Two OEMs, Two OSs

3CX and Digium are two of Broadvox’s largest IP PBX platforms in terms of SIP Trunking market share. I am always hesitant to mention specific IP PBX OEMs for fear of alienating another of our OEM partners. That said please forgive me Panasonic, NEC, Samsung, Iwatsu, Epygi and anyone else. Today, I found it interesting to look at a couple of recent press releases from the two companies.

3CX, a Windows based IP PBX, announced the release of call center features for SMBs and that is a good thing. Too often we assume that the advanced attendant features and queues offered by a basic PBX will suffice for an SMB running a call center. After all, how tough can it be to managed a half dozen to a dozen call center employees. Well, managing their time, performance and success is just as difficult as if the number were 100. I think 3CX has hit upon a very good addition to their platform and for that I give kudos to Nick Galea, CEO 3CX, and his team. A brief summary of the features include:

Advanced Real time Queue and Agent Statistics
Call Back Feature
Additional Queue Strategies
SLA Alerts
Listen in, Listen and Whisper with Barge in
Wrap up Time

Read the announcement of the 3CX call Center Module and see what you think.

Digium, an open source Asterisk based IP PBX, has always been about the TCO. Our first joint marketing effort was developing a case study demonstrating that their TCO was among the best in the industry. Their latest TCO release IP Communications Buyer’s Guide offers some interesting statistics comparing their product to other IP PBXs. However, I found the first three quarters of the guide to be the most useful and agnostic. Those sections of the guide address three very important current subjects:

Trends in Today’s Communications Infrastructure
Why Unified Communications
Quantifying Unified Communications Savings

Regardless of the OEM products you represent, use or are interested in buying, reading the first three sections will provide new information regarding the direction and value of IP communications. Of particular interest was the attempt to quantify the efficiency gains for an employee using Unified Communications. The guide noted a gain of 1.5 hours per day per employee. That is very interesting to any C-level considering the transition or addition of Unified Communications applications and features.

I’ll share the details behind those numbers on Monday as they deserve more space than I have remaining.

Enjoy the weekend and check out the blog on Monday for one of my more interesting original recipes!