In 2007, North American enterprises continued to deploy many VOIP technologies and services, but in many cases overall year-over-year growth was modest, as was use of managed VOIP and IPT services. Although many business users anticipate tremendous growth in deployments of IP telephony, VOIP and IP videoconferencing over the next two to three years, a number of critical inhibitors could delay migration.
Solutions to some of these problems lie in the hands of customers themselves, but many more are the responsibility of suppliers and providers. In addition to ever-present considerations like standards, these include challenges that business customers face with reliability, the complexity of migrating from legacy services and technology, and the lack of a consistently robust feature set. Finally, many companies are also still struggling with the complexities of the business case – enterprises would move faster if the migration process was simpler and didn’t require such a high level of customization.
SPENDING ON VOICE TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES CONTINUES TO SHIFT
In 2007, 15% of North American enterprise IT budgets were devoted to network and telecommunications services. To continue refining its understanding of enterprise market adoption of IP Telephony (IPT) technology and VOIP services, Forrester surveyed 715 network and telecommunications decision-makers at North American enterprises and found that 31% of their telecommunications services budgets were earmarked for landline voice. Although 22% of those surveyed planned to increase spending on legacy voice technology and services in 2007, almost three times as many -- 63% -- planned to increase spending on IPT and VOIP.
Throughout this article, readers will note that IPT, VOIP and IP videoconferencing spending and adoption trends often vary by industry. Interest in migrating to IPT and VOIP is a case in point. Nineteen percent of North American enterprises said that migrating to IPT and VOIP was a critical priority in 2007. But many industries exceeded the North American enterprise average – including primary producers, professional services, utilities, government, transportation and logistics, and construction and engineering. Interest also varied by size—here terminology can be important: in this survey Forrester categorized “large enterprises” as those which employ 1,000-4,999 employees; ‘very large enterprises’ are those which employ 5,000-19,999 employees; the ‘Global 2000’ are companies that employ 20,000 or more people. Interest or use often correlates directly, or inversely, with size, depending on the technology. These trends are examined in the sections that follow.
