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Early adopters of IP telephony regard the technology as an opportunity to set themselves apart from their competition, according to a survey of 1,600 IT professionals conducted by Info-Tech Research Group. Companies that consider themselves to be in competitive industries are twice as likely -- 14.6 percent vs. 7.1 percent -- to deploy IP telephony in the next year as those that describe their industries as not very competitive.
Corporations see strategic advantages in the features IP telephony offers over traditional PBX networks, says Ed Daugavietis, Senior Network Analyst of Info-Tech Research Group's Indaba division.
"Although the cost savings surrounding IP telephony have generated a great deal of hype, our study shows that early adopters see it as more than that," he says. "Improved collaboration is a big plus for users and a huge productivity boost for employers"
Daugavietis says companies recognize that IP telephony lags behind traditional telephony on some performance dimensions. Buyers of voice over IP show only half as much interest in product quality and reliability as companies purchasing general networking equipment.
"There's an expectation that some fraction of calls will have some crackle or jitter. They likely understand that IP telephony is a still-maturing technology and it doesn't yet meet every performance benchmark of traditional telephony systems," he says.
Large enterprises are the early adopters of voice over IP. More than half (57%) of respondents with more than 500 employees have either deployed or are planning to deploy IP telephony at some point, compared with 22% of small businesses.
Contrary to some reports, Info-Tech found that security concerns are not slowing down adoption of this technology. In a related study conducted by Info-Tech, 61% of respondents said security is not a factor, while only 25% cited it as a concern.
According to a new report by Juniper Research, the market for VoIP business services is set to reach $18 billion by 2010. In a separate report by Integrated Research, based on a survey of 1,232 executives worldwide, 78 per cent of large companies say they are deploying IP telephony, largely to enhance communications with IP applications and services such as video conferencing. With business critical applications like voice and video now running on IP networks, guaranteeing uptime, performance and service levels is vital.
While the excitement and promise of VoIP is real, organizations have been cautious in their deployments due to a lack of end-to-end visibility into network performance, and the inability to manage the call quality and reliability that users have come to expect from traditional public switched telephone networks (PSTN).
Some of the key benefits include:
· Robust performance management tools will allow enterprise IT departments to aggregate data and use it for baselining, trending, capacity planning and Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring
· Enable reporting from the service and device levels so that IT organizations can correlate business metrics to IT performance;
· Provide faster problem resolution.
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