We have just published a new report on the VoIP market. The report discusses and analyzes the results of major study of what midsized and large organizations are planning for VoIP over the next few years. Here is some of what we found:

* Although most enterprise telecom buyers will likely never admit to it, nearly two in five respondents surveyed told us their organizations would consider using a consumer/public VoIP solution instead of an in-house or private VoIP solution. However, three out of four companies do not sanction the use of consumer or public VoIP services for use in the workplace.

* More than seven out of 10 respondents expect VoIP to be important or “extremely important” to their organizations by late 2008. More than three out of five organizations say they now view deploying unified communications at the end of 2008 as very important or “extremely important..

* Nearly four out of five respondents anticipate that they will converge their voice and data infrastructure. The overwhelming majority of organizations that are not converging their voice and data networks told us that “substantial legacy telecom investments would be lost if we implemented VoIP.”

* This points to another key finding of the research – a key element that is holding back the migration to VoIP is the potential drag that legacy investments are having. Because organizations want to fully depreciate these investments and obtain all the value they can from them, most are unlikely to deploy VoIP solutions that do not leverage these investments.

VoIP can offer significant cost savings to an organization of any size, it can make employees more productive and it’s a key element of a unified communications infrastructure. Bottom line, VoIP will be a critical technology for organizations moving forward, one that IT and telecom managers must evaluate.(Compare VoIP Monitoring, Analysis and Management products)

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.