2007-05-11 - VoIP Vaults Ahead
VoIP Vaults Ahead
How This Hot Telecom Technology Is Riding New Trends To The Top
Heading into 2007, VoIP appeared poised for a breakout year in which it finally transformed from an early adopter’s dream to a trusted enterprise technology. In fact, Info-Tech Research named VoIP one of its hot technologies to watch in 2007 and predicted that by 2008, the technology will move from the “emerging” to the “established” application category.
“Carriers have done a good job of reducing their operating and transport costs with IP, which is great, but as the voice market has become more competitive, the focus has shifted to revenue generation and customer retention,” says Jon Arnold, principal of J. Arnold & Associates, which specializes in IP communications research and analysis.
Ironically, Arnold says, the market has actually grown more competitive because of IP, with operators that were previously absent from the voice business now making serious inroads into it. Many manufacturers and providers now see distinct opportunity in the space, and that interest is continuing to drive new trends. 
Changing Tide
Although the lure of significant savings on wiring infrastructure, long-distance service, and telecom operations appeared to initially drive the penetration of VoIP into the communications market, enterprises are discovering that money isn’t an overriding factor for switching from their established voice technologies.
“It turns out that VoIP solutions from traditional PBX vendors cost the same or more than legacy PBX equipment," says Martin Steinmann, senior vice president of marketing for Pingtel (www.pingtel.com). “If combined with the fact that most companies still use traditional PSTN [public switched telephone network] services for external communications, then, indeed, the cost savings are gone.”
However, Steinmann notes that VoIP can still deliver on the originally promised notion of cost savings by becoming interoperable, in turn granting customers a choice of end systems, such as phones and gateways. Further, he says that VoIP systems need to meld with applications that can run on commodity server hardware and that by breaking up vertically integrated solutions, costs will drop, competition will increase, and innovation will accelerate. All Together Now
As VoIP edges deeper into the enterprise mainstream, the push to make the technology an integral part of unified communications is evident. This effort is seeing voice make its way into data applications, such as email for unified messaging.
“All aspects of business, from the SMB to large corporations, will need unified communications, which is the key to the future of the VoIP markets where landlines and mobile products are seamlessly linked so travelers and road warriors can be connected to voice, video, and data—wherever they are,” says Steven Joe, president and CEO of D-Link Systems (www.Processor.com/DLink). “Converged networks allow standardization and wider opportunity for the network to be adopted by users, while removing the complexities between devices and services.”
According to Arnold, VoIP features will begin to mirror the PBX feature set and will help to push the technology into a more prominent role in mobility, particularly as FMC (fixed-mobile convergence) solutions come to market and bring more extensions of the PBX feature set to mobile phones. Once voice moves to IP, he says, businesses will start using features such as find-me/follow-me, visual voicemail, and conferencing on the fly.
“The new frontier is unified communications and presence-enabled services—what this means is integration of the telephone system with typical enterprise productivity applications such as CRM and ERP, as well as desktop integration,” Steinmann says. “Intelligent click-to-dial, federation of presence information, instant messaging and document sharing, desktop-initiated conferencing, etc. are among the new features enterprises would like to use.” Already In Motion
The prospects certainly appear bright for VoIP in the near future, but how close is it to reaching the “established” category alluded to by Info-Tech Research? According to Arnold, this transformation is happening right now.
“Early adopters of business VoIP have been large companies, but they have only deployed it on a limited basis,” he says. “As VoIP has proven itself with them, they are becoming more comfortable deploying it on a larger scale, and the more this happens, the more it filters down to smaller enterprises. VoIP continues to improve in terms of quality, reliability, scalability, and security and is now considered good enough for mainstream use.”
In fact, he says, vendors are now even productizing VoIP, offering distinct solutions for different market segments, such as SMEs and larger enterprises. Further, the emergence of hosted VoIP, which can prove highly useful for smaller businesses that can’t afford the capital expense of PBX systems but nonetheless desire more than regular telephony, is also helping to establish the technology.
According to some experts, telecommunications providers and manufacturers need to catch the wave now, while they can. “The strategic and competitive advantage of simply being in the market is that companies have the opportunity of gaining market share and visibility in this fast-growing market,” says Sonny Su, director of technology at TRENDnet (www.Processor.com/TRENDnet-Inc). “Companies that have presence in traditional telephony solutions better develop or acquire presence in the VoIP space, or their company may be left behind.”
D-Link’s Joe contends that pinpointing the precise time when VoIP morphs from "emerging" to "established" depends heavily on the marketing chain because well-known manufacturers must first establish their brand presence with solution providers, VARs, and integrators through cost-effective, easy-to-use products. He says they also must train themselves and build their expertise to offer these solutions to a broader audience. 
by Christian Perry
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