March 10, 2009

It’s a global world. Being able to connect in real time with any device and across any network is essential to being in touch with today’s world.

With a Polycom VoIP phone system, barriers are leveled. You can communicate through any system, from a phone to a laptop to a telecommunications broadcaster, anywhere in the world, as clearly as if they were sitting across from you. It’s truly communication without limits.

Whether you seek a telepresence, video or voice solutions, innovative technology makes it all possible. It makes it possible for the entire world to be virtually sitting across from you in the same conference room. Distances become minute. You can create a video and phone conference call between an unlimited number of individuals and communicate as if distance was only as far as the nearest connection.

Plus, you can have the world in your meeting room and hardly pay any long distance at all. With a Polycom VoIP phone, the entire system is on-line. Communication is as simple and inexpensive as email. Providing the party you need to reach has a VoIP phone, the call or video conference is completely free. Even if the other line has a traditional phone system, the charges are minor- as low as 2 cents a minute, and that’s only when your monthly allotted minutes are used up.

Small businesses are finding themselves in a difficult predicament as the world becomes more global, yet the economic climate becomes more severe. It’s getting harder and harder to turn a profit with increasing costs and declining sales, but in this new climate, staying global is more important than ever. The good news is that with a VoIP system, you get the global access your business demands at an affordable rate, sometimes even cheaper than you’d pay for traditional phone service. It allows you to connect instantly around the world without the added costs of long distance or hefty international charges.

If you are going to compete in this global world, you need to be able to cut your costs while expanding your technological presence. VoIP technology does both. It’s extremely affordable and makes communicating around the world as accessible as being in the same room. Truly, technology brings us a world without boarders where communication has no limits.

February 22, 2009

As the owner of a 300-employee business in Santa Monica, finding a local partner to develop my business’s network was important because I knew that a Southern California-based ISP would provide me with the best service at competitive prices. I needed to find someone who could provide me first with Los Angeles colocation for our servers, to ensure that we had backup and support for our network if it were to ever crash. As a business that generates a good deal of revenues from online traffic, it’s important that we keep our site operational at all times, and the collocated host option is one that has benefited us in a few ways, which I’ll mention in a second. We also looked for a company that would bundle our colocation with a Los Angeles Wimax solution, which we learned would be far less expensive than and as reliable as a fixed-line system like DSL, cable, or fiber-optic as far as a last-mile connection is concerned.

Our partner in the project was able to provide both of these services at an outstanding value, and with the assurance of service and quality that comes with working a  small business that has its reputation at stake in the small community. The company’s Los Angeles colocation center is by far the most sophisticated I’ve seen, and I toured them all personally when deciding where our services should be kept. A smaller client list makes it easy for the network operators to allocate bandwidth as is necessary to deal with peaks and valleys in network capacity usage, and an extremely impressive streamlined network architecture makes the website and our access to our own back-end data much faster, more reliable, and more stable than it has ever been.  Network operators monitor things 24 hours a day and can identify potential problems before they bring the storefront down.

The Los Angeles Wimax solution I received was also second-to-none. While Wireless last-mile technology in an urban environment may be counterintuitive, the convenience and low cost literally made it impossible not to buy laptops for any employees who wanted them – a promise that I know is likely to pay off by making them more productive at their work.

Bottom line: when planning your network infrastructure and IT solutions, talk to a local partner who deals with lots of small businesses like yours and won’t implement a cookie-cutter corporate solution. Doing so for my business saved us a bundle and gave me the confidence that our network and infrastructure is safe with a partner who has my best interests at heart.