|
Hosted VoIP Growing Strong For Next Five Year: IDC |
|
|
|
Written by Adam Gosling
|
|
Friday, 07 September 2007 |
Industry research outfit, IDC says the market for enterprise
hosted IP voice has been growing over the past two years. It is the
beginning of a trend that will continue over the next five years, it
says.
IDC
believes that potential for enterprise hosted IP voice is compelling
especially when delivered and integrated with other applications such
as IP contact centers or voice recognition software. The
market for hosted IP voice services among U.S. businesses is expected
to reach nearly US$455.9 million by the end of 2008.
This will continue to grow at a rapid
pace, but the strong growth masks several challenges the
industry has yet to overcome, says IDC. Foremost is the
issue of including pre-sale design and implementation as well as
post-sale service and support. Second, service providers must continue
to develop the service including integrating with existing enterprise
applications in order to create a unified flow of information from
voice and data applications.
IDC predicts that price will continue to be the most important differentiator when
competing with a premise-based solution, in the near
term. However capabilities enabled
by IP will create a rich applications environment that will easily
surpass the Centrex model and lead to promise land of communications
and desktop applications delivered seamlessly in a web services-like
architecture, it says.
In order to reach its true potential, hosted VoIP still needs to
improve and evolve. Conversations with enterprise IT managers and
service providers confirm that while delivering VoIP via IP PBX is
hard, delivering hosted IP voice can be even harder.
"Some of the very
early implementations were flawed, leading to customer cancellations
and botched deployments," says Will Stofega, research manager, Voice over IP
Services. Still, IDC believes that the lessons learned from these
early deployments are undoubtedly a painful but necessary part of the
adoption cycle as the hype and potential of a new service runs up
against the reality of customer expectations. As hosted VoIP services
evolve over the next five years, IDC expects the value proposition to
evolve from a communications service to a business process
tool.
Related news items Newer news items
Older news items
|
|
|
|
