VoIP is Becoming Entrenched in Business Culture as Part of Larger UC Solutions

When I first began writing for Internet Telephony magazine in 1998, part of our job was to convince the business world at large that VoIP was not just a quirky little hobbyist trend. The market was already in full swing with big names like 3Com, Lucent and Cisco feverishly developing products and educating the channel about the large-scale advantages of VoIP.

Even then, the benefits of VoIP technologies and applications for the business world were evident, if networks hadn’t quite evolved to the point of being able to seamlessly handle packetized voice calls. VoIP standards, technologies and equipment have all evolved tremendously since then and IP phone calls are traveling on very different networks today. The way VoIP is perceived by the business world has changed too, and it’s no longer a question of whether VoIP is a good bet or whether you should just keep plugging away with your legacy phone system. It’s a question of when and how you will adopt VoIP as part of your overall unified communications (UC) offering.

Ambiguity about whether VoIP will penetrate mainstream businesses has been erased. Infonetics Research says the global market will reach $88 billion by 2018 and SIP trunking had risen by 50 percent in 2013.

“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up market as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market.”

The rise of the cloud and hosted and managed UC solutions have all been positive factors in VoIP adoption. As businesses become more receptive to the massive amount of features, flexibility, scalability and attractive price points of these types of offerings, they are set to become entrenched in corporate communications culture. Growing trends like BYOD and mobility are also pushing businesses to adopt UC solutions that take advantage of VoIP over expensive and difficult to maintain legacy offerings.

VoIP for businesses has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and it still has massive growth potential in its future. As organizations continue to streamline their operations while continuing to adopt the latest technologies, VoIP is poised to become ubiquitous as part of today’s generation of UC solutions.