Costs of Telephone Systems

Approximately 51 percent of all Enterprise Phone System buyers experienced indirect costs that initially were not taken into account.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) for an enterprise phone system depends on the number of employees, technology of the solution (time-division multiplexing [TDM] or Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP], for example) and the solution delivery model (on-premise or hosted). Costs associated with implementation and support will influence the true cost of owning and using an enterprise phone system, ultimately making it much higher than the listed price of the system.

In addition to the standard license fee and implementation cost of an enterprise phone system, there are other costs to consider when budgeting phone system TCO, including:

• Auxiliary software costs
• Training costs
• Integration costs
• Infrastructure costs;

The 3 most common indirect or unexpected costs that you are likely to experience when you buy an enterprise phone system are:

• Internal hardware, such as equipment replacement
• Service, such as unexpected labor
• Licenses for supplementary software for functions such as information management or integration (SQL, for example)