Editor's Choice Awards 2019

www.binfo.co.uk 17 Editor’s Choice Awards Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) with all the telephony features they need, with a low monthly subscription and no need for large upfront investment in equipment. Developed in-house by the company’s engineers and software development teams and hosted on servers in one of Spitfire’s secure core network nodes, with full power and back-up redundancy, Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 offers a full set of features out of the box; free calls between extensions; softphones and smartphone apps for full integration of mobile devices; and an online portal for easy system management. In developing the system, Spitfire has drawn on more than 30 years’ experience in meeting the communications needs of SMEs, in particular their requirement for simplicity, ease of use and affordability. Value for money Subscriptions start at just £6 per extension, per month, with free set-up (for contracts of 12 months or more). Even when you add in the cost of renting handsets, for customers that don’t want to buy them outright, the cost is just £9 to £11 per extension (depending on phone model). Because Spitfire charges by extension rather than by device, as many competitors do, users can associate multiple devices to a single extension at no extra cost, including an office phone, a DECT phone (as a second office phone), a home office phone, a softphone, an app, or all of the above. This makes Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 a much more affordable option than competitor products that require customers to buy a subscription for each additional device linked to an extension and a very attractive proposition for modern businesses with flexible working practices and/or highly mobile workers who spend much of their time away from the office Easy to use Another major selling point is the system’s ease of use. Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 connects to a router on the customer’s premises, using voice-approved broadband or converged voice and data Ethernet circuits. All the customer then has to do is plug in pre-programmed, auto-provisioning Yealink handsets and they are ready to go. The user interface is designed to be just as easy to use and intuitive, with the ability to assign names to buttons on the phone, so that you don’t have to remember extension numbers, and smartphone-like features like an alphanumeric keypad that dynamically presents names from an Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 Hosted telephony solution Editor’s Choice: Managed IT address book as you type. The administrator console is laid out very logically, making it easy for customers to control all aspects of the system, should they wish to do so, with support from Spitfire when required. Drop-down menus make it easy for users to change features on buttons and make adds, moves and changes without having to call up their supplier. They can change who’s in a ring group; configure the auto attendant feature; create call centre groups; set up call flows to route calls to different destinations depending on the time of day or day of week; view call statistics down to an individual user level; and much else. For security, administrators can provide different levels of access. They might want to give users the ability to do things like set up call diverts to a home number/ mobile phone or logon at someone else’s extension but restrict access to more advanced settings and capabilities, such as auto attendant settings, for example. Not all companies will want this level of control and, for them, there is the option of a fully managed service under which Spitfire or one of its resellers will handle day-to-day system management. www.spitfire.co.uk What we liked: • A full set of features out of the box • Free calls between extensions • Web-based management console • Online portal for easy system management • Clear, transparent pricing Spitfire Hosted PBX 2.1 Issue 52 2019 In developing the system, Spitfire has drawn on more than 30 years’ experience in meeting the communications needs of SMEs