Heard of vPBX phone systems yet? They’re the next big thing in the business comms industry, and they’ve just started to fledge and take flight. Unlike most "next big things", too, they are flexible and adaptable enough to form the platform for the big thing after the big thing, which means they should effectively become current for ever more, as the base from which all modern business communications are conducted.

vPBX stands for "virtual Private Branch Exchange", which is something of a misnomer in that the systems the technology supports are way more advanced than any kind of branch exchange.

vPBX phone systems control, or have the capacity to control, absolutely everything that happens at every level of business communication – they are able to run all forms of business comms device, and every kind of message. They can route a message originating in one kind of device, or as one type of communication, into another. They can connect people using completely different sorts of devices and communications styles, and deliver a working conversation between the two. vPBX is more than just the next level of business telephony – it’s the future ground zero for all new communications technology.

vPBX phone systems, for example, are capable of translating email into speech, or vice versa. That means that a person can type emails in one office, which are heard as speech on a phone in another. The person using the phone in this second location simply talks as normal – her words are transposed back into email text by the vPBX, so the email half of the conversation keeps going too.

Two way translation is just a fraction of the capability of the virtual Private Branch Exchange. The same technology is able to manage multi way conversations across all sorts of different devices and media – relaying the correct responses to the right people in as many formats as required. Technologically, this is the equivalent of being able to understand anything said to you in any form of language, and reply in kind – but doing that for seven different conversations, in different languages, all at once.

vPBX phone systems are way cheaper than they sound like they ought to be – unlike most modern technology, which tends to spend a year as "next gen" stuff costing a minimum of three arms and two legs. This is because vPBX is software based: the hardware involved in a virtual Private Branch Exchange conversation is already owned by the conversant. A mobile phone, a PC, a telephone – all the virtual Private Branch Exchange does is to connect all those things together and translate between them.

Because vPBX phone systems are software based, they are very easy to expand. That means two things. One, they form the basis of all future communications, everywhere; and two, they can be purchased in diminished capability formats by small business that don’t need all the bells and whistles. If said small businesses wish to add vPBX bells and or whistles at a later date, they just buy the capability and unlock the software.

The future, they tell us, is coming. With a virtual Private Branch Exchange, it’s already here.