Small business Unified Messaging solution

At my previous job, I remember asking the owner of the business how much the PBX phone system that we were always having trouble with cost him when it was  brand new. “I believe it was about $15,000 at the time”, he replied with a resigned frown.

I worked at that company for 6 years and never once did the hold music work, every time it rained we would get dropped calls like crazy, and sometimes while you were trying to transfer a call to another extension … it would just disappear into the voice-mail void. There was no way we could afford to get a brand new system and when I tried to steer him towards newer technology (like VOIP), he was so technology-shy that he would practically break out in hives at the mere suggestion!

Here again to the rescue comes an article from the March issue of Entrepreneur magazine, para-phrased from the article by Jason Ankeny:

Enter Toshiba’s Strata Messaging, a low-cost, entry-level unified messaging solution developed expressly for the small-business market. The Strata platform supports 2 to 8 voice-mail ports and up to 400 mail-boxes with 300 hours worth of data storage. The base package has 2 voice-mail ports and 10 seats of unified messaging. A 4-port configuration with support of up to 10 users costs around $1,700. The system grows in price as it grows in size. Jon Nelson, product marketing manager with Toshiba America’s telecommunication systems division in Irvine, California states “Unified messaging is about convenience … with [Strata], you can go to your Outlook inbox and see all your e-mails, voice messages and mobile voice mail in one place. It saves a lot of time.”

At that price, I could have even talked my tech-averse boss into seeing the logic of the return on investment for such an integrated system!