In these difficult economic times, companies begin to look inward at the services they use in order to trim costs.  For a small company, it is amazing how the $100/mth and $1,000/mth services slowly creep and add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year.  Companies evaluate each of the services individually to determine whether they are “nice to haves” or “need to haves”.  From a technology standpoint we look at the number of WebEx and eFax accounts that we have.  Does everyone really need one of their own or can we share them to cut costs?  Do we have any extra Verizon wireless cards around that are not being used?  Cancelling some of the services involves cancellation fees, but these can sometimes be less than paying out the term of the contract. 

For the services that are “need to haves”, companies can evaluate other vendors that may offer better prices and features.  A second option may be to internalize the service.  Bring the service in-house to cut out or decrease the monthly fees for the service.  A good example of this is phone conferencing.  We have all used them.  They can be quite expensive as the host of the calls is picking up all of the minutes which typically exceed standard long distance rates when dealing with high quality systems.  We currently have a combined desktop presentation and phone conferencing solution with WebEx where we pay for a number of WebEx seats and a number of prepaid minutes of conferencing on a monthly basis.  The solution works well for us, but there are many features of the service that we just don’t need.

We looked into bringing the phone conferencing solution in-house a year or two ago, but found that it would be too expensive to buy the appliance, upgrade our phone system and bring in the number of phone lines that we could potentially  need for all the conference call that could be active at once.  At that time, we found a new vendor for a cheaper per minute rate and stayed with an outsourced solution.  We have now found a way to bring the service in-house to realize the cost savings by using Asterisk, an open-source VOIP server.  Asterisk is open source software installed on a *nix computer that can function as a full fledged phone system.  There is no licensing fees or special hardware required.  All you need is a desktop machine. We are just using the conferencing functionality of it.  We use a SIP/IAX provider, essentially an internet based Verizon phone line provider, to get our phone numbers and phone service for the system.  The system runs completely over the internet.  Our new pay-as-you go rate is 1.2 cents per minute for inbound calls which is far less than the 7 cents we were paying for before.

We have had great success with our new solution.  Over the next month we will move the Asterisk server out to our Qwest datacenter where we have access to additional more bandwidth then our corporate office so call capacity and quality will become even greater.

So let’s look at the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Decreased monthly cost
• Full control of phone conferencing including number of rooms, hold music and complete room functionality
• Set it and forget it system

 Cons:

• Increase burden on IT staff to manage system. Requires knowledge of *nix and Asterisk
• VOIP technology can be temperamental sometimes
• May require an increase in bandwidth at your site to support multiple conf calls at a time

We are also replacing our WebEx desktop sharing with Microsoft SharedView.  This is a great desktop sharing and desktop control product that is free from Microsoft.  This client allows us to have up to 15 participants with no server required.  No issues with it so far.  We will be able to cut our WebEx monthly bill by 90%.  We will still keep a WebEx account active for larger webinar events that they are better suited for.

When companies perform their internal audit, they should ask themselves whether they have to have the service and, if so, can you do it reliably in-house.  These economic times are great for forcing an evaluation of the services that are used to determine if they are needed or not.  Take advantage of this.  Don’t just look at it as gloomy time.  Get excited about it.  You are about to make money by saving money.

Bookmark: