Business Technology Roundtable

If you've ever had to add or move employees, you know that one of the biggest hassles is dealing with the telephone system. While many companies are deploying IP-based phone systems to ease their PBX hassles, still others are turning to hosted phone systems to eliminate their ongoing operation and management responsibly altogether. Hosted phone systems work especially well for companies that have highly mobile employees. With a hosted system, employees can just log into the system to automatically forward calls to another designated number. One big advantage: employees need only give their clients one phone number. This eliminates the complexity of dealing with multiple phone numbers and voice mail systems. Helios Realty , part of Real Living, the Midwest's largest independent real estate firm, has taken advantage of this concept. Helios relies on Cisco-Powered partner Geckotech to provide a scalable voice and data infrastructure for its highly mobile workforce of real estate ...

By out-tasking business technology responsibilities, you can avoid the need to manage equipment and add operations staff, freeing your in-house talent to focus on strategic projects. How would that work in practice? Here's a case in point. A residential Real Estate brokerage, located in Chicago, came to Geckotech as a new business looking to differentiate them in a highly competitive market. The owner was looking for something unique, a communication solution to launch his new business -- without worrying about how a phone system worked. And, he needed a system that would easily scale, as they added agents. The owner didn't want the distraction of managing hardware, but needed a high-tech solution for his mobile workforce and wanted to use technology as a competitive advantage -- as well as a way to recruit quality agents to the team. Geckotech proposed and implemented a best-fit out-tasked solution at their new office, which included a private T1 connection, Cisco IP phones a...