Go for it. Sharpening your pencil and calculating exactly what an investment in an Internet Protocol (Internet Protocol) PBX (private branch exchange) telephony system—a highly sophisticated business telephone system designed to deliver voice and/or video over a data network—amounts to, is an eminently worthwhile exercise.

To start, the savings you’ll enjoy on equipment purchases and ongoing telecom costs will be apparent from your next bill. Less obvious are those fuzzy benefits a sharp new telecom system lends a firm, such as the breathless decline in frustration experienced by those customers charged with navigating your particular telephony path.

Working that pencil is worth the effort.

Herewith, five hard-number reasons a new phone system is a sound investment.

1. Establishing a corporate IP network and running all your lines through it will translate into immediate savings on your phone bill, particularly if your folks journey back and forth a lot between branches, or engage in any kind of long distance. Also, if your employees are on the road at all, working their mobile phone keypads and racking up charges on hotel bills, this kind of investment will bear fruit right away.
2. You’ll appreciate a material cost cut in equipment purchases, too, if you choose wisely. A country-hick phone system can actually have a steeper price tag than its IP city-slicker cousin. It certainly has fewer features. What’s more, once you’ve got the IP system in place, you can ditch those old-fashioned phone contraptions altogether and install company-wide software that will transform your corporate computers into high-functioning tools of telephony.
3. Bypass the infrastructure costs for this new arrival by doubling up on your preexisting data network. Doing so represents a cost-savings that could amount to more than $100 per desktop. And if you ever add another user, or move office, you can enjoy the ease of self-administered setup (versus calling in an expensive “expert”) that this more sophisticated system offers.
4. One of the neatest features a snazzy new IP system brings to bear is how it, married to a broadband Internet connection, means anyone can get on the line from anywhere. Remote and telecommuting employees are suddenly a real possibility for a company so equipped.

In February, Therm-Omega-Tech, Inc., a leading manufacturer of reliable Tempered Water Systems and Automatic Temperature Control Valves for Fluid Management since 1983, found themselves in the middle of the record setting blizzards in Warminster, Pennsylvania. Like most businesses in the area, Therm-Omega-Tech employees were stranded at home for days at a time due to major roadways being shut down during a Pennsylvania state of emergency. Just days before the snowstorms hit, Bardissi Enterprises, a certified partner of AltiGen Communications, deployed the MaxMobile solution for key sales executives at Therm-Omega-Tech as a part of a beta test for the revolutionary new MaxMobile software. When the storms hit, contrary to most business in the area, sales resumed as usual for Therm-Omega-Tech as both national and international calls continued to roll in via the employee’s iPhones, which were running MaxMobile.  Inbound callers were unaware of any disruptions in service as the iPhones functioned as normal business extensions with full PBX features.

“Paul Driscoll, Sales Manager for Therm-Omega-Tech, informed me that he received his usual sales calls throughout the day on his iPhone due to the MaxMobile install, which allowed him to quote and close three new deals — even one prospective customer who called in from out of the country,” stated George Bardissi, President of Bardissi Enterprises. “Therm-Omega-Tech is now going to deploy the iPhone MaxMobile Solution for the rest of the company staff. The AltiGen MaxMobile iPhone solution combined with Microsoft SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007 brings all the company resources directly to the palm of your hands, allowing companies to conduct business remotely regardless of storm disasters or any other factors preventing travel to the office.”

“Our latest version of Max Communications Server brings advanced, enterprise class mobile PBX features to the Apple iPhone,” stated Jerry Fleming, AltiGen’s President & COO.  “MaxMobile allows smart phones to act as the primary business PBX extension and dynamically redirect all PBX extension calls to the mobile phone – completely transparent to the calling party.  With critical business-class PBX functionality, integrated with advanced smart phone features, MaxMobile offers true mobile communications on a single smart phone platform.”

The tickle in the throat. The scratch in the chest. The leak in the nose. Far from down and out, you’re functioning just fine, thankyouverymuch. Still, there’s trouble around your edges and every reason to believe you could be performing at levels much closer to the top of your game.

But wait. Before congratulating yourself on the wisdom that delivered tickly, scratchy, leaky you to the doctor’s office in pursuit of a clean bill, consider that other parts of your life could benefit from similarly preventative attention.

An information technology health check is common sense, write large, 72-point type, shout it from the rooftops and nothing less. Technology, after all, is a torpedo, tugging progress along by the nosehairs. For a company to imagine it can remain still in this rushing current, without benefit of the occasional Band-Aid, upgrade or plans best laid, is pure folly.

At 360 Visibility, our proven IT Health Check provides clients with a comprehensive review of their IT infrastructure status. Complete with diagnosis, we offer an all-in prescription for improvement. Among other things, our detailed report will identify both areas of present-day, drag-you-down incompetence and of big, hairy potential risk. We’ll benchmark your firm against industry best practices and offer some guidance on bridging the divide.

We’ll tell you if your existing infrastructure can be better aligned with your existing business strategy. We’ll scope out your IT inefficiencies. We’ll poke around your disaster recovery and business continuity provisions. We’ll take a listen to your IT policies and procedures.

