I was at a Seminar the other day, with the big names and you know what, they say the PBX is pretty much dead, but only in the traditional sense of a black box, only doing voice.
The industry trend is now to provide a full UC platform running on a generic x64 bit of tin, when you see it working, it makes sense.
You plug a bluetooth headset into your smart phone, it changes your status to "ring my mobile (if you set that profile), no more pratting around with forwards. You calendar has you in a meeting, you're calls can get routed to VM. You are in a 3 ways call, but you need to share a document, you drag and drop and a IM / whiteboard session opens, maybe chnage to a video call if needed, no readialling, no dropped session.
For me, I just need a phone and a laptop, but if I'm working from home, I don't want mess around setting up VPN's and forwards, just get the bloody call to me.
However, these can be done on premise or in the cloud.
They will still do a black box solution, but it's a shrinking market.
So is the PBX dead, no not yet, but it's moving on.
I worked on a pair of Vertical 500's with SIP trunks the other day. Complaint? Static. Yeah, so is it on every call?
Not sure if being sarcastic, but if getting "static" on a digital line, you have some SERIOUS issues, especially if it's fibre!
Robert Wilensky:
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.