Infrastructure is a necessary evil for any business in the sense that it’s an unavoidable cost that fuels growth but demands trained staff and expensive hardware. Your telephony needs will first be met by a simple, single phone line supplied by the local telecommunications company, and that line is used for voice and occasionally fax transmissions. The demands of a growing and healthy business will necessitate expanding the number and function of the lines installed in your office and you will quickly realize that it’s time to dedicate an Information Technology specialist to managing and maintaining your small business phone system. The IT specialist will make any moves, additions, or changes that you need to have done when a new employee is added to the company as well as overseeing the functionality of the conference phones that reside in the meeting rooms and allow clients and other partners to be tele-present in critical discussions. This approach will serve your company well in the early years of its life as a mid-sized business, but it is critical to your bottom line to reevaluate your requirements and your technological capabilities as you approach your full potential. When your network infrastructure assumes the reliability and capacity one would expect from an industry standardized backbone, it can easily be configured to now take the responsibility of telecommunications, through the use of voice over IP technologies. These technologies convert all of your voice communication to a digital signal and use your existing data network to carry the voice data from your phone sets to the outside world. At this point in your company’s life cycle, your network administrator will be able to add this technology seamlessly and work in concert with the rest of the IT team to deploy it quickly and painlessly. This will draw upon the established skills and knowledge of the network administrator, and give him or her a new opportunity to expand their knowledge base and explore a new technology. There is another alternative that every business should investigate as well, and that is the prospect of using a third party provider to host and administer your entire telecommunications solution. There is an appreciable benefit to this approach, in both cost and resources, and the IT team should thoroughly review the idea to see if it can fit with your plan. It may be necessary to keep all of these services within your physical location and under the supervision of your staff, but many businesses find it cost effective to utilize these other options.
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