IDC expects extraordinary growth in enterprise IP telephone systems and hosted VoIP services in the next 12 months.
Corporate spending on VoIP will rise from this year's expected $1 billion to $5.5 billion by 2008, said Teney Takahashi, an analyst at the Radicati Group. The research company's study, released Tuesday, is called "Corporate VoIP Market, 2004-2008."
Rapid growth of VoIP is expected to continue over 2004-2005. VoIP in the small, medium and large enterprise. VoIP promises to cut 25% of telephony costs for the enterprise - -a significant cost savings in a tough economy where cost savings affect the bottom-line.
"I believe we will see strong growth in enterprise VoIP in 2004 and 2005," said Peter Hall, Ovum research director. "Awareness is very much higher. IT managers and network managers are much more aware of what's available and are now prepared to consider the business case. This wasn't the case a year ago."
The adoption of VoIP and infrastructure in the enterprise as well as the carriers provide a wide range of new options for media conferencing, collaboration and videoconferencing that is easier, more cost effective -impacting the value of new applications once reserved for the largest enterprise.
Technically, vendors and standards groups have been busy over the past several years creating an environment to leverage the emerging IP networks to support the applications and interoperability required for seamless communications.
While just a few years ago the videoconferencing industry was all about set top boxes and room systems specific for video that ran over expensive ISDN networks, the rapid adoption of corporate-wide IP networks and broadband to the home provide a new level of network availability and plug and play options for video and other media conferencing applications such as IM (Instant Messaging) etc. (Wainhouse Research)
The Year 2003 was the a year of migration towards IP based conferencing solutions. Catalyzed by growth of web conferencing, text-based Instant Messaging, and presence managment systems all exclusively based on IP. These technologies are going mainstream for the enterprise and for consumers. (Wainhouse Research)
Consequently, while the growth of the overall PBX market is tied closely to the rate of general economic growth, the replacement market comprised of IP-based systems is expected to grow much faster. Factors driving this growth include operational expenditure and capital expenditure savings on the part of customers, as well as the capability to deploy new productivity-enhancing applications, such as presence management and unified messaging. In-Stat/MDR expects the number of IP lines shipped in PBX systems to grow from 5.5 million in 2003 to 15.9 million by 2008. (InStat)
