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Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
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We’ve regularly compared phone systems - Talkswitch vs Allworx, Talkswitch vs Response Point, etc. For your average small business I really like the Talkswitch system due to its feature set, ease of management, excellent support policies, and very affordable entry points.
But for a different class of buyer - those looking for top end functionality the Allworx truly excels. Here’s a few situations:
Site-to-Site Calling
Allworx can link up to 100 sites together and allow for 3 or 4 digit dialing between extensions in any location. Not only does this mean free calls between offices that could ordinarily be long distance, but a call coming into your Seattle office can be transferred to a staff member in the Portland office just as though you were in the same office.
For comparison, Talkswitch can do site to site calling but is fairly limited on calls directly to an extension in a remote office. Response Point doesn’t even support site to site calls.
Telecommuters
With high gas prices, more companies are looking to offer the option to telecommute some days of the week. Allworx blows the competition out of the water here, literally everyone can take their phone home and it works just as in the office - the biggest practical limitation is getting sufficient affordable bandwidth in cases of heavy use.
While Talkswitch also does a great job supporting telecommuters at a small scale, each system is limited to 8 simultaneous VoIP sessions, though up to 4 systems may be linked to grow that. Response point still lacks external IP phone support.
Computer Telephone Integration
Also known as CTI, this refers to a variety of features like software based attendant consoles, voicemail to email, click to dial and other TAPI integration. Allworx does all of these features while the competition only does one or two of these.
Presence Management
This isn’t a feature every business will use, but is quite nice in the right situation. Most phone systems have two modes for extensions - available and do not disturb, both go to the same voicemail greeting. With presence management you can set a variety of options like available, out of the office, on vacation, in meeting, etc. Each can have different call handling options and different voicemail greetings. Users can customize their own settings online and switch modes with just a button press on their phone.
Conference Center
Allworx is one of the few small business phone systems that can act as a conference bridge for up to 8 attendees. Obviously there are external conference services as well which are worth consideration, the best value depends on calling patterns. Evaluating the two options comes down simply to cost and scale - you have to consider the monthly fees and per minute fees of a conference service along with the line capacity for your staff to call out vs. the one time licensing of your own conference bridge along with the line capacity for those calling in.
T1/PRI Support
Though SIP trunking is the future and Allworx does it very well, T1/PRI is still in use by many companies and some aren’t willing to take the leap to VoIP. In fact a CRN survey found about 80% of SMBs have no plans to switch to VoIP - meaning for certain functionality T1/PRI will be the right solution. The Allworx 24x is probably the most future-proof small business phone system we’ve seen on the market as it has full support for PSTN lines, T1/PRI trunks, and SIP trunks. Talkswitch and Response Point don’t do T1/PRI trunks - few small business phone systems do. Beyond that on the matter of future proofing, the Allworx 24x supports up to 150 extensions, while Talkswitch tops out at 64 and Response Point at 50.
What really is a surprise is price. Allworx is a bit more expensive than systems like Talkswitch and Response Point, but understandably so given what it can do. When we’ve bid against comparable systems from Cisco, Shoretel, and Mitel the Allworx systems are often 30-50% less. Given that Allworx is a mature and well respected product in the industry, its an easy decision to save thousands by going with Allworx.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
