The transition was not without its pratfalls. Marmion says it took New Era nearly two months to establish good voice quality, and three months beyond that to convince internal users to adopt the new technology. Today, no matter how New Era officials perceive their VoIP system, no one can deny that the technology is yielding huge dividends. Marmion says communication quality between facilities is better than ever, and brags that he calls the facilities in Alabama from his office in Derby at least 10 times a day, all for free. What’s more, whereas New Era used to pay per change for even slight modifications to the old PBX, administrators now can use AltiGen software to make fixes such as adding new extensions and rerouting calls. The new system already is also showing major ROI. Though Marmion declines to say exactly how much he spent on VoIP, he reveals that he expects to save nearly $15,000 per year in long distance alone, and nearly $50,000 per year overall. You have to tip your cap to those kinds of numbers.

The Dentist Is In

Availability is everything in the medical practice business, and at 11-employee dental consultancy Consani Seims, representatives live and die by their telephones. Consani consultants spend their days dialing dentists to chat with them about buying or selling a practice. When these dentists return their calls, it’s critical that someone at Consani Seims answers. President and chief technology decision-maker Paul Consani describes the challenge as "minimizing phone tag," and admits that he’s tried everything, including 24-hour answering services, to make it work.

"Most of our business goes down on the phone," he says, noting that the company abandoned 24-hour answering due to mixed results. "If we lose the ability to field incoming calls, we lose everything."

For years, Consani Seims paid long-distance tolls to route callers from a PBX box at company headquarters in Vancouver, Wash., to field offices in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and elsewhere in Washington state. Last year, when dropped calls rendered this method ineffective, Consani himself started looking for alternatives he could implement on the fly. He had read about VoIP in the local newspaper and figured it would be too expensive to implement at a business as small as his. Still, he decided to give it a whirl and contacted nearly a dozen providers to see what they’d say. The response to these initial RFPs was overwhelming?all of the vendors came back with bids. In the end, he chose a product from Zultys Technologies.