Hardware and setup

If you haven’t yet got a business telephony system, the start-up costs can be significant. The upfront costs of buying a PBX, setting up leased lines and equipment like interface cards can run into the thousands. The same is true if you’re upgrading your system – hardware costs can take a chunk out of your budget.

On top of the initial costs is the ongoing server maintenance – when you need IT personnel to manage your telephony solution, the total cost of ownership becomes higher and higher, whether you need to hire someone in or increase the duties of your existing IT team.

In contrast, cloud hosted telephony solutions don’t require anything like the Capex costs of on-premise systems. You don’t need to buy a server or cards, or any additional equipment. Maintenance and configuration are not an issue – your provider handles all of that for you.The most you’ll have to do is upgrade your telephone handsets.

Future-proofing

One of the biggest issues for small businesses setting up a telephony system was knowing how much capacity to buy from day one. You may have started out with one or two employees, but with plans for growth you bought enough capacity for ten people (knowing how much more complicated it can be to add further capacity later down the line).

What happens if your growth is slower than you’d like? You’re paying for capacity that you’re not using, money that’s going nowhere. On the other hand, if your growth exceeded your expectations, you have the additional costs and hassle of adding more capacity sooner than you thought. Either way, it’s financially inefficient.

Cloud telephony grows as you grow. Adding new users is simple, and can be done one at a time whenever you need to. No more guessing at how much capacity you need, or paying over the odds for something you’re not using – pay for what you need, and upgrade only when you need to.

Ongoing costs

The biggest difference between cloud hosting and on-premise telephony is in the ongoing costs – we’ve already covered how cloud hosted solutions don’t require budget for maintenance, but there are other regular costs to consider too.

While on-premise solutions don’t have a monthly fee beyond the cost of leased lines, a cloud hosted solution includes the cost of calls within your monthly subscription charge. Take the Equity solution for example – local, national, and mobile calls are completely free (with a very generous fair use policy), and international calls are cheaper than the vast majority of on-premise providers.

Even with a monthly fee for the cloud service, savings reach an average of 34% – and that doesn’t take into account the savings associated with purchasing and maintaining the on-premise option.

Of course, these are just indicative savings – if you’d like to know how much your business could save, get in touch for a free, no-obligation discussion to review your potential.