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November 18, 2010

The JAR Group Brings Hosted PBX Savings

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The JAR Group is a small business working with online marketing, specializing in search engine optimization, basically trying to improve clients’ website traffic. They’re the very model of the modern new-school digital workforce -- these are people who have never signed up for a landline in their lives.

So, according to PhonePlus magazine, when they needed an office phone system they went VoIP, with hosted PBX (News - Alert) service OnSIP from Junction Networks. Melissa Koehler, JAR’s business development manager, set up the system. “We had been using another VoIP service provider, but the service didn’t scale," she said.

Koehler works from home one day a week, PhonePlus explains: “Calls to her extension ring through to the free eyeBeam softphone from Counterpath Corp. running on her laptop. Location independence also came in handy this winter, when New Jersey-based employees frequently were snowed in.”

With OnSIP, “JAR Group employees now can take most of their office calls on the softphones on their laptops or the cell phones in their pockets. If they have smartphones, as most do, they might also use the mobile VoIP clients via Wi-Fi. All this helps the JAR Group’s bottom line, as there’s less desktop hardware to buy and with VoIP, few or no cell phone minutes to charge back to clients.”

See, because one office phone probably wouldn’t work for them all: Two work in a New Jersey office, some from Scottsdale, Arizona, Eugene, Oregon, Denver and Philadelphia. But as PhonePlus’ officials say, “they can transfer calls between each other with four numbers or a few online clicks, retrieve and swap e-mails and do everything else that regular extensions do within a brick-and-mortar office. This is because all of their softphones and handhelds are attached virtually to the OnSIP hosted PBX service.”

Additional applications are also on the pay-per-use model. If employees need an audio conference bridge, “we bring in a conference line number for two dollars a month," a company official said. The company then pays for minutes of use. AJ Lawrence, CEO of JAR Group, estimated a monthly savings of $500 to $1,000 in total telecom costs.

In July TMC’s (News - Alert) Anil Sharma reported that Junction Networks entered into a new partnership with Ditech Networks to bring PhoneTag Voicemail-to-Text service to OnSIP customers.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Erin Monda

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