Editorial

In the era of digital globalization, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are crucial in guiding businesses toward success. With the workforce adopting hybrid environments, MSPs need to provide a complete set of services, covering anti-spam protection, cloud phone systems, and managed security. Continuously adding new services enhances the overall customer experience. By expanding into new territories across diverse industries and undertaking empowering branding initiatives, MSPs secure customer ownership and boost profit margins.

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We are nearing the end of our tenth anniversary year, and I must say it’s been quite a year. It’s been ten years of innovation in VoIP and cloud communications, and we remain at the vanguard of the industry. We founded Vodia a decade ago with a commitment to innovative software development, and this commitment has only strengthened over the past 10 years. It is the core of what we do.

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PromptVoice’s Freemium model offers everything you’d expect from a classic Freemium proposition – the ability to give all customers access to basic functionality, free of charge, and then upgrade them through paid subscription packages that generate healthy incremental margin increases.

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“We were jumping on that train very early,” says Christian Stredicke, serving the MSPs, Vodia is marking a decade as a leader and pioneer in offering PBX software that effectively turns mobile phones, laptops, PCs and standard VoIP phones into clients everyone in an organization can use for communication.

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Our partner, Easy On Hold (EOH), based in Kalamazoo, MI, provides streaming music and messages on a custom marketing schedule for contact centers, enterprise-level corporations and small-medium size businesses via their phones and overhead environments. The company creates effective message on hold productions, auto attendant and IVR greetings, overhead announcements, and overhead music solutions. And they’ve got some great guidance for what to play and when for your callers during the holidays.

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Eric Altman, Sales Engineer, Vodia: I understand Vodia is reaching its 10-year anniversary. It’s a pretty significant thing. Can you go through the evolution of Vodia? Where we’ve been and, actually, where we’re going? Christian Stredicke, President and CEO, Vodia: It started much longer than ten years ago. It started in 2005 and under a different name, Pbxnsip. “PBX” for PBX, “n” for and “sip” for session initiation protocol. At that time you clearly saw the cloud already, and there was no product readily available that was ready for the cloud but was carrier-grade. There was BroadSoft and a company called Sylantro which was ultimately acquired by BroadSoft. But these were really big, big deployments. There was nothing for a small MSP so it would be able to run a small PBX in the cloud. That was the original goal, to write software that can be used by these people.

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At Vodia, we understand how important branding is to both enterprises and SMEs, and our phone system is perfect for any MSP, VAR, WISPs System Integrator and Interconnect looking to build and maintain its brand. We make it so our resellers can brand our apps, web interface and emails – it’s as easy as dropping in a logo or as in-depth as changing the web front end Email templates.

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Another factor driving hybrid and remote work is inflation, 9.1 percent in the USA as of July 2022, while many economists are pricing in a recession for the euro zone either later this year or in 2023, with inflation in the zone forecasted at 8.3 percent for this year. With the price of goods and services lofted skyward by inflation, and the average price of a gallon of gas across the USA above $4.00 per gallon, working from home gives Americans the chance to reduce the amount of money they spend on commuting and meals and other incidental costs related to working on-site every day.

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Even with so many ways to engage with a company or brand, including and particularly social media, today’s customers still prefer voice to connect with your business. So, the phone remains a core component of the customer experience, but many call centers are unaware 86 percent of their customers experience significant hold time when they do call. This is where high-value queues and on-hold content can vastly improve the customer experience.

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In tandem with our cloud PBX, the Vodia app, available for Android and iOS, neatly and simply separates private and professional conversations. The app connects to your office phone system via a QR code, which is scanned in the app – once the QR code is scanned, all of the staff member’s office settings in the PBX are now included in the smartphone OS, and anything you could have accomplished with a desk phone in the office or with the softphone on your desktop can now be done with your smartphone.

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Vodia is the platform of choice for MSP and ITSP partners. Despite its small form factor, this device runs the complete Vodia PBX software on a state-of-the-art embedded server – it’s prebuilt and ready to deploy with pre-loaded license. It’s never been this easy and inexpensive to have a professional phone system for your business. And not just any phone system, but the rock-solid, feature rich, world-class Vodia PBX. All you have to do is connect it to your router.

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The Vodia app also makes it so you can set business hours, for the entire company or for individual employees, all within the PBX. This means no one can call an employee late at night or on a weekend or holiday. This is a key requirement for many employees, who worry using their smartphones means receiving work calls at all hours.

