Realtor Tosses PBX, Snags Hosted Voice from a Pair of Partners

Hosted and cloud voice providers have long beaten the drums for tossing on-premises PBXs. According to the theory, old style voice hardware is expensive, inflexible, and wastes business’ time and resources managing gear that is better handled by dedicated experts.

RE/MAX Allegiance, the largest of RE/MAX companies with over $2 billion in sales, is used to selling. But in the case of hosted voice, the seller became the buyer. The deal was put together by long time ISP and service provider EarthLink, Inc. and Converged Network Services Group (CNSG), and resulted in a hosted MPLS and voice network that spans 18 sites.

RE/MAX reports it is happy with its new voice home. "While working with CNSG, it became clear that EarthLink was the best provider to help us streamline our communications and scale for the future," remarked Brandon Gray, executive vice president of Operations for RE/MAX Allegiance. "EarthLink Hosted Voice gives us geographic flexibility, real time disaster recovery options plus a full-featured Hosted IP PBX solution without purchasing expensive equipment that can quickly become obsolete. I'm now able to deploy my IT team onto projects that will positively impact our business instead of monitoring our network."

According to a CNSG managing partner, the RE/MAX phone system was out of date, and expensive to maintain. Instead of the capital expense of a new in-house PBX, the realtor was convinced to go with a hosted PBX, which has fewer upfront costs.

"Providing integrated access to all sites was a big challenge for a company this large, and EarthLink had the MPLS network access options RE/MAX needed," said CNSG’s Ali Niroo. "EarthLink's ability to deliver MPLS with Class of Service over a dedicated ADSL circuit allowed for lower network access costs without sacrificing performance. With EarthLink's solid engineering team and overlay support, they provide best-in-class network and engineering solutions for large enterprise accounts down to smaller multi-site retail accounts."