2005-2006 VoIP State of
the Market Report
by Steven Taylor, Distributed
Networking Associates, Inc
Published and posted February 2006
Abstract:
For the fourth year in a row, users at Webtorials were asked during August
and September of 2005 to share their perceptions of Voice over IP (VoIP) and
their plans for implementing VoIP in their networks. This 2005/2006 VoIP
State-of-the- Market Report is a summary of the findings from that survey, and,
where applicable, these results are contrasted with similar reports prepared in
2002, 2003, and 2004.
Overall, there were few surprises in the data. In most cases, the major
trends showed little change from the 2004 survey, indicating that the market is
maturing. This is reassuring because drastic changes from the prior years’
results would indicate flux in the market space. However, additional questions
were added to this year’s survey that provide insight into new and/or emerging
areas that were not previously studied.
There were some significant findings. In particular:
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There was an increase, albeit somewhat minor, in satisfaction. This is in
contrast to the prior two years in which there was not a major positive or
negative shift in satisfaction. |
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The ability to show a Return on Investment (RoI) based solely on cost
savings is not a major factor. |
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A new category, “Mobility and flexibility can be provided to employees,”
ranked as the top expected benefit. |
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The most important factors inhibiting implementation remain concerns about
security and the availability of systems for managing and troubleshooting
VoIP quality. |
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Issues surrounding Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are viewed as quite
important, especially for interoperability. |
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Among specific applications, unified messaging is viewed as most important.
For the applications considered, the extent to which targeted benefits are
expected varied significantly. |
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Most of the decisions concerning implementation are being made either by a
combination of the traditional voice and data organizations within a company
or primarily by the company’s data organization. Also, respondents did not
feel strongly that the data infrastructure and the VoIP/IP telephony
infrastructure must be provided by the same vendor, and most will be
operating and managing their own equipment.
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Acknowledgment: Please note that this paper was made
possible in part due to the support of
Nortel.
About the Author:
Steven Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher
of Webtorials. Taylor also is a
columnist for Network World and coauthor of Network World's "Wide Area
Networking" and "Convergence" newsletters. Taylor can be reached
at taylor@webtorials.com.
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