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With all this 21st century technology and the many “work from anywhere” requirements it satisfies, what about your phone system? For many of your clients and customers, your company’s phone number is the most direct and simplest way to engage with your organization. If your system is a traditional PBX, those old-fashioned wires make it so you’re anchored to your office if you want to make and receive calls, but there’s no need for this – you can move your entire phone system to the cloud!

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The Vodia cloud PBX gives end-users the ability to service more than one caller simultaneously – it’s a native feature with our phone system. Our PBX comes with agent groups which are equipped to handle higher call volumes and sequentially distribute calls. Callers can receive a call back when it’s their turn, instead of holding. Agents can log in and out of the queues, and managers can see service level measurements like speed of answer.

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Vodia’s all-in-one contact center solution improves agent productivity and customer experience by providing call centers with platform integration, reporting and unified tracking, all to streamline engagement for customers and processes for agents.

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You can now send faxes with Version 67.1 or later of Vodia’s best-in-class cloud PBX. We’ve had inbound fax for a while, but now we’ve added the outbound fax feature, which has been integrated into the front end and is available via the web front end app. It will also be included in the next Windows app release.

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While today’s PBX community agrees hosted is the way to go, rather than on-premises, the decision doesn’t end there. It used to be our customers were comparing our features and cost benefits with other on-premises systems to reach a final decision about which to purchase. Today, the same is true for the plethora of hosted systems out there.

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What next? Enter Hosted IP PBX. This is where all your calls are sent to the hosting server, which is now where all of the magic happens: four-digit dialing, music on hold, transfers, conferences…you no longer need any premise equipment, there’s no complicated setup or ongoing maintenance, no time-consuming and costly upgrades, it’s just simply services and features delivered via the Internet (SIP trunks) back to your office. Wait, this sounds kind of familiar…

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In this podcast, Christian Stredicke, CEO of Vodia, a cloud phone system company, talks about how Vodia is working to use WebRTC to create new communications environments for PBX users.

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Before there were computers, email, document sharing, instant messaging and mobile devices, the telephone was critical to the workplace, and it still is. Business telephone systems have been around for a long time, and we’ve all gotten used to listening to auto attendants and making our choices on a touch-tone keypad. We know pressing 123 gets us to the person whose extension is 123; if they’re not in the office, voicemail kicks in, but we can’t rely on just voicemails when we’re working remotely. Some conversations need to take place right then and there – some issues can’t be left in the purgatory of voicemail tag.

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VoIP systems integrate easily with IoT. For any company, the phone system is still an operational foundation, and management and employees need access to calls and voicemails and to individual extensions, whether they’re in the office or away from it, and a VoIP phone system makes this possible by moving all of an organization’s telephony into the cloud.

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Whichever model you adopt and however many days you and your team are spending onsite, the Vodia phone system is simply the best choice for remote, hybrid or onsite work models, and it’s installed at just about every type of company and organization, from municipalities to hotels to medical offices (we are HIPAA certified). We’d love to tell you all about it and connect you with one of our outstanding resellers. For more information, please reach out to us, sales@vodia.com.

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Based in Stoneham, MA, northwest of Boston, Microsoft Gold Partner and the U.S. home of anynode SBC, IT pioneer TE-SYSTEMS has been on a mission for three decades “to globally connect all devices while enabling unified ways of sharing data, information and making it accessible to everyone.”

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As of 2 August 2022, this summer, telecom services providers will forever retire POTS lines, per the FCC, and their customers will have to find another type of service. In August 2019, the FCC issued order 19-72A1, mandating the replacement of all U.S. POTS lines with an alternative service by August 2, 2022.

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SIP HARMONY is a business and residential VoIP provider. The company provides VoIP services to businesses, residences, schools, hotels and Airbnb’s, giving every one of its customers telephone systems that bring together standard SIP devices and services with proprietary clients for standard mobile and PC clients. And they do it all with TLC.

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Fallout from COVID-19? The landscape hasn’t just changed, it’s almost as if it’s been dynamited and reconstructed, and dispersed teams, necessitated by the virus, are becoming the norm. Like it or not we are now in the hybrid work era, and the term “everywhere enterprise” seems to apply to almost every business and organization. The digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, seems to continue apace with no signs of slowing down.

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The Vodia phone system comprises the most complete suite of robust business telephony features for on-premise and cloud-based telephony. People working at home or working from anywhere particularly love the Vodia browser app because it makes it so easy to control availability. And everything can be managed with our Android, iOS and Windows apps from a smartphone or desktop.

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Our mission is to make #workfromanywhere possible, seamlessly connecting you and your team with a solution that was designed for the cloud from day one. It’s everything you need for work from anywhere and hybrid work environments. Our industry-leading cloud PBX is OS agnostic, so you can use any OS – including Android, iOS, Linux, MAC and Windows – as your underlying platform.

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As the industry’s leading cloud PBX, the deployment of our software around the world is music to our ears. We think of each of our outstanding partners as one of our greatest hits, a platinum album…indispensable. We of course feel this way about our Austin, TX partner, SIP HARMONY, a family-run cloud VoIP provider for small-to-medium businesses, hotels, schools and residences. The company is helping keep Austin weird – and connected.

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If you’re an MSP looking for the perfect cloud PBX provider, look no further. Many UCaaS providers offer their channel partners full compensation and specialized, subject-matter expert resources while closing deals of any size, one to infinity, plus hands-off upsell services, comprehensive training and certifications, channel manager support and a dedicated partner support line. The issue, however, is you are unable to sell your own brand, which means you become an agent and you don’t own your customers. This is purely a retirement decision, not the decision made by a thriving company looking to grow its business.

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2021 was dominated by #workfromanywhere, #workfromhome, #hybridwork and, of course, the ubiquity of Zoom, Google hangouts and Microsoft Teams. Over the summer, when a significant percentage of people were vaccinated, many companies, including Apple and Google, predicted their employees would soon be returning to the office, but it turned out most people desired either hybrid or completely remote work; few workers wanted to return to an office full-time. Then, at the beginning of December, we faced a global outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 and, once again, the conversation returned exclusively to remote work. We may be having this conversation for quite a while.

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With our laptops on our desks or kitchen or dining room tables and 5G Wi-Fi at home, many of us are checking emails or polishing off projects long after the workday would have ended at the office. We check our work emails after dinner, before we go to bed…maybe even before that first cup of coffee. And let’s not forget, even when you don’t have a computer in front of you, you’re probably checking emails and SMS messages on your smartphone.

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Since our company’s inception, we have empowered and supported numerous businesses worldwide, both small and large, by providing these organizations with our best-in-class cloud and on-premises IP PBX technology. The Vodia PBX comprises the most complete suite of robust business telephony features for on-premises and cloud-based telephony, including auto attendant, SMS, paging, separation of personal and work calls, conference calls, call recording, CRM integration and Microsoft Teams integration.

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Hunt groups are used to distribute inbound calls to agents and are typically used for simple, low call volume groups. The PBX calls the agents in stages, making it possible to escalate calls to more and more extensions; if the call does not get picked up, it will ultimately be sent to a programmable destination – this can be an internal resource, like a mailbox, or another group, or an external number. Incoming calls are processed as they come into the system, which might cause call waiting on agent devices.

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Founded in 2014, Vodia partner Skyetel is “the telecom company that scares the big guys,” an independent telco with customers in all 50 states and all Canadian provinces. Skyetel maintains a robust network spanning North America that provides true multi-tenancy to resellers. The company’s platform was built for resellers to manage multiple customers from one convenient portal.

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A call detail record (CDR) is a record of the call data produced by a telephone call which documents the details of the call and of the other telecommunications transactions (e.g., SMS messages) which pass through a facility or device. The record will contain various data-points, including time, duration, completion status, source number and destination number. It’s similar to someone not only taking down a message but adding all of the actual call details.

Editorial

Microsoft Teams offers an unprecedented feature set for office communication – its integration with document processing, emails and a huge amount of Windows ecosystem software make Teams an outstanding productivity tool for just about every organization. In many business environments, however, both traditional and hybrid, connectivity to standard VoIP devices can be challenging.

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From mobile voice notes to IP-based voice calls, voice is once again dominating communications.

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Wenn uns die Coronapandemie eins gelehrt hat, dann dies: Außergewöhnliche Zeiten erfordern außergewöhnliche Lösungen. Aber kann es angesichts der – zumindest in den entwickelten Ländern – beeindruckenden Impferfolge und fallender Inzidenzen wirklich ein reflexartiges Zurück an die Schreibtische geben? Was geschieht mit den aus dem Boden geschossenen “Everywhere Enterprises” – bleiben sie bestehen oder entstehen gar viele neue? Denn die Vorteile solcher Unternehmen haben sich im Krisenfall bewährt: Können ihre Teams doch durch die verteilte Nutzung von Technik, Tools, Prozessen und Infrastrukturen gemeinsam ihren Kunden zur Verfügung zu stehen.

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“Gartner C-Suite: Redesigning Work for a Hybrid Future” delineates and dispels seven myths about hybrid work. According to the esteemed research group, “75 percent of hybrid or remote knowledge workers say their expectations for working flexibly have increased, and four out of 10 employees are at risk of leaving if you insist they return to an in-person office environment.”

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“You may have a fantastic product, but if your customer service isn’t helpful or reliable, or your customer service team is just plain hard to reach, folks are going to hear about it, and you will lose customers,” says Cobus Wiese, Executive Head of Service Delivery at ICTGlobe.com. “This is a big reason why investing in customer service is key to long-term business success, and it’s the driving force behind ICTGlobe.com’s HPT structure.”

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In a 2019 report, Pew Research estimated some 900,000 people born in South Africa were living abroad in 2017, and that these expatriates are mostly skilled professionals. Once the Covid-19 pandemic began, in March 2020, even more people left the country, with thousands of South Africans emigrating to distant shores. South Africa’s skills shortage is preventing the country from achieving five percent annual GDP growth – this growth is the country’s only real chance of recovering from the pandemic and making a real dent in poverty.

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IT service provider Gulf Network was founded in Kuwait by Mr. Shaik Inaithulla in 2019. Since then, the company has moved numerous Kuwaiti companies to the cloud, including companies in the banking, ecommerce, energy and utilities, environmental engineering, finance, healthcare, housing and urban development, oil, petrochemicals and public works sectors.

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There are many reasons to opt for cloud connectivity. Anecdotal evidence suggests about a third of South African businesses have moved their telecoms services to the cloud. PBX solutions hosted in the cloud make it so any enterprise or SME can benefit from corporate-quality unified communications platforms without the need for clunky physical equipment.

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The Vodia cloud PBX is the industry standard and a telephone system that works from anywhere – it’s the last tool companies need to work from home. It gives you real-time talk with an imperceptible delay. Our best-in-class PBX integrates with Microsoft Teams out of the box: it’s tailored for remote environments, so your team can use their mobile devices as their office extensions, making it possible for everyone to work from anywhere.

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The William Vale Hotel reached out to Vodia and requested we take a look at their system and help them move to the cloud. Our PBX met all the requirements the hotel needed for its telephone system. The William Vale had previously examined a hosted system, but it was too expensive and required too much support – with our ITSP, we were able to greatly reduce the “cost of ownership” for the hotel.

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The Vodia multi-tenant cloud PBX is a carrier-grade phone system for telephony cloud deployments, so you can easily create multiple tenants. Connect your existing SIP hardware devices and register to your favorite SIP trunk provider by using our pre-configured SIP trunk templates. It’s easy to deploy the Vodia multi-tenant PBX in a call center environment: all you need is a routable public IP address and a virtual machine. Call centers around the world trust Vodia to provide them reliable voice communication services.

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The Vodia cloud PBX comprises the most complete suite of robust business telephony features for on-premise and cloud-based telephony, including auto attendant, SMS, paging, separation of personal and work calls, conference calls, call recording, CRM integration and Microsoft Teams integration. If you’re looking for the best, most feature-rich PBX for your call center, Vodia is far and away best-in-class.

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The Vodia Auto Attendant dispatches calls to the right destination without the need for human intervention. Callers can use extension numbers and extension names to find a particular account. There are several ways to redirect incoming calls, based on time of call, and to present different announcements. A selection of pre-recorded announcements makes it easy to announce shortcut numbers, for example, for sales or support departments. Pre-recorded and custom IVR makes sure callers feel welcome and can navigate the system on their own, while internal users can access and use the Auto Attendant when calling from their mobile phones.

Editorial

Many UCaaS providers offer their channel partners full compensation and specialized, subject-matter expert resources while closing deals of any size, one to infinity, plus hands-off upsell services, comprehensive training and certifications, channel manager support and a dedicated partner support line. The issue, however, is you are unable to sell your own brand.

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Normal end point protection is no longer an option, nor are normal firewalls. You might allow only port 443 for https traffic to your website, but are the “nice, new features” on your website a possible threat to your network? How can you be sure you’re secure? What if the email your receptionist received from a friend a worm, thanks to a hacked account? What if that funny video someone gets via WhatsApp or Messenger is actually a threat? How do you block these threats and stop them from slowing your operations or, even worse, bringing them to a grinding halt?

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The answer, according to independent telco ICTGlobe, is maintaining a single-minded focus on generating new business while keeping down costs. “Small resellers of voice and data ICT services need to be cautious of taking on overheads that interfere with their ability to nimbly secure new business,” says Lucien Brink, Executive Head of Products and Services at ICTGlobe.

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Mr. Brink believes cloud-based ICT products and services could offer a solution within the overall current climate of uncertainty. “No-one is suggesting things are as dire as they seemed 20-plus years ago, but if businesses are unsure exactly how things will pan out over the next couple of months, our advice is to invest in the cloud, not in physical equipment,” he says.

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“The South African tech industry is booming, in Cape Town and everywhere else,” says Lucien Brink, Executive Head, Products & Solutions at ICTGlobe, “and we are deploying high-value integrated business solutions to SMMEs nationwide. We give our customers superior up-time, competitive voice rates and outstanding call quality, as we continue to grow our national footprint. Our partnerships have been designed to benefit the SMME market in forms of access portals and Innovative products that expand the growth potential of our channel.”

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The Vodia cloud PBX is the industry standard and a telephone system that works from anywhere – it’s the last tool companies need to work from home. It gives you real-time talk with an imperceptible delay. Our best-in-class PBX integrates with Microsoft Teams out of the box: it’s tailored for remote environments, so your team can use their mobile devices as their office extensions.

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This presentation is narrated by Christian Stredicke. The office phone reinvented For more information about Vodia Networks visit us at https://vodia.com

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If you’re a small or medium-sized enterprise, you want to maximize ROI on all of your costs and expenses, and this includes your telephony; if you’re a reseller, you want to give your SMB customers the best VoIP solution at the best pricing. If you’re a reseller, Vodia is the best-in-class solution for many reasons.

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It’s not just the pandemic: Vodia been preaching #workfromanywhere it for a long time, since our cloud PBX makes it possible, but the pandemic has certainly accelerated it. We’ve seen a lot of companies where at least a few staff members choose to work from home, or need to, and for a long time IT departments were wary of undertaking the necessary migrations to make this possible, but with the pandemic and the shift of entire teams away from the office, it’s become a top priority to make it so an organization’s telephone system can accommodate working from anywhere.

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Learn how the Vodia Multi-Tenant PBX is the #1 one PBX for MSP and ITSP. Full feature PBX for the growing managed provider or a valuable add-on to any Telco solution.

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As part of our new video series, our CEO, Dr. Christian Stredicke, discusses #workfromhome​, #hybridwork​, and #workfromanywhere​, and how the Vodia #cloudPBX​ can bring your organization’s telephone system to the cloud and to your team members, wherever they are.

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If you’re an SME and you’re looking to enable your team to work from anywhere, there are a number of things you’ll need to get started, or to improve whatever systems you already have in place. The first place to start is VoIP telephony.

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The Vodia PBX includes the most complete suite of robust business telephony features for on-premises and cloud-based telephony, including auto attendant, SMS, paging, separation of personal and work calls, conference calls, call recording, desktop, and mobile apps, CRM integration, and Microsoft Teams integration.

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The work from home trend has gained quite a bit of traction over the years. Considering how many companies are going global and employing talent in remote places, it was only a matter of time before this happened. With that said, this trend is not only gaining traction because of necessity, it is also because of the benefits. 2020 is a tech savvy time to be alive, and provided that companies give their employees the proper tools to do it, working from home can prove to be a catalyst for surprisingly high productivity compared to working in the office.

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Remote work, fueled by cloud computing, is changing how we connect beyond traditional offices. Telephones remain vital, demanding solutions beyond basic call forwarding. Emulating extensions, with call control functions, becomes essential for effective remote communication. Options like home IP phones and softphones blur the line between office and remote work. The emphasis is on replicating a seamless phone experience in the era of flexible work arrangements.

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For someone who has struggled with SIP interoperability for the past 15 years that has an earthshaking impact. Instead of arguing about SIP headers, UDP and RFC, WebRTC makes it now possible that the PBX vendor writes the software for the clients. The interoperability is essentially JavaScript which has very little room for interpretations (compared to SIP). That means we can offer all possible features of the PBX in the browser without any interop problems, on practically all platforms that are out there. This will make SIP softphones superfluous.

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We have talked about it before, but reading the article I think it is important to point out some points that were not so clear before. The first one is that some carriers really seem to go after the money, even if they have to go to court. In contrast to the credit card industry, fraud is the responsibility of the customer, not the provider.