Parallels, more famous in web hosting world for its “Plesk” web control panel, has launched hosted PBX services too on 23rd Feb 2011, as per press there press release. They will provide Hosted PBX solutions, as well as support for Microsoft Office 365 Syndication and Hyper-V Cloud. It is also increasing its investment in facilitating APS-enabled solutions to accelerate ISV’s ability to also profit from the cloud.

Parallels announces Hosted PBX

According to ‘Parallels SMB Cloud Insights’ (U.S. 2010); small and medium business (SMB) cloud consumption has hit the mass adoption curve with the cloud services market valued at $10.6 billion in 2010. This market opportunity will increase to $28.6 billion and small businesses with fewer than 100 employees are the foundation of this market. They account for over 80% of the total market spending and over 95% of all U.S. SMBs.

“SMBs cloud consumption has hit the wide adoption curve and driving a sea change in the cloud industry,” said Birger Steen, CEO of Parallels. “They are demanding a trusted, full service provider to deliver the integrated and complete portfolio of IT services they need. Today, there aren’t many that can provide the full service offering or keep up with the increasing expectations from their customers. Partnering is the only way service providers will meet the growing needs of SMB and stay competitive.”

Service providers need to adjust to remain competitive in the industry as SMBs are asking their traditional IT providers for cloud services, driving new, well-funded, entrants into the market. The service provider must offer a full set of integrated services to grow profit and reduce churn. With the right partners they can do that and can continue to drive efficiency accelerating growth through reinvestment.

For complete press release.

Here is a very good article about choosing on premise or hosted PBX for your business written by Bryan Johns
Digium Community Director :-

In advance of a planned panel discussion on this topic at IT Expo in Miami next month, I decided to take a moment to formalize my thoughts on the merits of both the hosted and premises PBX deployment models. At risk of coming off as indecisive, I am going to go ahead and say that there are arguments both for and against hosted and premises solutions that depend heavily upon customer size, needs, network infrastructure, planned use and growth forecasts. Generally, the way in which these variables come together supplies the best determination as to which deployment model makes the most sense and why. Let’s take a minute to look at that assumption in more detail. Full Article Here.

Startup Introduces Free Business Class PBX Systems for SMBs

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 28 — InVox, a leading provider of business telephony solutions, today announced the launch of its free hosted business phone system service PBXPlus, for startups and SMBs. InVox’s mission is to provide feature-rich business telephone systems and enable productive business telephony using the latest speech technologies with this release of their latest product.

With PBXPlus, setting up a phone system is quick and easy using the patent pending drag-and-drop visual designer which eliminates the need for the user to know technical details of phone systems. PBXPlus is cloud-based, which allows users to access and change the phone system settings from any computer with Internet connection.

“Most SMBs need a simple and powerful phone system in few clicks with no additional learning curve,” says Manohar Chapalamadugu, CEO of InVox. “Voice applications involving speech recognition are traditionally reserved for organizations with large budgets. PBXPlus now offers several value added voice solutions and out-of-the-box integrations with popular third party services to increase caller satisfaction and employee productivity.”

Just like Google Voice for consumers, PBXPlus is offering numbers in the US and UK for businesses bundled with advanced business class features for free. Businesses can now get a free number with unlimited extensions, unlimited inbound calls, unlimited call forwarding, voicemail, transcription, and speech recognition. InVox also has a wide range of more than 50 voice applications which can help businesses increase sales, boost employee productivity and enhance seamless communication.

Besides taking advantage of free PBX features, business owners can now add more power to their phone systems by adding voice applications and featured 3rd party integrations for a fraction of the industry standard. The ready-made voice applications include integrations with Salesforce, Google Talk, Skype, MSN Live, Google Calendar, Zoho, Sugar, Intuit and most payment gateways.

About InVox

InVox is an international company that provides ready-to-use voice systems for businesses. Their goal is to empower businesses to design and manage their speech applications. InVox easily integrates with widely used business applications and services such as Salesforce, Intuit, Skype and Google Calendar. With headquarters in Silicon Valley and development in India, we work around the clock to service our global customers. Visit us on the Web at http://www.InVox.com.

SOURCE InVox

Recent trends about PBX shows that, people are moving towards hosted PBX systems. But, self hosted PBX systems still widely used, specially in India. But with increasing demands by customers about many value added features like IVR, Voicemail, UMS ( Unified Messaging System), has been forcing many PABX manufacturer to move towards IP PBX as well as hosted PBX.

Recently, I had a chat with Mr. Susant Pujari, MD of Benzfab Technologies (Private) Ltd., who has opined that, it may not be long when simple and plain EPABX systems would be used only in exclusive domains like Indian Public Sector undertakings, Defence Forces or any other large organizations requiring exclusive local communications. And every other users of PBX might opt for Hosted PBX.

Though he informed, it is not happening in India n near future, mainly due to ignorance of hosted PBX by majority of customers which happen to government organizations. Many large private organisations have so far opted for virtual PBX connecting multiple locations.

According to him, mobile service providers as well as basic telecom service providers are aggressively marketing this king of VPN ( Virtual Private Network), a kind of Hosted PBX and already eating into plain old PBX market.

Mr. Susant Pujari is based in Bhubaneswar and sells PBX systems, turnkey telecom solutions, IVR, Call Center to Indian Railways, BSNL, PSU, ISPs etc.