VoiceCon Attendees See Increased Investment
Vendors, take heart: If the attendees of VoiceCon Orlando are representative of the large-enterprise market (and they are), these folks don't yet expect the recession to dampen their spending on communications.
In our post-show survey, we asked, "Regarding your organization's investment in Unified Communications, IP Telephony, VoIP, and converged networks in 2008 compared to 2007, do you think your organization's investment will...?" Here are the choices and results:
I want to remind you of the context in which VoiceCon Orlando happened. On the first day of the show, Monday, March 17, we were all waking up to the news of Bear Stearns' collapse, and at that point, nobody was quite sure how much worse things might get in the financial sector. Now, this post-show survey was conducted earlier this month, so we've had time to digest those seeming portentous events, and things obviously didn't turn out as bleak as they could have. But still, I'd argue that it's impossible to recall the experience of VoiceCon Orlando 2008 without thinking of the recession. Remember that in his Tuesday keynote, Lou D'Ambrosio, CEO of Avaya, made that his central theme, the call to IT people to save the country from the bad times that loomed.
Interestingly, I had a conversation with another vendor exec, Chris Thompson of Cisco, who was much more sure that customers would keep spending.
And when we asked, in our survey, what topics and technologies the respondents were most interested in, they named the core elements: "Unified Communications Systems/Services" (which, admittedly, was left deliberately broad); IP-PBXs; IP phones; enterprise network/communications infrastructure; and, "SIP."
When we asked what products people "plan to buy" as a result of their attendance at VoiceCon, guess which came in first--the only one with more than 50%? IP phones. So much for the death of the desktop phone. "UC Systems/Services" came in second, beating out IP-PBXs, with SIP next, but a good ways behind.
Of course an IP phone could be one of those funky-looking Microsoft-compatible barebones sets, the kind that plugs in via USB and is driven by Office Communicator software on the attached PC. (It could, of course, also be another vendor's variation on the same USB-phone theme.) But I'm not betting on it, at least this year.
But back to that big, fat, encouraging 75% number, the folks who expect to spend more this year than last. Chris Thompson's argument is that in tough economic times, people continue to invest in technologies that can give them a solid return, and that VOIP/IPT is such a technology. Our survey would appear to provide at least one data point in support of that theory.
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