Today, if one wants to scale from 20 telephone lines to 20,000 lines, it can be effectuated in a matter of minutes through the miracle of cloud telephony. Today, cloud telephony is also addressing as hosted telephony. The hardware can be the host from anywhere, but the services can be provided wherever required. In the past, the companies had to invest crores in buying EPABX hardware if they had to scale their telecom system. Not only that, but the telephone lines also had to be configured and extension provisioned.
In traditional voice architecture, the ‘brains’ of the system are in the building. It is a closed system, which connects to the outside world through dedicated, voice-only lines. In a cloud-based voice architecture, the ‘brains” of the system are in the cloud. The arrangement provides flexibility to even the smallest customers. The phone communicates with the system via an internet connection. It is the most common internet-based phone system.
Reasons for Spurring Growth in Cloud Telephony in India
So, why is cloud telephony taking off!
There are multiple benefits to cloud telephony. There is a need to add physical hardware at the user’s end. It is a pay-as-you-go model and reliable as redundancy in build in, and it provides analytics and actionable intelligence. It can be rolled out extremely fast.
Apart from cost savings issues, cloud telephony players state that the biggest attraction to customers is the analytics and actionable intelligence they can provide. Tracking, reporting, recording, and analysis provide several insights helpful for cloud telephony users to attract and retain customers.
Apart from this, cloud telephony is not limited to providing IVRS solutions (Interactive Voice Response Solution). For instance, suppose one book a cab, and he/she may not want the driver to know his/her actual number. So, cloud telephony conceals his/her number when Ola and Uber direct his/her calls to a driver. When the driver calls him/her through a call center, he does not have the particular number-the data is secure with Ola and Uber.
Apart from the number masking, call directing, recording functions, cloud telephony can now provide fax, bulk SMS and voice messages, call forwarding, conferencing, and various other facilities. Not only just start-ups and SMBs (Small and Medium businesses) have been the most aggressive adopters of cloud telephony; the large enterprises that carry the legacy investment in equipment are adopting cloud telephony.
Cloud Telephony Market Size and Competition
While there are no independent estimates for the size of the addressable market, industry players point out that the domestic BPM (Business Process Management) market alone is worth anywhere between 6–7 billion. Cloud Telephony players compete with CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) sellers such as helpdesk service providers like Freshdesk, Zendesk, or Zoho.
Today, the cloud telephony players have come together, and they are working with TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) and the Department of Telecom to ensure transparency in regulation. The start-ups are encouraged to provide value-added service.
Cloud telephony is in India to stay, and it will get more traction both with SMBs and large enterprises.
5 Cloud Telephony Trends In 2021 