After years of supporting their operations with an on-prem telephony system, phoenixNAP’s management team decided several years ago that the company’s growth and expanding geographic footprint warranted a more modern, cloud phone solution.
But Danny Fuentes, phoenixNAP’s Vice President of Information Systems, explains that the company’s experience with a previous cloud phone platform created more challenges than it solved.
“For a while, our first cloud telephony platform worked well. But then we started seeing problems. The admin system was very complicated, and the vendor’s suggestion was that we get someone on our staff certified to manage it. That was going to consume a lot of time and resources. Also, the system had a lot of reliability issues—for example, the video conference app crashed regularly—and we always had trouble getting support on the phone.”
Another drawback of the system, Danny adds, was its high, unpredictable cost. “The vendor took an ad hoc approach to their licensing, so we had to decide in advance what to purchase for every user. Sometimes we overpaid for services employees didn’t need; other times we found an employee needed more than we’d bought, so we had to upgrade those licenses. It got very expensive and became essentially impossible to plan for our telephony budget.”
