* Survey shows sharp rise in voice over IP
We have just wrapped a large survey on the state of voice over IP in North America and will be publishing a report on our findings in the next couple of weeks.
Here’s a sampling of what we found:
* IT decision-makers expect the growth in the number of VoIP users in their enterprise to increase fourfold over the next 36 months. The most important motivators for organizations to deploy VoIP include lowering telephone toll costs (cited by 74% of respondents as an important motivator), providing better communication with remote sites (71%) and improving user productivity (64%).
* At present, VoIP is not all that important in the context of overall business plans and priorities: Only 21% of organizations view VoIP as important. However, by the end of 2005, about 30% of organizations expect to view VoIP as an important business priority.
* VoIP reliability will have to be higher than the reliability for e-mail systems. For example, if a VoIP system had just 99.9% uptime, only 23% of organizations would be satisfied or extremely satisfied with this level of reliability. However, many e-mail systems do not provide even this level of uptime.
One of the key takeaways from this research is that VoIP growth is going to be substantial. We expect dramatic growth in the number of VoIP users during 2005 and 2006.
Although a key advantage of VoIP will be lower long-distance telephone costs, the benefits go well beyond simple cost savings. The ability to integrate telephony and data networks means that network infrastructures can be more efficient and the costs to deploy and manage them can be lower. The integration of these networks and their consolidation into a single interface will open new opportunities for applications that will seamlessly combine voice, data and other communications.
