VoIP Supply: 5 Phone Systems Under $5K

Garrett Smith at VoIP Supply’s VoIP Insider blog has an good post today detailing Five 10 Seat VoIP Phone Systems Under $5,000. It’s interesting to survey the capabilities of low-cost systems.

In the realm of small business telephony $5K is pretty affordable, but even so it’s considerably more costly than the super-lower-end system that I outlined just days ago. The options that Garrett Smith details are definitely more capable systems, with room to grow when necessary. There’s an inflection below which some solutions are only adequate for home offices, not sufficiently future-proof for small business installations.

If I were a consultant operating in the VoIP for SMB space I’d be thinking as much about innovative advantages offered as  cost savings. Consider retail and warehouse operations and cordless mobility solutions. Look at a mobile sales force and find a way to provide tight integration of cellular calling. If you have a cellular gateway how about leveraging SMS to drive info to the phone screens? There are so many ways to take it up a notch. All you need is a little imagination.

As products like Jazinga make the basic installation of an IP-PBX dead easy for average people the VAR world needs to get things in gear and provide added value. Communications enable common business processes, from remote control of the facility access to inventory level alerts.

VoIP is about more than just cutting cost. It’s about doing entirely new things, and doing the old things better.