Your cabling, switching, wireless networks, phone system, routing and firewalls will all be subject to a technician’s gentle exploration. We’ll call up your legacy phone system to see if it’s up to snuff.

And we’ll give you a brutal glimpse of the scene that awaits a company that makes no move to improve.

More than that, qualified 360 Visibility technicians will set you up with a exhaustive report that includes working paper checklists on those specific categories we’ve identified as worth watching, and solid written counsel to help you prioritize next steps within an implementation timeline.

Your IT Infrastructure is a critical factor in the success of your business. It provides the construct for your employees to do their jobs. It facilitates daily operations and expedites plans for growth. Thanks to it, security, communication and access to information are reasonable expectations for a day at the office.

If the information technology bones inside a business are unwell, or even in peril of minor fracture, the company as a whole will suffer. And if the place isn’t operating at maximum capacity, when a certified IT professional with a highly refined trouble-seeking stethoscope is at such close hand, well, that’s just a shame.

And that doesn’t feel good at all.

SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration and document-management platform from Microsoft. Effectively a content-management system, SharePoint allows groups to set up a centralized, password-protected space for document sharing. Here, documents can be stored, downloaded and edited, and then uploaded for continued sharing. SharePoint can also host specialized applications, such as wikis and blogs, from within a browser.

The logic behind the concept is that an organization’s effectiveness can by streamlined by having someone else oversee the maintenance of a server, and the management of the data on it. Corporate clients have outsiders host applications on a SharePoint platform such that developers can focus on the application and not have to worry about such minutiae as access, permissions and coordinating look-and-feel with other applications.

A feature-rich document storage site and retrieval system, SharePoint boasts a cache of tools that includes document storage, tasks, calendars, announcements and contacts—data-dense material that SharePoint frees from a multitude of desktop folders on company servers. Users can also sync up their MS Outlook to work with SharePoint to share calendars and appointments.

SharePoint works in units called sites, which are really just collections of tools. A single business may have many sites and sub-sites, each with SharePoint’s drill-down capability.

Users can access SharePoint from anywhere: through their web browser, Outlook or compatible Microsoft Office applications like Word 2007 and Excel 2007. And you can further customize your SharePoint site with Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 access.

It is a brilliant, easy and seamless integrate into your corporate culture. Good-bye Windows Explore with in nested directories and unsearchable documents.

360 Visibility: Points worth Sharing

At 360 Visibility, our hosted SharePoint service has been built with component-level redundancy, and is housed in one of the most sophisticated data centres on the market. Clients can develop business-line applications delivered through a secure portal to help increase their efficiencies.

With the click of a button they can set up new accounts, reset passwords and manage storage. The whole point of hosted SharePoint, after all, is to relieve non-technically minded administrators of the burden of IT expertise. And users also gain access to 360’s considerable resources to create their own rocking applications featuring cool and uber-efficient functionality like automated processes and event-driven e-mail alerts.

And of course the choice to sign on with 360’s hosted SharePoint services means access to an expertly managed—and individually customized—Microsoft Windows environment without having to invest in the building and maintenance of a comparably outfitted in-house system. You pay only for the service you need and sidestep handily the initial outlay of installation, to say nothing of the ongoing cost of support.

Best of all, SharePoint users can rest assured knowing their SharePoint site—managed capably by Microsoft Gold Certified staff—is always available to them through redundancy and 24×7 monitoring.

In the very first minute after the earthquake, 106 people filed status updates with the word “earth” in them. In the first three minutes, that number jumped to over 700. Since then, updates with the word “Haiti” have been coming at the rate of 1,500 a minute, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation.

But not only are texting, Tweeting survivors alerting the world to their plight, many of us on the receiving end are responding with our keypads, too. Springing from text-giving inroads dug after the South Asian tsunami in 2004, the cellphone is rapidly becoming the most popular means of pledging financial help to charitable initiatives.

Texting Your Donation

The Mobile Giving Foundation, the company that pioneered the technology behind “text-to-give” campaigns, reported this week that Haitian donations are arriving at a rate of US$50,000 an hour.

On January 20, the Canadian Red Cross set up a text-messaging campaign that lets cellphone users donate $5 to the Haiti Earthquake Fund by texting “redcross” to 30333. After users respond to a confirmation message, a $5 charge is tacked on their phone bill.

In the U.S., the American Red Cross has raised more than US$22 million in cellphone-administered donations since the January 12 quake.
But there’s more in store for this modest instrument of interaction.

The phone is gaining new prominence as the unwitting central character in an unfolding drama that will ultimately send up an across-the-board revised definition for this critical instrument of modern life.

Unified Communications Infrastructure

It’s why, more than ever, managers need to be mindful of the communications infrastructure inside which they organize their companies, and with the corporate partners with whom they align themselves in pursuit of same.

But there are limitations to these sharp new methods of communication, especially when messages are too wordy or complex for such bite-sized dissemination. It’s why attaching voice integration to data-based devices is more important than ever.

