Tim Green today covers a release by BT INS (division of British Telecom) of a study into the adoption of VoIP in the enterprise or what we call enterprise IP telephony. The good news is:
According to a survey by BT INS, 62% of respondents either have deployed or are in the process of deploying VoIP across their networks — up from 44% in 2005.
. Enterprise IP Telephony is a mainstream product but:
In 2005, justifying costs to upper management ranked fifth among a list of 15 possible barriers to adoption. This year, that worry rose to the top of the list, with 46% saying it was a significant barrier. Cost justification shared the top spot with technical integration issues, which also was cited by 46% of respondents as a significant barrier. The cost of network upgrades to support QoS ranked third among the adoption barriers, cited by 41%. Concern over lack of standards dropped slightly; just 28% listed it as a concern this year.
It gets worse for Vendors:
The survey also reflects a shift in how customers plan to deploy VoIP. In 2005, 57% said they would gradually replace traditional telephony gear with VoIP gear. That number has shrunk to 39%.
This does sync with discussions that I was involved with this week on an increased trend towards hosted VoIP for business. AMI Partners reported that:
North American SMB hosted VoIP market spending was US$164.9 million in 2005 and will cross US$1.56 billion by 2010, at a CAGR of 56.8%.
…among other things. However what remains is not so much the feature gap between CPE and Hosted, but the Applications Services Gap. That is functionality in the area of Contact Center, Event Notification, and Unified Communications. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for hosted SMB providers like Covad, Quest and ATT among others. Companies like Cistera, Iperia, and Radisys are working with hosted platforms like Sylantro and Broadsoft to rapidly close the Application Services gap with customer premise equipment. This will allow for subscription models for larger enterprises removing the large capital cost of IP telephony infrastructure. The all you can eat subscription service model for hosted VoIP is well on it’s way.
