VoIP Adoption in the Enterprise

By Stephanie Jordan
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Although VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol) has been around for a while, it hasn’t enjoyed an outrageous adoption pace. According to Michael Osterman, Principal of Osterman Research, VoIP offers the potential for substantially lower telephony costs, integration with presence and traditional messaging, and the opportunity to make low cost unified communications a reality. Osterman believes that VoIP is especially attractive in this economy particularly because of the ability to lower communication costs, yet boost employee productivity.

The current adoption pace of VoIP, however, is not unexpected. Back in 2006 Infonetics Research released a study noting that VoIP might take some time to be widely adopted. At the time the study was released, Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics Research predicted: “Our forecasts show a continued steady uptake of VoIP over the next few years, with adoption following a relatively straight line, not the S-shaped curve typically seen in the adoption of emerging technologies. That’s because VoIP uptake is largely tied to an organization needing a new phone system, and when companies buy a new phone system, they generally invest in the latest technology, which happens to be VoIP-based now. By our estimates, almost half of small and two-thirds of large organizations in North America will be using VoIP products and services by 2010.”

The Osterman report Enterprise VoIP Market Trends 2009-2012 published earlier this year, revealed that some of that anticipated growth is being impacted by the economy because today only the most critical expenditures are being met. Osterman writes, “While 40 percent of respondents indicated that their organization had budgeted for VoIP in 2009, up from 31 percent in last year’s survey, the actual numbers spent per organization are going to be significantly lower.”

Of the organizations that participated in Osterman’s research, 50 percent identified Skype as the VoIP system being used. Followed by Other (14 percent), MSN (11 percent) and Google Talk (13 percent). Osterman says that Skype estimates its enterprise penetration at about 30 percent of its user base and adds that Skype has been trying to make enterprise inroads with various product enhancements including the announcement earlier this year at IBM Lotusphere 2009 to integrate Skype functionality with LotusLive.

When it came to forecasting VoIP deployments, Osterman believes that the number of VoIP users is on rise. Osterman observes: “As we looked at the data by organizational size, the greatest number of VoIP users in absolute numbers were in organizations with over 50,000 users (350,000 or 35 percent of users), but the highest penetration of users using VoIP systems was in organizations with fewer than 250 employees (58 percent).”

Osterman anticipates, regardless of the economy and shrinking budgets, that the importance of VoIP will continue to grow and will be seen as more important than unified communications. In addition, he predicts that the coming year will see an increase in the number of vendors that offer hosted VoIP as part of hosted email services: “We anticipate that many of the 150+ hosted Exchange providers will add VoIP to their mix of offerings, as will other vendors.”

Keep an eye out for a September article in Messaging News that will take a deeper look at VoIP and its adoption in the enterprise.

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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com

Published August 27, 2009