Cloud computing slashes cost of business telephones
Firms can now significantly reduce capital expenditure and realise up to 25 per cent bottom-line savings on their cash flow.
Digicel Business, the arm of the telecommunication provider which specialises in corporate solutions, said this became a reality with the launch of its Cloud Telephony on Friday.
Cloud telephony is the latest addition to Digicel’s suite of Cloud Services being rolled out from the telecom’s $600 million data centre in Caymanas, St Catherine. It is a subscription-based technology that is hosted remotely from a central shared system and accessed over a private network. The service uses Voice-over IP (VoIP) technology to deliver voice and unified communications services to users. It is being touted as secure, resilient and reliable, offering businesses the latest communication and collaboration tools to drive competitive advantage and improve operational efficiency.
“Cloud telephony is essentially a hosted-PBX service which allows Jamaican businesses and public sector organisations to refresh their communications infrastructure without having to spend money up front,” said Tom O’Neill, business development manager ICT solutions at Digicel Business, speaking during a media tour of the data centre on Friday.
“You get a brand new PBX system delivered over Digicel’s network on a simple pay-to-use model on a monthly basis like a utility,” added O’Neill.
O’Neill said the subscription prices range from US$20 to US$36 a month and noted that some 16 existing corporate customers have already signed on for the service.
What’s more is how relevant such a service can be for start-up businesses in Jamaica, where lack of access to capital is often seen as endemic. With Cloud Telephony, companies are now able to significantly reduce the huge money outlays that were once necessary when installing a traditional phone system.
“It simply means that they don’t have to go out and spend a lot of money to buy the capital infrastructure neccessary to start a business on the IT systems that they need,” said Digicel Business data centre specialist Robert Flynn. “Where you get the advantage of Digicel is that we allow you to effectively rent the technology from us and you pay on a limited basis for it every month, thereby allowing you to focus your cash reserves on other strategic initiatives.”
Digicel is investing heavily in the development of Cloud Services in Jamaica and the fundamental foundation block for this technology is the requirement to host these platforms in a certified data centre. The Digicel Data Centre is the only Tier III certified facility in the Caribbean and is currently supporting the critical IT infrastructure of businesses and Government entities with services such as managed hosting, cloud backup and colocation. The three-storey facility has some 8,000 square feet of space available to businesses in Jamaica and across the region.
Explaining what the Tier III certification essentially means, data centre manager Jodie Fearon said: “We are concurrently maintainable; we can take out any single capacity component and do maintenance without affecting the overall operations of the data centre. This translates to roughly about 99.98 per cent up time guaranteed per year for our customers.”
The facility has two, 1.2 megawatt, back-up generators, of which either is capable of operating the entire facility in the event of a power cut. Fearon said the data centre has enough fuel on-site to run the generators for at least a week.
The data centre is certified at about 316 kilowatts of maximum power capacity.
“We have well in excess of that capacity available for back up power and protection,” noted Fearon.