billmars

As an IT consultant, I have thoroughly researched over a dozen hosted VoIP companies.  I believe that Jive has the best combination of pricing, quality of service and ease of use of any of the offerings out there.  Initially we chose not to use them because their pricing model made them pretty expensive but they have since reevaluated their pricing structure and are now much more aggressively priced.  All of our clients have saved significantly by changing from the a la carte pricing model of the previous provider.  Their offering is already feature-rich by comparison but they continue to actively add functionality and have just hired a number of new developers to continue to drive enhancements forward.  All customer service and support is US based and is easily accessible with little to no hold time.
Another thing that is often not considered is the usability of the website.  All vendors will provide you with a web interface for configuring users, extensions and system functionality.  Jive's web interface is superior to all I have experienced and is not only very fast but extremely usable.  System configuration of call routing is done through a graphical drag-and-drop interface which reminds you of a flowchart.  This make it SO much easier to see how calls will actually flow through the system as opposed to trying to visualize in your head how multiple auto attendants which are linked together with diffrerent timing structures will behave.  This system is so intuitive that I was able to recreate my largest client's most complex programming easily and on the first try where it took multiple calls to the previous provider to get it to function as we wanted.  Call reporting is very powerful and the system is designed to automatically detect the type of handset you are using and perform some configuration items automatically based on that information.  Overall, the system is very well thought out and extremely flexible and we haven't experienced a minute of downtime since switching (certainly can't be said of our previous vendor).