* VoIP will be deployed, but reasons will change
Based on research we conducted for a recent report on the VoIP market in North America, as well as our analysis of VoIP trends, we anticipate that the market for VoIP will increase substantially during the next few years.
The most important motivators that we discovered for migrating to VoIP are the desire to reduce telephone costs within an organization, to provide improved communications for remote users and to improve end user productivity.
Three out of five of the organizations that we surveyed believe that VoIP would reduce their telecommunications costs. Further, VoIP systems will have to be significantly less expensive than the telecommunications systems they replace, as nearly three out of four organizations believe that would be “important” or “extremely important.”
I believe this will be the trend for motivating organizations to deploy VoIP in the near term and long term. The initial draw of the technology will be the potentially significant cost savings that VoIP provides, in large part because VoIP avoids much of the taxation that burdens traditional telephony provided by common carriers.
However, I believe that over the long term, particularly if VoIP adoption increases as expected, regulators will increasingly view VoIP as a source of additional tax revenue (or they’ll realize what they’re losing from decreasing use of traditional telephony) and will apply many of the same regulations and taxes to VoIP vendors that currently apply to common carriers. This will result in VoIP’s other benefits – the enablement of unified communications and greater integration with other forms of messaging – becoming the primary drivers for VoIP deployment over the long term as the cost advantage of VoIP diminishes.
