In 2004, my office made significant changes to our communications infrastructure that took over a year to implement. Afterwards, we've made smaller adjustments until 2010 when we implemented SIP trunks. Prior to 2010, we tested SIP trunks for 12 months before deciding to make the change. Overall, we're spending 59% less today than we did prior to 2004. Prior to 2004 we had many vendors, more than we have today--and we still think we have too many vendors. We have more choices and we now have that SMB feel that goes along with these choices that allows us to move in and out of these services with minimal or no disruption and with greater comfort.
Communications Infrastructure Services
AT&T cellular represents the largest share of our communications infrastructure expenses. Maybe in time, cellular services will migrate or face disruption through technology. Until then, our strategy to shave costs is simple. For the past two years we've adjusted our rate plan (out of contract) and we've still managed to carry a surplus of voice minutes that carry over. We are changing our cell plans to the next-lower tier of minutes to purposely incur overtime minutes that will be absorbed by our surplus carryover minutes. We estimate we have enough carryover minutes to last 18-24 months before we have to revert back to the previous plan, negotiate a new package or change carriers. This flip-flopping of plans is only good as long as AT&T allows it. I called AT&T and they agreed to roll the minutes and made this change effective with our next bill cycle, and the reduction was 8% on the monthly.
Verizon will likely continue to pump up Internet bandwidth costs and refrain from offering any respectable discounts even for long term commitments. The cable operators are the only alternative and they may keep the Telcos in check for competitive prices and bandwidth plans. I don't hear much about the Triple Play any longer, other than people hating their providers and wishing they could live without them altogether. Had I not been Apple centric, I could easily roll our cloud services from Apple into Verizon's services included with FIOS and reduce the costs. The tradeoff is we do get more "technology" bundled in with Apple with tighter integration between our desktops, the cloud and our iPhones. We also get a few more features and tools on our website. We could also roll our email accounts to Verizon and retain MX Logic, but Verizon doesn't make it easy to do business. In other words, their web support, documentation and use of the cloud are basic and cumbersome to deal with.
Google provides free usage for what we need and we've retained MX Logic in front of them to lock down email. We could redo our email and forgo using our domain and come up with a naming convention using Apple's unfriendly-to-business email/domain services. Apple's MobileMe is a great tool and even acts as a key UC element, but it lacks on the issue of using domain services without workarounds. In VoIP: What About Apple? I wrote, "Apple users may be wondering about how to integrate or include their Apple wares with business communications applications and services. The folks at Apple seemingly ignore the VoIP/SIP business world." Had I entitled this post today, it would read, "UC: What About Apple?"--and the same sentiment would apply. MobileMe is an almost-there product for SMBs but fundamentally lacking.
Unifying the domain, email and Apple's cloud services for business is, as Tom Nolle wrote in Is Apple the Future of UC?, one of two outcomes: "Apple can define the UC space so completely that anyone in it is either a slave to Apple's positioning, or is irrelevant. That doesn't mean that they will, though. Apple could also walk away from UC completely, toss the brass ring back to the current UC masses." Sadly, I think Apple is myopic on businesses buying Apple servers and this bucks the trend of cloud reliance, energy savings and paring down CAPEX. Even with our Mac Mini server--I know we could upgrade our Verizon bandwidth and services; then, open up the firewall and reconfigure for email, VPN and even connectivity with our iPhones. The reliance upon our server or any server on premise is what I've resisted for years and still would rather use Apple's or other cloud services that offers a unified solution.
Broadvox is providing our SIP trunks and we've managed quite well without Verizon voice. Should Verizon awaken to providing the needs of SMBs and delivering SIP trunk services competitively, then we could return to Verizon for either same or lower costs and reduction of one vendor. Our fax services for several years with MyFax have been flawless but our fax usage has declined. We decided to port our fax number over to Broadvox. We won't receive faxes on our iPhones and that doesn't really matter since most of our fax traffic is signatory documents. This change reduces our monthly costs by 4%. Still, they fall short on offering basic features and services that would further reduce our costs. We still lack basic Telco features (Call Forwarding/Call Transfer) and hosted voice mail/automated attendant. The savings is in energy costs powering our voice mail/auto attendant system, then further reduction in rack space. Our Panasonic NCP1000 has excellent Fax success with SIP trunks on customer installations too--a better solution would be an in-skin Panasonic fax server function that would integrate with the voice processing system, and this would reduce energy costs and rack space.
What I do see happening is a slow migration of services into the cloud, and providers are converging and consolidating services to create value. For example, recently, j2 Global Communications, Inc. acquired Protus Communications. j2 Global Communications is a provider of cloud-based, value-added communication, messaging and backup services. They just launched www.j2.com, a new website that makes it easy for businesses and individuals to learn about and sign up for the company's suite of brands.
There's 12% monthly savings I've managed in the course of writing this post after contemplating and then making these changes over the Easter holiday. One less vendor and so you know--I'm still not satisfied. Neither should SMBs be, but they fall victim to traditionalism simply because they don't want to change, modify their behavior, and assume new risks, or just other reasons.
For years my wife encouraged me to try online banking with the bill payer feature and for years I rejected the free services. There's a cost to paying bills--time, cutting checks, envelopes and postage. I can't even remember why I resisted. The online banking is one of my new favorite services. Traditional services and ways of conducting business are okay and I think business needs to adhere to even older rules of staying competitive and remain razor sharp on expenses. There is no room for complacency, and for those that venture out of tradition, new risks and problems occur but so do new rewards and discoveries. At the beginning of this post I stated that, "Today, we are spending 59% less than we did prior to 2004." Most of the savings we achieved are attributable to SIP trunks and we didn't cut or reduce services:
