XO Communications announced
the launch of Enterprise Cloud Communications, a scalable, enterprise-grade IP
communications service designed to allow businesses to accelerate the
deployment of IP and unified communications. The platform integrates a range of
IP telephony features, local and long-distance calling, enterprise-wide
high-definition voice and video, network services and IP phone sets in a
communications as a service, per-user pricing model.
Features of Enterprise Cloud
Communications include IP telephony and unified communications applications,
free local and site-to-site calling within the enterprise, long-distance
calling plans, enterprise-wide HD voice and HD video, choices of IP phone sets
from Cisco and Polycom, a Web portal for managing service for each location and
employees’ Quality of Service monitoring, MPLS IP-VPN network services, Robust
Service Level Agreements for all services and business-continuity capabilities.
“Enterprise Cloud
Communications represents the next evolution of our award-winning IP
communications portfolio, which today supports 30,000 business customers and
more than one million end-users,” said Mike Toplisek, chief marketing officer
for business services at XO. “This solution is ideal for midmarket businesses
and larger enterprises with distributed operations by helping them solve
important business issues of controlling costs, improving employee productivity
and increasing their competitiveness in the market.”
The platform offers
businesses a range of potential cost, operational and performance benefits,
including eliminating capital investments in PBX infrastructure, freeing up IT
resources and capital, the ability to deploy new productivity-enhancing
collaboration and communications technologies and managing the upgrades and
maintenance costs typically associated with handling IP communications.
“Today, businesses with
multiple locations of varying sizes typically have a wide range of different
telephony infrastructures that not only inhibit efficient and seamless communications,
but also the integration of telephony infrastructures with applications that
enable unified communications,” said Tom Hobika, vice president of solutions
engineering at XO. “Our innovative, cloud-based enterprise IP communications
platform will help businesses contain and reduce capital expenditures at a time
when budgets are tight, while giving them the ability to introduce new
productivity-enhancing communications capabilities that future-proof their
networks and corresponding investments.”
Other benefits include
providing business-grade HD call quality across the enterprise-wide area
network, delivering IP-PBX functionality using the XO nationwide network,
technology from BroadSoft and IP phones from Cisco and Polycom for a unified
solution of HD voice and video and IP telephony applications through the cloud,
and managing the service through a Web portal to handle day-to-day
administrative tasks, such as reconfiguring users’ phones, setting up phones
for new employees and managing name and number displays.
Elka Popova, program
director of unified communications and collaboration at research firm Frost
& Sullivan, said cloud-based communications are rapidly gaining traction as
businesses look to adopt IP telephony and unified communications in a flexible
and cost-effective way.
“With a long track record of
delivering business VOIP [voice over IP] services, XO is now expanding its
portfolio to include a feature-rich, hosted IP PBX solution that enables
customers to fully outsource their communications infrastructure from a trusted
partner, Popova said. “The Enterprise Cloud Communications solution can help
distributed organizations save costs through a common architecture and enhance
employee productivity through advanced communications and collaboration
applications delivered across geographically dispersed locations.”
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