Indeed, this concept of “unified communication” is gaining ground for its usefulness in corporate environments where workers increasingly recognize the value of the marriage between computer and phone, and its promise of speedy and reliable communication.

Devices that can accommodate the dual demands of voice and data, business and personal, media consumption and individual interaction, are the current darlings of the buzzing telecommunications world.

Managers considering a commitment to a new communications system in 2010 need to select one that addresses all of their requirements—old school and new age alike.

I’m not looking to ride the ink trails of Charles Dickens here, but it’s awfully hard to resist when he laid down so apt an all-purpose summary of a year. Because it is always the best of times—and the worst. A little of this, a little of that. Some highs, some lows. One day you’re an American journalist getting an escort from North Korea by Bill Clinton, the next you’re Taylor Swift and your stage is being stormed by Kanye.

Certainly if you were Miss California or Roman Polanski in 2009, you’ve had better revolutions through the lunar cycle. But if you were Susan Boyle or the guy who won that dream job on that Pacific Island, well, you had yourself a bit of a party over the last 12 months, didn’t you?

As for us here at 360 and our journey through the latest calendar pages, we feel confident laying claim to Dickens’ more positive category of assessment. Prominent among those best-of times was our growth. In spite of the so-called “recession,” we managed to pass another year in expansion mode.

Our growth rate over the last six months? 46 percent.

More than that, we hired six new people in the last four months of 2009 and, in December, moved offices to a spot that is almost triple the size our original space.

Rising above negative ambient circumstances seems to be our thing: we launched the company during the last recession.

As for the folks we served over 2009, I will say they are grateful and better off for their encounter with us. Smart companies did not hold onto their cash when the pace slowed; they upgraded their systems!! Imagine that, and some of the best deals are made during a recession. And today these folks purring with efficient operating structures that are poised to capture business from a recovering economy.

And what of the rest? Well, they’re kind of preoccupied right now with the matter of enacting a system upgrade of their own. Still running Windows Server 2000, 2003 or perhaps Windows XP or better yet Exchange 2000, 2003, 2007? Have a look at your daybook, fella: It’s 2010 and the latest technology is Win2008, Window7, Exchange2010.

Hmmm, what else of this past year? In April, the Standish Report released its latest survey: an increase challenge and failures of in ERP and CRM implementations, 44% and 24% respectively. No surprise there, eh. I’ve been doing this for 15+ years and the scene was ever thus. Hence, why 360 Visibility was established with its innovative Solution Centre of ERP/CRM implementation methodology.  Try it, nobody likes to be burnt twice.

Certainly server virtualization continued to grab the attention of companies wanting to do more with less. Plasma and LCD are dead; LED TV is here to stay. And the results finally came in for the Beta-vs-VHS debate – Blu-ray won. So why does your IT disaster recovery plan still include “Tapes” – please shelve them along with those 8Tracks. Resistance is futile – Remote Online Backup is taking over.

Traditional phone system vendors that have been around since the mastodons continued to play catch-up while true voice-over IP systems like those that hail from AltiGen, Cisco and Microsoft Unified Communications laid the true pavement for 2010.

2010, a new decade! Set your goals, because “Vision without Execution is Hallucination” This year will be the best of times.

I read an article in The Wall Street Journal recently that gave me pause.

It was a piece on how the fragmented nature that’s defined the technology industry for the last several years may have run its course, and how a new trend to vertically integrate operations is afoot in corporate America.

Case in point: the surfeit of massive deals in the offing, including LiveNation’s targeted acquisition of Ticketmaster, PepsiCo’s pending US$7.8-billion acquisition of two of its key bottlers and Oracle Corp.’s massive planned purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Comprehensive control, it appears, is the new name of the game.

With this model, organizations are encouraged to draw back in house those splintered factions of its existence that they’ve increasingly released to outsiders.

More than that, it embraces the philosophy that one needn’t stick to his knitting, after all, if one hopes to be successful. Indeed, if you knit, why not consider crocheting, too? And while you’re at it, give needlework a whirl.

“Vertical integration,” as described in the article, is a longstanding strategy which sees companies assuming direction of all aspects of their corporate existence, from materials, to manufacturing, to distribution.

At least superficially, it makes sense to me.

Certainly a move to amass under one roof as many components of the production and delivery of the service or product a company sells to its customers is a potential move toward better profits and higher productivity. Quality, production, distribution can all be enhanced with more direct oversight.

But it is, alas, also a potential move toward chaos.

If the manager filling his arms with new and revisited strategic imperatives is not mindful of also loading up on ways to effectively manage them, this corporate shift may backfire badly.

And so, as much as this move is about shedding outside participation in a company’s operational activities, it behooves executives considering this to enlist professional help as needed.

At 360, we can lend a raft of expertise to the enterprise.

We can help you to define the overall technological architecture you’ll need to gain ground over your competition. We can conduct a health check and needs analysis of your current outfit. We can set you up with the enterprise software and communications systems to support your expanded operation.

And we can help you to align your newest additions with your existing infrastructure such that your tried and true don’t get diluted in the process.