Growth Management

Managing growth in a hosted environment is easier than with a premises system. There is no need to track line cards and trunk cards and maintain cushion capacity.
Nor is there a need to manage gateway scalability and upgrades if capacity is exceeded. Traffic analysis in a hosted environment is performed by the service provider’s operational support systems (OSS), and there is no need to worry about switch and trunk capacity, performance and configuration.
From a financial standpoint, the hosted service’s pay-as-you-go approach provides savings
Ken Dolsky, a director of professional services at Info Tech, has 30 years of experience across a
wide range of disciplines in the industry. Warren Williams is vice president and senior program director, services at Info Tech. He also has more than 30 years’ experience in the industry.
Hosted solutions have 24x7 management and monitoring. In order to receive similar 24x7 support
for a CPE system (which may still mean a 2–4-hour wait for a tech to arrive on premises) customers usually have to pay an uplift charge and, in some cases, an additional fee for remote monitoring and management. Less critical issues, such as alarms, are cleared so quickly by hosted providers that they are often not even noticeable and customers do not
have to spend time and resources investigating. Another key maintenance benefit from hosted
solutions is that the provider is responsible for dealing with network/ CPE interface finger pointing
problems, and customers do not need to purchase agency support services to handle these
issues. By eliminating some servers and associated uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, hosted customers also reduce their need for such maintenance support functions as testing/monitoring UPSs and replacing batteries.
From a financial standpoint, hosted maintenance charges are included in the per-seat charge and are only applied against the actual number of seats in use. Many CPE provider maintenance contracts are based on available or equipped ports, which mean any port that can be connected to either a terminal or a trunk, even if they are not currently in use. Since hosted customers only pay maintenance for ports being used, there is less need to keep track of ports incurring maintenance charges in order to remove unused ports from the inventory.
Network Management And Administration In a hosted environment, customers who bundle WAN management services with hosted telephony do not need to proactively manage WAN quality of service (QOS). This reduces the amount of resource, training and test systems needed (e.g., equipping laptops with sniffer cards) in a CPE environment.
Hosted solutions save money if your user population declines in certain charges and internal resources. Hosted terminal licenses are sold on a line-by-line basis (bundled into the per seat charge) rather than in bundles of 5 or 10, as is the case with some CPE provider terminals. Inventory tracking and management overall is less extensive in a hosted environment.  There is no need to track elements at the host site such as cards, servers, gateways, power supplies, UPS systems, etc.
Another important advantage of hosted services is that their costs can decrease if the user population declines. With a premises system, there may be opportunities to decrease maintenance costs by reducing active ports, but the opportunity to sell excess equipment is limited, and original purchase expenses might not be fully recovered by the enterprise.

Maintenance

When critical CPE problems occur that cannot be cleared remotely, CPE customers have to wait for a truck roll and could easily have a total time to repair of 4+ hours (many maintenance plans’ objective is to arrive on premises within 4 hours to start the repair process). The repair on the hosted system with similar trouble may be completed almost immediately because techs are on site at the provider location.
In any network, most configuration problems are due to human error. Allowing hosted providers with well-defined change management processes to handle this function should produce fewer problems than those typical of a CPE environment.  Premises systems enable self-supporting customers to move faster on moves, adds and changes for high-priority situations. But hosted service providers do offer SLAs that can be customized to address very high-priority situations. This is one area in which CPE control is an advantage, especially if this type of situation occurs regularly.

Mixed IP And TDM Environment

Hosted services provide immediate centralization of voice applications for all locations and lines deployed at any site, regardless of whether a main site is converted to IP or not. More work is required (e.g., planning, design, installation and ongoing management) to interface a mix of IP and TDM systems in a CPE-based environment than in a hosted environment. In a hosted environment, carriers handle all the architectural issues such as IP/TDM interfaces and softswitch functionality.  Customers can deploy IP-telephony by work function across multiple locations, without having to disrupt other corporate functions (although this would require some additional integration with the TDM environment with regard to dialing plans and voice mail and/or unified messaging).  Hosted services generally offer customers more terminal choices than do CPE solutions.  Independent vendors like BroadSoft, Tekelec and Sylantro provide multiple IP terminals, giving customers a wider range of choices than offered by individual CPE providers. For example, Broadsoft offers terminals from Polycom, Cisco, Zhone, Uniden and ipDialog. Customers can also use Citel gateways to support many TDM terminals, allowing retention of existing equipment. However, CPE providers such as Avaya do enable customers to retain existing TDM terminals.