Was over on the other forum, you know the one. Oh you save so much money in the cloud, premise based is so expensive. You know when I see most of my premised based customers? At their kids functions, weddings, golf outings and bar-b-ques. My clients are family. Find that in your frickin cloud. Ray Barone imitation included at no extra charge.
Trust me I'm not excited about the idea of having to switch to cloud systems but that seems to be the way the market is going. In my service area I would be willing to bet that some businesses will take another 8-10 years to switch to the cloud. Either way VoIP is not going away, there are hosted providers out there allowing vendors to sell and maintain hosted phone systems in their server but allow the vendor to have full control of the customer.
We have, with reluctance initially, offered hosted solutions via a provider that, as the selling dealer allows us to provide full services. We perform our due diligence at the sites and, so far, this service has fully delivered.
The provider deals with billing, collections, server maintenance, while we collect a generous commission. It has been worth it in the sense that we no longer deal with hardware at these sites and don't have to chase down the endless upgrading of equipment.
It allows us to easily compete with the clowns as mentioned. We have even used this to leverage customers considering hosted to stay with us as we can leverage their existing legacy hardware with the hosted service in some cases.
As with any service, it can be the right service in the right scenario but it is certainly not for everyone at this point.