The VirtualPBX™ is an industrial-strength, full-featured business telephone system similar to high-end systems in common use with one very important exception: it is delivered as a service over the commercial telephone network so that no equipment purchase is necessary. This also means that an employee can be located anywhere: at the office, at home, in a vehicle, temporarily working in a clients office, at a hotel on a business trip, anywhere in the world.

Everyone has had the experience of telephoning a business which answered with an Auto-Attendant and a message such as: "Thank you for calling XYZ Corporation. If you know the extension of your party, you may dial it now. Press 1 for sales, press 2 for Customer Support, press 3 for Tech Support, or press 0 for the Operator." Such phone systems, which are very common today, typically consist of a commercial PBX installed in a "phone closet" on the company's premises connecting all of the company's extensions with each other and with the outside world. The features of the system, Voice Mail, Company Directory (allowing extensions to be connected by spelling the extension owners name), etc. depend on the price of the system; and full-featured PBX's can cost upwards of $ 100,000 and more although simpler systems may be obtained for considerably less money.

Providing a business phone system as a service instead of using a hardware system as described above means that a company can have a professional telephone system without the purchase of any equipment, without any maintenance, and without the danger that a power or other failure will take out the phone service. In addition, the nature of the VirtualPBX™ allows many new features which are either impossible or very difficult with typical PBX systems such as extensions being located anywhere. See a list of companies that would most benefit from using the VirtualPBX™.

When a company gets a VirtualPBX™, they are given an 800/888/877 main business number, a set of virtual extensions, an Operator extension, and a set of ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) Queues: Sales, Customer Support, Tech Support, etc. Each extension can hold up to four contact phone numbers, two default fax numbers, and a pager number. When a customer calls the main business number, he may dial the extension if he knows it, spell the desired party's name, or select Sales, Customer Support, the Operator, etc.

Each of these choices leads to an extension, and the system automatically tries each of the contact phone numbers for that extension in turn until the party is found. Because of this structure, an extension owner can be anywhere: the home city, the home state, North America, or the world.

The Sales, Customer Support, Tech Support, etc. (ACD) queues allow as many employees as desired to log into a particular queue at the same time and take customer calls on a round-robin basis. The employees can be at home, at work, in a vehicle, in a hotel room, etc., anywhere in the world. The queues allow many customers to be talking to company representatives at the same time. The number of customers who can be simultaneously connected is limited only by the number of employees logged into a given queue.

If desired, the extension owner can change his contact phone numbers "on-the-fly". This would be done for example if he is travelling on business, checks into a hotel, rents a cell phone, etc. If he then wishes to change his contact phone numbers to contain his hotel-room number, his rented-cellphone number, the number of the office he is visiting, or the office phone where he is temporarily working; this can be easily and quickly done.

When the extension owner answers a call, he hears the number of the calling party (or his name, if this option has been set); and he can either answer the call or send the caller directly to Voice Mail. Furthermore, an extension can be marked as "Available" or "Unavailable". If marked as "Unavailable", all callers are sent directly to Voice Mail. When Voice Mail is left, the extension owner is paged either on a standard pager or on a digital cell phone.

In addition to Voice Mail and a Company Directory, the VirtualPBX™ has Fax Mail (send a fax directly to an extension), Voice-Mail Callback with automatic return to the Voice Mail menu to continue hearing messages, Call Filtering through caller ID (whether blocked or not) and/or Call Screening (a "speak-your-name" requirement), VirtualDID (Direct Inward Dialing), and many, many other advanced features. The possibilities for enhancing company communications with the VirtualPBX™ are almost unlimited.

One VirtualPBX™ main business number can be geographically routed (Smart800™) to many different VirtualPBXs™ at different locations using the caller's Area Code (and perhaps Prefix). This allows a large company to advertise one number nationally and have callers routed to the nearest store, location, branch office, franchise, etc. Typically the nationally advertised number will be a vanity number such as 1-800-XYZCORP, 1-800-FLYHIGH, etc. Because many companies have a very large number of branch locations, the capital savings of using multiple VirtualPBXs™ rather than to have each location with its own phone system can be enormous. For example, a company with 500 locations could spend as much as 50 million dollars on individual phone systems for each branch. Even if a less expensive PBX (with corresponding fewer features) were chosen the capital costs could still be of the order of 2.5 million dollars. With the VirtualPBX™ there are no capital costs.

For example using the ACD Queue concept is possible to set up a world-wide international Call Center reached by a single number which stays open around the world 24 hours per day, 7 days per week with employees scattered through many countries logging in and logging out of the Call-Center ACD queue as their work day begins and ends.

As another example, it is possible to establish a full-feature Answering Service with the VirtualDID option which has no installed equipment and allows employees to work from home or (for that matter) anywhere.

Large companies with a subset of their employees who constantly travel can overlay the VirtualPBX™ on an existing company PBX that has classical DID (Direct Inward Dialing), and use the VirtualDID feature to reach any employee traveling on business by simply dialing his company extension either from the outside with the full 7- or 11-digit number or from the inside by only dialing the last 4 or 5 numbers. This can be set up to reach an employee through his company extension no matter where he is in the world (in a hotel room, carrying a rented cellphone, working at a temporary office, or visiting a client for the day).

An example might be a satellite company which launches from the Cape in Florida, from Vandenburg in California, from the former French Guiana, or from the former Soviet Cosmodrome at Baikonur, Kazakstan; and always sends the same group of employees to prepare the launch. An employee would simply enter the numbers where he is as contact phone numbers; and when someone dials his company extension, the appropriate phones ring one after another until he answers or the caller is sent to Voice Mail.

Once a company has decided to use the VirtualPBX™, they can have a full-service, professional sounding phone system up and running within a few hours.

VirtualPBX.Com's equally revolutionary PBXParachute provides unparalleled disaster recovery services for a company's primary phone system by creating a mirror image of the company's phone system that waits in hot-standby for an emergency. When the primary phone system fails, within minutes the PBXParachute, implemented using the VirtualPBX™ is answering calls and routing callers to the company's employees at their homes, in their cars, and on their cell phones.