Industry news

Small businesses 'benefit most from VoIP'

Investing in VoIP systems can save businesses money and make it easier for them to operate complex phone systems, an industry expert has suggested.

Colin Duffy, chief executive of Voipfone, explained that large firms could reduce their costs by opting for VoIP. He added that they could also create easier to manage communication systems.

He explained: "There are many benefits, but I suppose the big one for really big companies is it's a way of moving all of your technology onto one platform.

"You have to manage one set of technologies. It's all IP traffic, so you no longer have to have a telephone switch in the corner that only a telephone engineer can manage."

However, Mr Duffy stressed that the biggest benefits of VoIP systems were for smaller firms.

He said that VoIP meant that these companies could have access to the "clever services" that had previously only been available to large companies.

These services included multiple telephone extensions, music on hold and call divert.

"They can do all the things that big companies used to be able to but would cost tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve," Mr Duffy concluded.