperception

• Concern of unknown expenditure

• Costs of employee involvement and resource

However, as my mind began to work on answering these questions, I also understood these are common barriers to any service. But should that stop us from exploring the possibilities? I of course say no, but with good reason when it comes to what we do for our Clients, and I answered his questions below in order:

• Employed expectation

We respect that every company and organization has the potential to audit their billings, re-negotiate their own telecom contracts and get some form of respectable savings.

o Though, with over 30 years experience, and for over 7 years as a corporation, we have been successfully negotiating for companies who could have chosen to do it themselves. We produce maximum results by applying superior carrier expertise and benchmarking that most companies could never expect to acquire on their own.

o Also, it is not about IT, Procurement, Finance or a Business Unit not doing the best job they can, or from lack of technical experience in any way. Instead, it lies within the expert resources within our organization; those being former carrier service negotiators and high level executive telecom professionals, which are experienced in working with some of the largest and most well-managed companies in the world. Our resources have spent and continue to spend, each and every day aggressively engaging the carriers and providers of telecommunications services to minimize your expenditures.

o Not every situation or company is the same because of: unique needs, multiple geographic locations, utilization of numerous carriers, abundant telecom products/services and complex contract terms.

• Lack of trust

Testimonials from Clients ensure we deliver on our Promises. Click here to see testimonials.

• Misperception

A shared savings billing optimization / telecom audit is not something for nothing…instead it is no risk service, a truly big difference when it comes down to “too good to be true”. In fact…we do have an upfront shared savings advance we collect from our Clients. We collect this advance because we have real costs with internal employees,  associated with the level of expertise, work and due diligence placed into every billing optimization/ telecom audit we perform. However, we are so confident we will find significant savings we back it by a 110% Money Back Guarantee.

We offer a valuable solutions which further cuts costs and produces bottom-line savings in one of your largest expense areas. We also limit any disruption to your business work flows, and we can negotiate on your behalf at any time during our engagement. And… for peace of mind, we don’t look to change service providers unless it is in your absolutely best interest and you agree with our recommendation.

• Concern of unknown expenditure

Tell us…If you hired us to drill for oil on your property, and we agreed our fee would be based on the profits achieved from the well, would you want us to only dig 10 feet down? We deliver for your business immediate and significant savings, because “we dig deep”…averaging reductions of over 25% for most Clients.

o Bottom line we must PROVE the savings in order to be paid and – our Clients RECIEVE the refund, credit, or go forward savings before we invoice for our services.

• Costs of employee involvement and resource

WE FIND….FIX…FOLLOW-UP…and FINISH the tasks to make sure that it gets done, and is done right. – AN ENORMOUS TIMESAVER for our Clients. We literally become a virtual extension of your employee base at no cost to you.

For Answers to Any Other Questions You May Have,

Call Limitless Technology CRS Today at (866) 504-4050.

High telecom bills hurting your business? One of the worst mistakes business owners make is trying  to eliminate services your company may need just to save money. You may not know  every service your company has and how much it needs those services until you have “cut” them off and it’s too late.

At Limitless Technology CRS, we make your company more efficient by researching what your company does and does not need and eliminating unnecessary services.  This makes your company’s telecom bills more cost affordable, while never compromising your company’s efficiency or productivity. We know that we can provide your company what it needs without making your company sacrifice, because….

 BOTTOM LINE We Improve BOTTOM LINES.

Never let reviewing your company’s telecom bills slip your mind. Missed errors can snowball into a big part of your yearly spend. However, if you don’t have the time or resources to internally handle this endeavor, call us! We go over every bill to find your company the greatest amount of savings. If you do have the staff but not the expertise, Limitless Technology Cost Reduction Specialists also offers consulting to help your company gain our knowledge and be more successful.

Todd, bandwidth needs, capability and scalability are all fine and dandy until we run into a situation where the system shuts down, whether due to a natural disaster or a deliberate attack on the Internet.

And this is not a matter of “if” but “when”.

To gloss over this fact, is shortsighted… and the IT based industry is abound with those who are taking the short term, save a buck approach.

Posted by David Kleber

———-

David,

I understand your concern…but those things happen “shut downs, equipment failure, inability to afford the appropriate redundancy, attacks,viruses and more with IT inhouse also.

I hope you didn’t misconstrue my intent on the inevitable, and truly seen my point on the expected. Nor am I saying the cloud is there now with a “plug and play, no worries and walk away deliverable”…that you an afford.

But it will be.

So then you must know that if you can afford it, it is there.

Now it comes down to why would you put it in the cloud if you can do it cheaper yourself?

Which is one very big reason why the cloud is so attractive….COST. People, time, developed expertise, network redundancy, multiple delivery mechanisms and state of the art facilities and equipment CAN’T be afforded by most companies. And is not looked at close enough in the business planning and development phases of a business. People and companies forget all the “soft” and hard costs associated with being “state of the art”

Again…people are looking for perfect answers in a world that is not perfect. If its technology…it is not a matter of if it will break it when? And then…who is there when it does.

The cloud is coming. Know it, understand it, and use it where and when it makes the best sense for you.

Knowing exactly how much and what type of cloud service a company needs is one of the more challenging aspects of deploying a cloud strategy, and most enterprises are getting it wrong, according to experts.

“The whole premise of the cloud should be to drive the IT director to think small, but people aren’t doing that,” says Sharon Wagner, president of Cloudyn, an Israeli company whose SaaS application helps businesses monitor their cloud usage and provides recommendations on how to right-size it. “Many customers are over provisioning, which leads directly to over paying.”

