Twilio > Case Studies > PhoneUnite Leverages Twilio SIP for Scalable Hosted PBX Solution

PhoneUnite Leverages Twilio SIP for Scalable Hosted PBX Solution

Technology Category

Networks & Connectivity - Gateways

Applicable Industries

Cement
Telecommunications

Use Cases

Construction Management
Infrastructure Inspection

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

PhoneUnite is a company founded in 2013, with its headquarters in Kansas City, MO. The company offers small and medium-sized businesses a hosted PBX service, aiming to integrate the phone system's inbound and outbound calls. Their vision is to route calls to their customers' mobile phones, in line with the BYOD trend. However, they discovered that their customers also wanted traditional business phones, alongside lower communication costs. Therefore, they sought a solution that could satisfy these diverse needs while also future-proofing their communications infrastructure.

The Challenge

PhoneUnite, a company offering hosted PBX services to small and medium-sized businesses, faced a significant challenge in finding a scalable, pay-as-you-go communications provider to support their growing business. The co-founders, Henry Weber and Bryan Heitman, initially planned to route calls to their customers' mobile phones, aligning with the BYOD (bring your own device) trend. However, they discovered that their customers also desired traditional business phones, alongside lower communication costs. The challenge was to satisfy these customer needs while also future-proofing their communications infrastructure.

The Solution

To address this challenge, PhoneUnite decided to deploy SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), a signaling protocol that allows voice and data to be transmitted over the same channel. This solution simplified their communications infrastructure, reduced costs, and increased flexibility. Moreover, SIP offered the added benefit of future-proofing PhoneUnite's communications infrastructure, as it can handle any kind of media, allowing customers to converge all their communications onto a single platform. However, implementing SIP can be challenging. To avoid potential issues, PhoneUnite chose Twilio SIP. They were already familiar with Twilio's communications API platform as they were using it to connect to the traditional carrier network. They tested Twilio's SIP capabilities for inbound calls and switched over to outbound calling as soon as it became available.

Operational Impact

By choosing Twilio SIP, PhoneUnite was able to avoid many of the problems associated with implementing SIP. They were able to offer their customers the features of an advanced business phone system without the need for hardware. Today, PhoneUnite's standard features include auto-attendants, unlimited extensions, unlimited call trees, call queues for teams, call screening, voicemail transcribing, advanced reporting tools, an iPhone app, and more. Furthermore, Twilio's flexibility gives PhoneUnite the ability to add or modify functionality on top of its SIP infrastructure, as needed. This ensures that PhoneUnite can continue to meet the evolving needs of its customers.

Quantitative Benefit

Twilio's pay-as-you-go pricing allows PhoneUnite to quickly scale and meet rapid growth in its customer base without over-investing in communications bandwidth.
SIP simplifies communications infrastructure, decreases costs and increases flexibility.
Twilio's reliable API makes SIP infrastructure easier to maintain, compared to other SIP providers.