Cloud Telephony - Boon or Bane ?

Cloud telephony, although still in its nascent stage in India, is fast growing and being widely accepted across the globe. This technology mainly focuses on combining your regular computer applications and software systems with telephony applications that are designed for specific purposes. This combination is usually hosted by telephony providers and hosted via data centers. With financial projections of $1.1 trillion by 2015, and the number of new service providers entering the market globally and in India, cloud telephony is here to stay.
Cloud telephony goes a long way in negating the hassles of maintaining a concrete telephony system. It does not require miles of wiring through Main Distribution Frames like an EPABX or specialized hardware or dedicated in-house monitoring. You do not need human assistance to manage your telecom resources. You can also use cloud telephony to build your own call flows with IVRs that can help in routing calls accurately. Mobility is another key factor in making cloud telephony a success. You can use your cloud telephony system from anywhere around the world. All you need to do is log in! The rapid pooling of virtual resources according to demand enables the consumer to handle any number of calls at any point in time, irrespective of peak and non-peak traffic. The uses of cloud telephony is definitely not limited to businesses. Anyone who has a website or an IT application can turn to cloud telephony to add telephony functionality to the app or website.
What does all of this boil down to? A completely reliable, built-to-order, inexpensive and super-efficient virtualized telephony system that can handle any number of calls along with the advantage of mobility with a bare minimum of supervision. The disadvantages of cloud telephony is minuscule when compared to its advantages. The only key disadvantage of cloud telephony is that it largely depends on the availability of a working internet connection at the host level. If the internet connection is slow or unavailable due to an error at the operator level, it could affect the functioning of the cloud telephony system. This is probably the only apprehension that consumers may have when it comes to adopting a cloud telephony system as a minor glitch in the internet connection could lead to a pause in operations that could be harmful, especially for small businesses.
But the advent of cloud telephony in the Indian markets has seen a lot of SaaS providers venture into the market and bring a lot of new innovative features and additions to this technology. This also brings about a hope of finding a way to bypass the dependency on internet connectivity – although not immediately, but definitely in the near future.
Cloud telephony is sure to attract a lot of attention among SMEs and SMBs in the country. Even start ups stand to benefit as getting a proper business communication channel for themselves is only 3 steps away – register, buy a number and start receiving calls.
So, cloud telephony is finally picking up in India and carries along with it a lot of promise. Now that we have weighed out the benefits and hindrances of cloud telephony, we can all sit back and watch as cloud telephony not only takes over business communications, but also becomes the next giant leap in telecommunications on the whole.

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