Staffing

Planning a new hosted system generally requires less customer resources than planning a CPE system implementation:
Financial/business planners do not need to negotiate lease arrangements or develop business cases to receive scarce capital resources and set up accounts for depreciation. Maintenance contract negotiation is also eliminated, although some of this may be replaced with negotiations to set SLAs. There is less likely to be a need to develop and manage detailed RFPs to compare multiple systems offers (both functionally and financially) and to compare and negotiate installation charges.  Since call accounting functionality is included in all hosted services, there is also no need to upgrade or procure new call accounting systems. 
 
·          Telecom managers and technical and network planners do not need to manage station reviews, participate in detailed network (WAN) planning, develop processes for self management of the network and train administrators on the details of system support. For example, technicians’ IP-telephony certification can easily cost $10,000.  
·          Project management is reduced, as the hosted provider does virtually all this work and does not need as much customer interface when equipment is not being installed on site. In multisite installations, project management is not needed to ensure all locations are being configured identically. 
·          Security/continuity specialists do not need to spend as much time planning for security control of the PBX functions and continuity processes.  Ongoing management and technical resources are reduced as well in a hosted environment: 
·          Telephony inventory management is basically reduced to terminal management. (LAN equipment including UPS supplies would be the same in either environment). There is no need to track ports in use in order to minimize maintenance charges.  
·          Change control only requires an office manager to forward and check on requests to the hosted service provider.  
·          Ongoing network management, review of traffic studies and identification of need for additional bandwidth, etc. is minimal, as the hosted service provides bandwidth based on demand. 
·          Basic maintenance including checking alarms and first investigation of troubles is totally eliminated.  The need for customer technical resources to interface with providers to handle remote and on-site maintenance issues is greatly reduced.  
·          Downloading, testing and installing software patches are also eliminated. InfoTech research indicates that the minimum resource needed for patch management of Windows servers averages 1 hour of technician time per server per week. If testing is required, this could expand considerably.  
·          Management of application servers such as E-911, conferencing/collaboration, music on hold, messaging, find-me/follow-me, etc. is eliminated. 
·          Management of software upgrades and changes in technology (e.g., upgrades to faster servers or higher-density interface cards) is eliminated. 
·          On-site preventative maintenance functions such as battery, voltage and fan checks, vacuuming filters and cleaning/testing tape drives, adding new area codes to the dialing plan, etc., are reduced or totally eliminated. 
·          Financial management is reduced as there is no capital expense to depreciate and there is no need to develop annual budgets for maintenance. 
·          Business cases and associated internal proposals for software upgrades are eliminated.  
·          Security management of firewalls, security policy development and investigations are minimized or at least reduced. 
·          Continuity processes such as configuration backups and restorations are eliminated.