A small business challenge solved

by Rick Koenders, VP of Business Development and Marketing, bluArc Communications

Small- or medium-sized businesses with multiple sites struggle to easily and cost-effectively connect their sites.

We can clearly identify their challenges and quickly identify how they can connect everyone—everywhere.

Challenges facing small businesses

Connecting remote offices for voice, video and data communications typically has been in the realm of large national and international businesses. The cost and complexity of connectivity used to require legions of IT and telecom staff—and a pocketbook to match. With cost and complexity as a backdrop, the likelihood of small- and medium-sized businesses integrating multiple sites with voice, video and data was almost zero.

The challenges these business face connecting voice, video and data communications are many:

1. The minute differentiated traffic types such as voice, data and video are mentioned, is the minute that network costs rise exponentially. To handle different traffic types the network needs to be able to prioritize one type over another while maintaining that priority throughout the network.

For example, voice needs to be prioritized over data to ensure call quality. Lack of prioritization leads to the voice-over-Internet phenomenon where callers experience latency, jitter, dropped voice segments, and dropped calls, all of which leads to business inefficiency. Thus, the Internet is eliminated as a good medium to interconnect business voice, video and data traffic—companies are left with no choice but to deploy expensive private networks.

2. Assuming a private network is in place, the network elements required to manage the connections site-to-site are expensive and complex to manage and maintain. In fact, networking specialists who configure these challenging networks are one of the most costly resources in the IT domain.

3. From a voice perspective, to interconnect sites each site typically needs its own telephony equipment with unique dial plans, individual programming, separate maintenance and support plans while allowing for seamless direct dialing to any other facility in the enterprise. Feasible, but immensely challenging to deploy, manage and maintain.

4. The combination of these factors, each complex in their own right, makes support and maintenance a nightmare. Debugging issues of quality and performance involves multiple resource types and expertise domains—this is in the realm of finger pointing, frustration and out of control costs.

Sounds grim, especially as most small businesses approach connecting multiple sites as a data issue and plan for the traversal of strictly data over their corporate network.

From a data only perspective, small businesses will deploy Internet access services from multiple vendors while relying on virtual private networks (VPNs) to ensure the security and integrity of their data. The performance is usually poor and ignores the fact that the cost of deploying this type of network doesn’t even include the cost of their voice services. For voice services, each site deploys a PBX (often from different vendors), voice lines (often from different vendors), and long distance and conferencing services (often from different vendors).

The point is, that while interconnecting multiple sites for voice, data and video is challenging for large businesses, it’s virtually impossible for small businesses—it’s costly and complex just to deploy the minimum of required voice and data services.

Well, it used to be virtually impossible. This is where bluArc’s Hosted Business Phone and Internet Services shine.

Solving the voice problem

bluArc’s premise is that connecting multiple sites should be looked upon as a “voice first” challenge. Because networking requirements for site-to-site voice communications are so stringent, once the voice problem is solved, data and video come along for the ride.

Accessing bluArc’s private network

Since 2006, bluArc has specialized in solving the voice problem. We started by building a Canada-wide private network that allows us to effectively manage different types of traffic including voice, video and data. By deploying segments of our network to customer sites, we can offer our customers access to our core private network so they can run voice, data and video traffic site to site, Canada wide, without having to traverse the Internet.

Reducing costs and complexity; simplifying how you work

By hosting voice services for our customers we eliminate the need for customers to deploy multiple boxes to multiple sites; manage multiple finger-pointing vendors; manage complex dial plans; and pay for high priced resources across multiple networking disciplines. By integrating voice, data, video communications, conferencing and long distance, among others, bluArc enables small business customers to connect multiple sites more easily and more cost effectively.

Solving your connection challenges

If you’re a small- or medium-sized business with multiple sites and you struggle with how to easily and cost-effectively connect those sites, call bluArc. Our consultative approach will clearly identify your challenges and quickly identify how you can connect everyone—everywhere.