We had a fantastic webinar last week in which we basically turned the hour over to Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research, who delivered a really useful talk on opex in IP telephony (watch it here). I'll post this week's VoiceCon eNews here tomorrow, in which I discuss Robin's main findings. In the meantime, some side points were noteworthy.
One is Nemertes's projections on IT budgets for this year and next. I've discussed the optimistic findings that we got out of our post-VoiceCon Orlando 2008 survey; Nemertes's findings suggest a bit more caution:
If you're straining to read the lettering, basically, blue is "increase," yellow is "decrease," tan is "flat" and purple is "unsure." So what we see in the Nemertes survey is actually a few fewer projecting decreased budgets for 2009, but a lot fewer--half as many--expecting to see increased budgets next year. What's significantly bigger are "Flat" and "Unsure," which are kind of two sides of the same coin. All in all, a picture of buyers who are pretty uncertain about what this year will bring for their businesses.
Of course, the major difference between Nemertes's survey and our VoiceCon attendee survey is that Nemertes's is for IT budgets overall, whereas we asked just about communications spending. If you believe both surveys are valid, it looks like communications spending could edge out other IT spending over the next 18 months.
Another Nemertes chart from the webinar, one that doesn't require a lot of comment, is this:
The big yellow chunk is "No plans;" purple is "currently evaluating;" green is "planning to use within 2 years;" and that little blue sliver is "using or planning to use within 1 year." That slice represents 5.7%, which is near or even below the share that Centrex used to get in the old TDM world. Maybe, like the growth/replacement rates we've seen in PBX, it's going to matter less what the technology is, and more what the philosophy of the enterprise is.
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