Most businesses between twenty and two hundred seats are running a phone system that someone installed years ago, that only one supplier understands, and that everyone is slightly afraid to touch. Hosted PBX is often sold as “the same thing, but in the cloud”. Done properly, it is a different way of running telephony altogether, and the difference is who is in control.
What changes when the PBX leaves the cupboard
An on-premises PBX is a box with a licence, a support contract and a finite capacity. It shares the office’s power, cooling and internet connection, and when the office is down, so is the phone system. Adding a site means adding hardware or a trunk between sites. Adding a feature means a quote.
A hosted PBX runs in a data centre, reached over the internet or a private link, and serves every site and every remote worker from the same place. The office losing power does not stop calls being answered from a mobile. Capacity is a configuration change. The business pays for seats rather than for hardware and its eventual replacement. Those points are familiar. The one that matters more is that a platform built for many tenants is designed from the ground up for self-service, because the operator cannot afford to make every change by hand.
Multi-tenant done properly means a real portal
A multi-tenant PBX hosts many organisations on shared infrastructure, each isolated from the others, each with its own numbers, users and configuration. The quality of the platform shows in the tenant portal: the branded web interface where the business’s own administrator adds a user, changes a ring group, records a new greeting or pulls a call report.
The test is simple. If a receptionist going on leave requires a support ticket to redirect their extension, the portal is not doing its job. If the office manager can do it in a couple of minutes from a browser, with no training beyond a short walkthrough, it is. Self-service is not a nicety. It is the mechanism that turns the phone system from something the business tolerates into something it runs.
WebRTC softphones
A WebRTC softphone runs inside a normal browser or a lightweight desktop and mobile app, with no separate SIP client to install and no VPN to configure. The user logs into the portal, opens the phone, and their extension is live wherever they are: at a desk, at home, on a site. Encryption is built into the protocol. Calls show up in the same recording and reporting as calls from desk handsets.
For a business that has spent years buying and replacing physical handsets, the change is notable. Desk phones remain useful in reception areas, warehouses and shared spaces, and a hosted platform supports them alongside softphones, but the assumption that every seat needs a piece of hardware on the desk is no longer true. Onboarding a new staff member becomes a portal entry and a login rather than a courier delivery.
Queues, IVR and recording the business can change itself
Call queues, interactive voice menus and call recording are where an on-premises PBX is usually at its most rigid. On a well-built hosted platform they are ordinary configuration.
Queues can be built around how the business actually works: an accounts queue that rings three people in order, a sales queue that rings everyone at once, overflow to a mobile after a set time, different behaviour after hours. IVR menus are recorded and rearranged in the portal, and can typically be changed the same afternoon a new department appears. Recording is enabled per queue, per user or per direction, retained for a defined period, and searchable, which matters for compliance in regulated industries and for training everywhere else.
Reporting sits on top of all of it: who answered, how long callers waited, how many gave up. Most businesses have never seen this data about their own phones and, in our experience, find it more useful than they expected.
The migration path from an old on-prem PBX
Moving off a legacy PBX is a project, not a switch flick, but it is a well-understood one. The sequence that works:
- audit the existing system: numbers, extensions, ring groups, greetings, hunt behaviour and the undocumented quirks staff rely on
- build the new tenant in parallel and test it internally with softphones before any number moves
- port numbers in stages, starting with a low-risk direct line, keeping the old system live as fallback
- move the main number last, once the queues and IVR have been proven on real calls
- decommission the old hardware only after a full billing cycle without incident
Number porting in Australia has its own timelines and paperwork, and a provider who has done it many times will manage that rather than leave it to the customer. The other thing to plan for is the network: a hosted PBX depends on the internet connection and the local switching being fit for voice, and that is worth checking before the first call, not after.
Where Bizix fits
Linepost is Bizix’s own multi-tenant hosted PBX, with a branded self-service portal, WebRTC softphone, queues, IVR and call recording, built and operated from Australia. We handle the migration from legacy systems as part of the service, and we run it alongside the network and cabling work that usually accompanies a phone system change.