Springfield, MA – November 11, 2008 – Thing5, the leader in SIP trunking and hosted PBX services for the hospitality industry, announced today a guarantee that its solution costs at least 50% less than traditional PBX platforms such as those offered by Mitel and Avaya.
“To purchase a new PBX, as a replacement for an outdated PBX or for a new building, a hotel with 140 rooms will have a capital expenditure of at least $40,000 and up to $60,000,” commented Bill Faxon, managing director of Thing5. “Thing5’s hosted PBX solution drastically reduces the capital outlay required to renovate, open a new property or replace an ailing system. Our solution eliminates annual maintenance fees completely.”
During these challenging economic times, hoteliers need to be more mindful than ever about reducing expenses while maintaining high levels of service and offering innovative differentiators. With Thing5’s solution, hotel owners can achieve both – the reduction of one-time and ongoing costs and benefit from additional features that improve hotel staffs’ efficiency and enhance the guest experience.
Thing5 is the only fully featured, hospitality-specific hosted PBX solution available to hoteliers. Thing5’s hosted solution provides all of the features that property owners and managers expect – wake-up call management, call accounting and interfaces to property management systems – plus additional features not available from other PBXs such as a complete unified messaging platform that allows guest room calls and wakeup calls to be forwarded to cell phones and voicemail as an email for Smartphone and Blackberry users.
Thing5’s solution also eliminates the risk of communications equipment failing. With Thing5’s hosted solution, voice and data networks are managed offsite, in a Thing5 data center that is staffed 24×7 with technicians. This frees hotel staff from dealing with contractors or other technicians to support onsite equipment. Thing5’s fully redundant data centers in Springfield, MA and Miami, FL provide hosted PBX, SIP trunking and voice-over-the-Internet (VOIP) service for over 1,500 properties throughout the United States. In the event of loss of power due to lightning strike or other occurrence that prevents hotel staff from answering phones, Thing5’s
call routing ensures that calls are immediately transferred to central reservations, or any other call center or phone designated by the hotel.
Thing5’s enterprise solution utilizes burstable IP trunking; this enables on-demand sharing of under-utilized trunk capacity. Thing5 clients take advantage of its fixed rate calling, reducing their monthly telecommunications expense immediately – in most case by 40-60%. With Thing5’s solution, applications such as voice mail, automatic call distribution, audio conferencing, faxing and instant messaging are hosted in geographically redundant data centers rather than by the clients, and delivered as managed Internet protocol (IP) services over the Web helping to control setup and operational costs.
Thing5 provides all of its solutions via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Thing5’s web-based dashboard, which is included with it services, gives end-users complete control of their telephony environment via its intuitive user interface. End-users can easily add, edit and delete phones and contacts, define and change their find-me/follow-me preferences with sequential or simultaneous ringing, manage their conference bridges and view and download call and conference reports.