• Technology expertise at predictable, affordable monthly rates
• 24-hour management of network services
• The ability to manage rapid business growth while keeping a small staff
• Freedom to focus on core competencies
• Enhanced productivity
• Reduced network and communications costs
• Rapid access to new technologies without needing in-house expertise
• Increased agility to respond to business conditions

More and more SMBs are realizing these benefits.

Find out what others are saying about Managed Services! Click here

In 2005, 11% of U.S. small businesses and 6% of U.S. mid-market enterprises outsourced their entire IT infrastructure to a managed service provider, up from 3% and 4% respectively in 2004, according to Yankee Group Research.

Widening Service Selections
More providers are competing to reach SMBs with a wider variety of services, notes Sanjeev Aggarwal, senior analyst at Yankee Group." These services have become more affordable for SMBs," he says.

Case Study Sterling Bancorp
Leveraging Open Source SIP to Deliver Cost Effective VoIP Caseworks
Sterling National Bank offers a full range of banking and financial services products, combined with a unique high-touch approach to service. So when Eliot Robinson, Sterling’s CIO wanted a more cost effective alternative to its legacy Western Electric PBX and Centrex solutions to communicate between branch offices, the back office operations center and the disaster recover office, they needed something they could rely on.

“The industry has standardized on SIP for IP communications so we knew we needed a standards-based SIP solution if we were to achieve our goals,” said Robinson. “We looked at a variety of systems and Pingtel’s SIP based solution was the obvious choice as the linchpin of our new system as it provided the most options for end points given its native SIP architecture and interoperability focus.”

The other main driver was economics as Sterling recognized a significant and rapid return on their capital investment using the Pingtel solution. Robinson estimates that including service provider access charges, Sterling will be able to lower their average monthly costs for telephony services by two-thirds once it replaces all the legacy phones.

Sterling uses Cisco SIP phones, connected to an IBM server (with Red Hat Linux) running Pingtel’s SIPxchange PBX, and a Cisco media gateway to connect to the PSTN. Sterling expects to expand its production environment to 700 seats quickly as the economics clearly favor this approach. “One huge advantage to the Pingtel solution is that it is compatible with a variety of phones – Polycom, Cisco, GrandStream, and more, so Sterling has the ability to use whatever SIP phone that meets SIP standards and has been approved by Pingtel to work with Pingtel’s SIPxchange."

Once Sterling has the system fully implemented, Robinson likes the fact that their options in terms of end points goes up dramatically. In tests done to date, he’s found consistent voice quality no matter the end point. In the future, Sterling plans to integrate the system with more of its computer systems. For example, if a customer went to Sterling’s website, they could use the system to set up a voice chat (IP call) to answer questions directly from their computer.

An open source business model means Sterling does not have to worry about whether a particular software vendor is going to be around to service the source code. For Robinson, it’s kind of an insurance policy. “Pingtel is important because they supply support, configuration tools and training. We want to have the flexibility to add phones as we see fit and we don’t have to worry about the licensing every time we add another phone as we do with other business models,” he added.

Given Sterling’s business, the bank had specific needs outside a typical configuration so having a partner that could provide the requisite professional services was critical to Robinson and his team at Sterling. “We asked Pingtel to provide guidance in how to set up a back up server in case we had a hardware failure and the professional services team more than exceeded our expectations,” said Robinson. Pingtel’s professional services team also helped Sterling set up a sophisticated ACD-like functionality for some of the bank’s help desks.

According to Robinson, Pingtel combined the three things Sterling needed to move forward with this type of solution: a low-risk, easy-to-use SIP-based system, a fundamentally better economic model for Sterling’s telephony needs and a technically savvy professional services team that helped tailor the application to meet its specific needs.

Reprinted from IQ Magazine © Cisco Systems, Inc. and Pingtel Corp.