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Ringing in the New Year on a positive note, 8x8 (News - Alert) Inc. today announced that more than 10,000 U.S.-based small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) are now subscribing to its Packet8 Virtual Office hosted VoIP service.

This simple-to-deploy, readily expandable hosted PBX solution offers a slew of features found in much more expensive on-premise phone systems, such as auto attendant, worldwide extension dialing, business class voicemail, a full featured conference bridge and ring groups, in addition to other business class PBX and dial tone features. The service is ideal for SMBs seeking a fast and reliable way to make the jump to IP communications.

Going with a hosted telephony solution affords many advantages to smaller sized businesses. For one thing, there is very little up front cost, because there’s no need to purchase any on-premise equipment and have someone install it, plus there are no whopping one-time licensing fees for software. All a business really needs is a high speed line, the computers and the phones.

There is also much lower operating cost, as the system is maintained by 8x8, instead of the staff in your IT department. Plus with its convenient “pay-as-you-go” pricing model, your telephony costs now take the form of a recurring line item in your monthly operating budget – so there are no “surprises” when equipment breaks or things go wrong. Perhaps best of all is the fact that you only pay for the amount of service you use – just like any other utility.

Yet another huge advantage of this hosted PBX solution is the fact that it is so highly scalable: you can add lines whenever they are needed, plus, if your business grows to include multiple locations, the system can be readily expanded in such a way that all locations are treated as a whole (with extension dialing and call transfer between all end points). Through its simple to use Web interface, the system can be managed centrally, plus you get flexible reporting on all telephony activity – who is calling who, and when, and where – all broken down in the “views” that managers and supervisors desire. With this flexible solution, businesses manage their communications usage and hence lower communications costs in ways that are not possible with traditional phone systems.

In a press release, 8x8 Vice President of Sales and Marketing Huw Rees (News - Alert) said the company is “very pleased to have reached this new milestone with our Packet8 Virtual Office service, which remains the most popular hosted iPBX phone system in the country."

“In addition to the 'micro business' customer we have been serving all along, we are now seeing escalating interest from larger SMBs and corporations that operate from multiple locations who need a cost effective way to connect dispersed employees under the same phone system,” he said. “Since the Packet8 Virtual Office service works over any high speed Internet service and does not require expensive, on-site PBX equipment, these businesses can realize tremendous cost savings and performance advantages with our broadband agnostic hosted iPBX solution."

8x8 was a busy company in 2007. In November it introduced its Packet8 MobileTalk international calling service, a new mobile VoIP services which is available for users of mobile smartphones running the Windows, Palm or Symbian (News - Alert) operating systems. The service is also available for users of the ever popular Blackberry devices. The service lets users dial VoIP calls natively from their mobile phones – in other words, there is no need to use a calling card or call back service, nor is there a need to dial from a WiFi access point or to place calls over the data portion of a wireless carrier’s network (resulting in expensive monthly data usage fees). All a user has to do is download a software client from the Packet8 website, or of they do not have a data plan, they can download the app from their PC (which can be sent via email). About three weeks after the launch the company announced that the service now works on more than 450 mobile phones.

In December, 8x8 announced that MobileMax (News - Alert), a leading provider of mobility and unified communications technologies, would be reselling MobileTalk.

For more information, visit www.8x8.com.

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and Associate Editor for Customer Interaction Solutions magazine. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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Today’s featured White Paper (News - Alert) is titled VoIP Doesn’t Require Any Phone Equipment Investment, brought to you by Accessline.