In the past, when businesses needed phones, they typically installed a hulking, expensive PBX system. In the wireless era, Research in Motion's (News - Alert) BlackBerry Mobile Voice System extends the capabilities of a traditional office phone system and makes it mobile.

The beleaguered company is now playing to its strengths, offering advanced communications to businesses.

“BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS) converts the user’s BlackBerry device into an IP extension of his/her office PBX (News - Alert), thus providing the user with feature of single number reach wherever the user goes,” said Sunil Lalvani, director of enterprise sales for RIM in India. “The user can make or receive all office calls through office PBX by just using the BlackBerry (News - Alert) device.”

One Indian company, Financial Technologies, turned to the system after getting enormous phone bills after executives made calls to the office while overseas. BlackBerry MVS helped them save money by letting executives connect wirelessly to the PBX. The system uses least cost routing to figure out the most efficient and least expensive path for an outbound call to take as it winds its way through the phone system.

“Mobility is important when directors and senior officials are traveling overseas. Typically, telephone-related bills are expensive due to a huge number of conference calls, international roaming charges, as well as charges incurred in data consumption,” said Rohit Ambosta, vice president and head ESG of Financial Technologies.

Financial Technologies installed MVS along with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). The BES authenticates the user, while the MVS server allows mobile users to actually connect with the PBX system instead of using the roaming network.

“Today, using MVS, we can just link up to a Wi-Fi network and have a local PBX extension on our BlackBerry device. As a result, we have got about 50-60 percent savings on roaming costs,” Ambosta said.

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