Experts agree. “I think it’s a problem just about everyone could be facing,” says Paul Burns, an independent cloud analyst at Neovise. Burns believes there is somewhat of a misnomer about paying for cloud services. While many consumers think they are paying for resources they use in the cloud, instead users are actually paying for a certain capacity of compute or storage. Whether they use it or not is up to them.

“Just about every customer likely has an issue with this,” says James Staten, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “Some have had that shock bill from their service provider so they’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with it, but almost everyone could benefit from taking a closer look at their actual usage.”

So what can be done about overprovisioning of resources? Companies can fairly easy install measures to prevent it, Staten says. The best way is by having load balancers written directly into application code that automatically scale up and down resources based on need. Just as important as scaling up though is scaling back down when those resources are no longer needed. Staten warns, however, that enterprises can run into some complications. A bug in a software or a distributed denial-of-service attack can, for example, create false scaling requests for additional resources.

Overprovisioning occurs mostly in infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service instances because those are metered based on an amount of compute or storage, Wagner says. Software-as-a-service offerings traditionally don’t have as much of a problem with the issue because they are generally charged on a per-user basis.

It can happen for a number of reasons and Staten says one of the most common is that IT professionals just aren’t thinking about the cloud in the right way. Developers and other end users usually ask for more resources than they need so that they don’t have to “go back to the well asking for more,” Staten says. It requires a “mind-shift” to think small and scale up, he says.

The issue is complicated by the numerous offerings and prices for cloud services in the market, Wagner says. Cloud vendors offer customers a range of options at different prices when purchasing cloud services.

For example, industry-leading Amazon Web Service’s popular Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) has four versions of on-demand instances to choose from. They range in price from $0.15 per hour for a small instance that provides 1.7G of memory, a single EC2 compute unit, and 160G of instant storage, all the way up to the extra-large version, which is $1.20 per hour and provides 15G of memory, eight EC2 compute units and 1,600G of instant storage. There are midsize and large offerings falling in between. Beyond that, there are offerings for high-memory on demand and high-CPU offerings, each which have different sizes of compute power as well. Or, customers can choose to purchase reserved instances, which are paid for on an annual basis instead of being metered on an hourly rate. Meanwhile, AWS recently announced its 19th price decrease in the past six years, and Windows Azure and Google dropped their prices as well.

Cloud is quickly gaining importance for enterprise communications from multiple perspectives. In the benchmark report “Business Optimization through Integrated Communications: In the SoMoClo™ (Social, Mobile, Cloud) Era,” Aberdeen found that 20 percent of respondents considered a cloud-based implementation of communications, typically from a hosted or virtual private cloud, to be strategic to their organization. This percentage skyrocketed to 33 percent for respondents that had integrated mobility into their organizations.

Respondents typically are not pursuing a full rip-and-replace approach from a legacy system to a fully converged social, mobile and cloud-based communications environment. Rather, they start by incorporating mobility at the edge of interaction, and then use the cloud to provide both scalability and greater parity of services for remote employees. Because of this, mobility adoption tends to be a strong indicator for a company’s willingness and ability to consider cloud-based solutions.

In comparison, 22 percent of respondents seek to embed communications within enterprise applications, which increasingly are becoming cloud-enabled. As cloud becomes both the processing hardware for communications and a key source of information, integrated communications platforms must have a roadmap for becoming more cloud-enabled. To understand which cloud-based applications were affecting the communications environment to the greatest extend, Aberdeen also asked these organizations about the adoption of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) solutions for a number of different technologies associated with integrated communications.

Core communications technologies, such as voice, email, voice mail, presence and fax, were adopted by less than 20 percent of respondents. However, web conferencing, social media and content management technologies in the cloud were more likely to be utilized and potentially could be a point of entry to provide cloud-based communications solutions to the business. Most cloud-based technologies evaluated for this study exhibit adoption rates consistent with early adopters, but Aberdeen found that services such as content management, virtual meetings and social technologies have crossed the chasm into general market adoption.

It is not a coincidence that technologies adopted most often tend to be considered line-of-business applications that are often purchased outside of the traditional IT procurement process. Aberdeen found that only 20 percent of cloud-based communications technologies initially were purchased by the IT managers; more than half were initiated by line-of-business departments. These purchases often occurred either as trials or departmental purchases to meet a specific need. However, these technologies required IT support and interaction to crossover from niche usage into the enterprise at large.

How is your Company utilizing the Cloud?

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Thank you, and I look forward to reading your future contributions on Focus.com!

Courtney Sato
Expert Services

The sooner companies find great “cloud based” solution partners and come to realize the value of having another company manage, support, provide, deliver, backup and protect their information the better.

Investing in technology which will be antiquated or replaced by newer technology which is twice as fast, half the size and less costly within an 18 month cycle is hard to justify in a CAPEX model.

For the biggest of companies the real tough part and where the greatest fear lies is critical content management. The need for a “code red” level of responsiveness they can have control over or have guaranteed form an outsourced vendor is crucial for mass adoption of the “cloud” model.

Not just the speed to respond to crisis situations but fear also surrounds security, and encryption of their data. That coupled with trusting the network to be up and ready to handle the mass amounts of content and data which will traverse it, are of utmost importance.

The telecom and AAP providers must improve their guarantees of delivery, redundancy, latency and jitter. When the prices come down a “wee bit” more, and the latter happens with improved networks…watch out for the adoption rate of the “cloud”!

End of Day…everything is just around the corner from happening…and for all the right reasons.