Item: Vonage Business Communications
Rating: 9
Author: Patrick Plaisance

Overall Satisfaction with Vonage Business Communications

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Vonage Business Cloud for all of our voice needs in our business. This includes remote staff, as well as our home office and a conference bridge. We also install and support Vonage Business Cloud for several clients. It is especially useful for organizations with a lot of remote staff.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ease of administration: The admin website is extremely easy to use and is constantly updated, without making radical changes that interrupt established workflows.
Cost: While there are a host of options that can impact your total cost, the costs for an unlimited extension (usable with a desk phone) or a mobile extension (usable only with the Vonage app) are extremely competitive.
Reliability and call quality: As long as you have a reliable internet connection (and for large deployments, well-designed and implemented VLANs), the phone service is excellent.
Sales: Sales staff is helpful and responsive. Not too pushy.
Support: Documentation is good. The support staff is helpful, but sometimes complex issues don't get elevated to higher tier staff as quickly as they should. Their Porting department is the best I've ever dealt with. They are tenacious in dealing with losing carriers to get your numbers over to Vonage.

Cons

It's nice that they include Amazon Chime for "free" with extensions, but I wish there was a way to turn it off. It's very confusing for users when they receive a Chime welcome email.
For larger deployments, project managers I've dealt with can be simultaneously overbearing and seemingly oblivious to the details of a deployment. I'd assume they are a bit overworked and are juggling too many deployments at once. The good news is that it seems that they are willing to let you take tasks off their plate if you already know what you're doing.
Admin website can be slow/error out occasionally. This is usually only an issue when making large volumes of changes. Just adding/changing a single user, extension, etc, is not an issue.
The admin website could use a few more export/report settings. Dumping a list of all your phone numbers (not just those assigned to users/extensions), more flexible reports, etc

Return on Investment

Retiring on-premise PBX at one client and replacing with Vonage Business saved thousands in monthly costs for PBX support, phone lines, and long distance charges.
Replacing staff using cellphones for all business calls with the Vonage app on their smartphones improved staff morale since they had more control over calls coming in outside of business hours.

Alternatives Considered

8x8 Virtual Office, RingCentral, Nextiva and Jive

We evaluated the listed cloud VOIP providers for clients and ourselves, as well as various on-premise solutions. While not perfect, Vonage had the best balance of cost, ease of use, support, reliability, and hardware offerings.

Other Software Used

Ubiquiti Networks UniFi, WatchGuard Network Security, Blackbaud Online Express

Likelihood to Recommend

Vonage Business Cloud is great for small to medium businesses in just about any configuration. If you have a large traditional office, as long as you take the time to consider your network environment and internet connections, Vonage is a great alternative to a traditional PBX. If you have a lot of remote staff, it is dead simple to order service and have Vonage ship a preconfigured phone to staff that they can just plug into their home network. Lastly, for organizations with lots of road warriors, the Vonage app turns their smartphone into a fully functional VOIP phone. I have clients that have 50%+ of staff that travel regularly, and who were thrilled to not have to give out their cell numbers to colleagues and just give out their Vonage DIDs instead, and let colleagues know that they could always reach them at the same number.

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