budgeting for the cloud

Budgeting for the Cloud—Preparing for a 2012 ShiftWhite Paper • November 2011

To learn more, please visit fonality.com or call 877- FONALITY

The next big shift that small businesses need to think about is Software as a Service, commonly called SaaS.

SaaS has already gone main stream in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, where services

such as SalesForce and SugarCRM are well established. The next major development is the wide scale

acceptance and deployment of cloud-based business communication solutions.

Cloud-based communications can

1. Reduce your costs and complexity, with savings of up to 40% on business telephony functionality

2. Help manage on-going operating and feature upgrade expenses

3. Avoid management of system configuration, backups and warranties

When compared to a premise-based solution, a cloud-based business communications solution makes

economic and business sense. Most importantly, it allows you to focus on your top priority, your business.

So, given that the financial benefits of moving to the cloud are clear, what steps should you take now to prepare

for a cloud-based communications transition in 2012?

Ask yourself three basic questions as you prepare your next budget. These decision points will help you prepare

and take full advantage of cloud-based business communication services in 2012 and beyond.


How do you want to reduce unproductive investments?

If you are targeting a number of business growth opportunities, should you invest your capital in these

new opportunities, or in the underlying communications infrastructure? After all access to and management

of working capital is a key challenge faced by many businesses like yours. The pay-as-you-grow model of

cloud-based solutions ensures you only pay for the services you use and need, without incurring additional

up-front costs. The lesson: you should stop investing and growing your existing solutions, as this

is not taking you where you need to go.

When considering your operating expenses, does it make sense to invest in IT skills and people that don’t

really help you grow the business or enhance the customer experience? Not really. Does it make sense to

pay for technology power and cooling requirements in each of your sites? No again. The pay-as-you-grow

model associated with cloud-based communications solutions includes the cost of maintenance, support and

upgrades, largely eliminating the need for you to staff up in these areas. Your IT budget requirements would

drop proportionately.

The bottom-line is that transitioning to a cloud-based business communications solution allows you to more

effectively invest in your business, while reducing the on-going costs of your communications environment. If

this sounds like a win-win to you, you’re right!

Where do you want to focus your management attention?

Most businesses would readily admit that the focus should be on growing the business, rather than on

worrying about your communications infrastructure. Businesses that own their own communications systems

often complain about on-going maintenance, backup, and operations costs associated with these systems.

They also complain about the challenges of managing technology lifecycles and associated warranty and

upgrade costs. In fact, most customer technology environments are dated, resulting in lost opportunities to

maintain and enhance customer service and employee productivity.

Cloud-based business communication solutions allow your business to focus on all aspects

of evolving and growing the business, while the service provider manages the technology and delivers

the communications experience.

As a result, a higher percentage of your budget can be applied to enhancing customer service and growing

the business rather than on underlying technologies. You win and so do your customers!


How do you best avoid obstacles while adjusting to changing business conditions?

Flexibility is an important imperative, as who can really predict all aspects of how you will achieve your business

growth. Let’s examine four types of flexibility that you need to consider:

1. Site flexibility — it should be easy to add/drop and grow/shrink new sites in response to business

realities. After all, you may need to quickly adapt to customer and competitive pressures.

2. Access flexibility — it should be easy to allow employees to access the network wherever they are,

however they connect using whatever device they have. Supporting a mobile work force, while managing

costs, is a critical business reality.

3. Geographic flexibility — it should be easy to expand or otherwise change you served market, whether

local or remote, domestic or international. You wouldn’t want to miss growth opportunities as they arise!

4. Application flexibility — it should be easy to add new communications and business applications,

whether they are employee or customer facing. If you are not moving forward in today’s marketplace,

you are probably losing ground.

Providing flexibility in changing business conditions, and has overcome the historical challenges with private

solutions, is a key value proposition of cloud-based business communications solutions. For example, with

cloud-based solutions, you only pay for the number of employees you have at a particular moment (i.e., no

additional costs for unused extensions), and adding a user can be done in minutes, not days. This makes

budgeting more predictable with lower risk.

Preparing for the Shift Towards Cloud-based Business Communications Solutions

Cloud-based business communications solutions, the next big development in the SaaS world, provides for

large opportunities for small and medium businesses like yours.

The three key decision points discussed above, can allow you to fully leverage cloud-based business

communications solutions, and a better position for the shift towards Software as a Service (SaaS). This

will allow you to realize cost savings of up to 40% for business telephony, to increase flexibility in adjusting

to business and market conditions, to reduce management overhead allowing you to focus on growing the

business, and to take advantage of powerful new capabilities and applications to enhance customer service

and improve employee productivity.

Fonality is North America’s fastest growing business communications company and a leading provider of cloud-based VoIP and Unified Communications solutions for small and mid-size businesses. With a unique software model approach, Fonality provides all the features of legacy providers without the cost or complexity.

Founded in 2004, Fonality has delivered more than two billion phone calls across the cloud while enabling more than one million users of open-standards based communications software. Investors include Intel Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Azure Capital Partners. Visit www.fonality.com for more information or call 877-FONALITY.

5601 Granite Parkway, Suite 500 • Plano TX 750241-877-FONALITY • fonality.com

Fonality, Moving Your Business Forward

budgeting for the cloud

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