Business VoIP – What is Managed VoIP?

What is Managed VoIP?

Business clients of all sizes are flocking to VoIP solutions to take advantage of the rich collection of features available, as well as to keep telephony costs down. There are two ways for a company to go about deploying VoIP. Larger enterprises may do better to install and manage their own IP PBX system in-house, although many SMB operations benefit from using the services of either a managed VoIP provider, or a hosted solution.

Managed VoIP, hosted VoIP and managed IP PBX are often referred to in the same light, but they are not the same, and this does cause some confusion as to what solution is best for each given circumstance. There is a difference between managed VoIP and hosted VoIP. In a fully hosted solution, the user does not have customer-premises equipment; rather, the equipment is located at the provider's site. A managed VoIP solution, on the other hand, may locate the equipment on the customer premises or off-site, depending on the service level offering.

In a managed VoIP offering, the location of the equipment is secondary to who is actually running it. The differentiator is that the managed VoIP provider manages all of the equipment, software, infrastructure, and maintenance of the system, whether it is on-premises or off-premises. There are a wide range of managed VoIP solutions; at the simplest, the managed VoIP service handles the day-to-day operations and ordinary tasks such as moves, adds and changes. Other managed VoIP services extend that to include management of the entire VoIP lifecycle.

Managed VoIP Solution

A managed VoIP solution will also typically include remote monitoring services, which allows the provider to instantly be aware of any problems that occur. A good solution will also include a service level agreement (SLA), which guarantees to the client that a predetermined level of service will be available, with a minimum of downtime. In addition to the SLA itself, the provider should offer periodic management reports and ongoing quality of service oversight, which besides providing metrics and management reports, should also provide actionable data to ensure that any degradation of service is rectified in good time. In most cases, the managed VoIP provider should be able to address quality issues in real time, or on demand.

Another advantage of managed VoIP is that it allows the customer to grow incrementally without having to have an undue burden whenever expansion is necessary. Although SMB clients represent the majority of managed VoIP users, enterprise customers are also seeing the advantages, and overall, adoption continues to grow.

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