In today’s modern business world, branch and remote offices need access to the same information and communications tools as HQ locations.

Enterprises in banking, insurance, real estate, and retailing have a basic business topology of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of small branch offices that are responsible for servicing their local communities. Communications-wise, these branches need local telephony services to connect with customers, and business applications such as e-mail, workflow, command and control, or technology services to support hierarchical corporate infrastructures. Legacy voice solutions for PBX internetworking, or combinations of PBX’s in regional centres and key systems in branches, have typically required costly digital circuits between branches and the regional offices. Too often, because of the cost and complexity, the branch office becomes an island of communications, avoiding any special corporate connection, and offering no corporate-wide features. Legacy solutions don’t easily facilitate global dial plans, lack support for important regulatory compliance-required applications such as call recording, unified voice mail, or web conferencing for the corporation, and have no backup facility in the event of local key system failure. Furthermore, the data network infrastructure operates independently. Since so much of the workflow is controlled by central applications, the possibility of integrating telephony and workflow-based data is further complicated.

The ability to deliver low cost and feature-rich performance has historically been a big challenge. Partly because of the limited availability of secure and reliable ‘first mile’ infrastructure and partly because of the limitations of PBX architectures, those enterprises with this basic business topology have been forced to settle for less than optimal cost structures, and feature-poor solutions that do little more than deliver dial tone. Until now.

Convergence is the cornerstone of a new set of requirements for the next generation branch office that is changing business significantly. IP telephony and a rapidly developing suite of convergence applications can uniquely deliver outstanding reliability, productivity, and lower costs.

Tecsource utilises these technologies and capabilities, in association with its partners, to provide solutions to extend HQ functionality to branch offices, whilst ensuring the cost of communication is controlled or reduced.