Cypress Claims Hosted VoIP Enhances Business

Entrust your communications to someone offsite eliminates the need for expensive solutions to combat disaster situations. Hosted VoIP solutions can provide an added dimension of flexibility in times of disaster. It’s scalable; resilient; and can handle a “wide range of applications.” Cypress Communications has aimed its new product at the hosted VoIP solutions market. The complete end-to-end hosted VoIP and unified communications solution, called C4 IP, earns its name from its design to “help organizations connect, communicate, collaborate and continue even during a disaster or catastrophe.” Cypress Communications is the operator of a national private network designed for VoIP. It claims that its network has been “engineered for 99.999 percent availability and local site survivability with no single point of failure” due to its design to automatically track down any problems before they can cause service interruptions and repair them, with redundancy built in for “ensure maximum availability of voice communications.” Cypress distributes its hosted VoIP over carrier-grade Nortel CS2000 switching and Nortel MCS5200 multimedia. The CS2000, a central-office-grade switching platform with mirrored hardware components, is located in Dallas. Both halves operate with separate power supplies to reduce interruptions in the event of power failure or any failure of hardware or software.  The MCS5200 handles C4 IP’s multimedia components. Collaboration, soft phone functionality, presence, chat, video calling and Web conferencing all fall under its domain, headquartered in Atlanta, and it also provides a backup to the backup for the CS2000. Resiliency is created by located the C4 IP platforms in hardened carrier-grade collection centers with dual power feeds, overlapping generators and uninterrupted power supplies. These measures ensure that C4 IP customers won’t be without communications during a disaster. Scalability comes from an architecture able to handle up to 180,000 lines, 200,000 trunk channels and 2 million busy hour call attempts. Additional disaster recovery components include redundant voicemail servers with failover capacity, and a feature that allows users to copy voicemail over to email. C4 IP is fully compatible with Microsoft Outlook and offers features including “click-to-call,” instant messaging, unified inbox and other unified communications applications, video/audio/Web conferencing, find me/follow me, virtual number and related remote/mobile features.