VoiceCon 2009: Verizon Business boosts hosted IP Centrex

ORLANDO, Fla. - Verizon Business has announced significant enhancements to its hosted IP Centrex service, including expansion of its burstable shared trunks capability, softphone support, easier E-911 provisioning, and local number provisioning.

Burstable Enterprise Shared Trunking (BEST), previously available on Verizon's IP trunking service, allows businesses to distribute inbound calls among multiple business locations, avoiding overloading when lots of calls come into one location. It also provides loadsharing of concurrent calls across the enterprise, so customers don't have to purchase more call capacity than they need for a group of locations.

Softphone support is being offered as an advanced feature under Hosted IP Centrex and includes a web management interface. In addition, a web tool allows users to register quickly and manually their physical location for E-911 purposes; other services require a more lengthy help desk service call for E-911 registration.

Another area where Verizon is coming a bit late (but still welcome) to the party is support for local number presence across North America. Businesses can now get local numbers regardless of the physical location of the office to enable a local presence. A Verizon Business spokesperson indicated that overseas locations will be available down the road.