Today, if someone wants to scale from 20 telephones line to 20,000 lines, it can be effectuated in a matter of minutes by the miracle of cloud telephony. Today, cloud telephony is considered hosted telephony. The hardware can be the host from any place, but the assistance is provided from wherever needed. In the past, organizations had to spend crores to buy EPABX hardware to scale their telecom system. The telephone lines had to be configured and extension provisioned.
In traditional voice architecture, the mind of the system is in the building. It is a secure way, which relates to the external world through dedicated, voice-only lines. In a cloud-based voice architecture, the brains of the system are in the cloud. The organizations provides flexibility to even minor clients. The phone communicates with the system via an internet connection. It is the most popular internet-based phone system.
Reasons for Spurring Growth in Cloud Telephony in India
So, why is cloud telephony taking off!
There are various benefits to cloud telephony. There is a necessity to add physical hardware at the user’s end. It is a pay-as-you-go model that secures redundancy in build-in and provides analytics and actionable intelligence. It can be rolled out extremely fast.
Besides cost savings issues, cloud telephony players state that the biggest attraction to customers is the analytics and actionable intelligence they can provide. Tracking, reporting, recording, and analysis provide several insights helpful for cloud telephony users to attract and retain customers.
Besides, cloud telephony is not limited to providing IVRS solutions (Interactive Voice Response Solution). For instance, suppose one book a cab, and they may not want the driver to know their actual number. So, cloud telephony conceals their number when Ola and Uber direct their calls to a driver. When the driver calls them through a call center, he does not have a particular number-the data is secure with Ola and Uber.
Besides the number masking, call directing, and recording functions, cloud telephony can now provide fax, bulk SMS and voice messages, call forwarding, conferencing, and other facilities. Not only have start-ups and SMBs (Small and Medium businesses) been the most aggressive adopters of cloud telephony, the large enterprises that carry the legacy investment in equipment are adopting cloud telephony.
Cloud Telephony Market Size in India and Competition
While there are no independent estimates for the size of the addressable market, industry players point out that the domestic BPM (Business Process Management) market alone is worth anywhere between 6–7 billion. Cloud Telephony players compete with CRM (Customer Relationship Management Software) sellers such as helpdesk service providers like Freshdesk, Zendesk, or Zoho.
Today, the cloud telephony players have come together, and they are working with TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority Of India) and the telecom department to ensure transparency in regulation. The start-ups are encouraged to provide value-added services.
Cloud telephony is in India to stay, and it will get more traction with SMBs and large enterprises
