The new economy comes with new rules, layers of government intervention that are welcomed by some and feared by others and adoption of old practices that saves firms money provided resources are available to support them. One of these old methods is for companies with extra office space to spare, is to sublet to smaller non-competing or non-threatening firms and start-ups and to share bandwidth and telephony resources.But this practice doesn't always go smoothly as I pointed out in Norstar Replaces Altigen. The key failure for that customer-landlord relationship was the landlord didn't maintain the Altigen system or keep it updated. Again, this is just one of many roadblocks to effectively share resources among different companies using the same facilities. The telephony system must be capable of true partitioning of resources including music-on-hold (MOH), zeroing out of the automated attendant to the right company operator and isolation of telephone calls and charge-backs to the right company. If the telephony solution can't do these basic things then the tenant loses confidence.
Are the manufacturers keeping tuned to market conditions? I don't think so. Any telephony system made today should include, as a standard, shared tenant services that stand up to the test of the customers using them and to the installation companies installing them. Along with the telephony needs, customers initially may fail to understand the overall IT needs of the organization, especially when they attempt to deploy hosted services or features and applications that their landlords take for granted. Running your business behind another company's IT gear isn't guaranteed plug-and-play.
Recently I completed an audit for a customer of his bills and shared Internet access billed by his landlord. His long distance provider was nailing him for varied rates between 5 and 8 cents per minute and his local Verizon lines with a 3-year agreement weren't worth touching with any provider including SIP or CLECs even if they could provide service to his building. The primary reason is that his pro-rated T1 Internet access billed to him by his landlord isn't taxed as his own. Anyone paying a T1 bill knows that taxes, FCC charges, recovery costs, etc... add up pretty quickly. For this customer I advised him to keep quiet on the good deal he's getting on the T1 but to rattle the chains of his LD provider and leave everything else alone for another year.
Earlier we engaged another customer, a law firm that has multiple offices with a hosted VoIP solution that just wouldn't work. The problems are pretty basic--the provider used Telco remote call forwarding without buying multi-path call forwarding, creating too many busy signals for clients; the law firm is unable to employ QoS with several of the remote offices that are in shared tenant services arrangements and the hosted provider didn't put in the physical skin to "see" and "interview" the customer and staff along with their requirements. Nothing can substitute for a site survey. Even then, you must be able to handle the new users as customers, not just as more annoying users complaining about the Internet being too slow or the phones not working right. Opportunity has its costs.
