Despite the economic recession currently sweeping across the nation, a new study from Infonetics Research revealed that worldwide hosted PBX (News - Alert) deployments increased between the second and third quarter of this year.

 

In its worldwide enterprise telephony market report, Infonetics Research (News - Alert) discovered that the hosted PBX sector saw a nine percent growth in revenue and seven percent in lines.

 

VoIP phone shipments saw year-on-year growth of 25 percent, while IP softphone deliveries more than doubled between the two quarters. The telephony market also grew overall by eight percent over the period, reaching $2.6 billion.

According to Infonetics Research’s Matthias Machowinski, hosted PBX was successful in 2008 thanks to new product launches and IP softphones. He believes that the industry should come out of the current economic slump relatively unscathed and will continue to experience annual growth.

So what are the reasons behind the hosted PBX market’s steady growth? Bloor Research cites cost savings as one major benefit for businesses that switch from a conventional system to hosted PBX. In fact, businesses can save up to 40 percent in telecoms costs the report claims.

Author Carl Potter, communications research director at Bloor Research, explained that the specific amount of savings depends on "how bad things were" before the switch.

He explained that businesses that have a number of premises spread across various locations, have old PBX systems and require a large amount of communications tend to do best from deploying a hosted PBX system.

"They gain from lower cost of ownership and simplified management and lower cost VoIP calls and also improved communications between sites and with customers and suppliers, etc." Potter said.

Another reason for the rise in hosted PBX deployments could be because they are ideal for today’s economic climate, according to Richard Bligh, marketing director at Gamma Telecom.

 

He explained: “Even the most resilient business needs to look hard at its offering in today’s market where margins are tight and customer wins are harder to achieve. It’s easy however for those who traditionally sell data services to infiltrate a new market with hosted IP Telephony packages. These are becoming an increasingly attractive option because they present an easy in-road to the telephony market and broaden companies’ portfolios, allowing customers to access voice and data services from one supplier.”

 

In addition, hosted PBX solutions can help smaller businesses that cannot afford the initial outlay and maintenance costs of a traditional PBX system.

 

Businesses selecting hosted PBX over conventional IP PBX models save themselves initial set up costs, according to an expert.

Samuel Schneider, Bandwidth.com marketing director, was asked if the outlay and maintenance of hosted PBX could stop smaller companies from deploying VoIP solutions.

He said: "The prohibitive cost and maintenance demands of traditional IP PBX technology was responsible in part for the emergence of the hosted IP PBX model, which charged businesses monthly fees per seat or per employee, dramatically reducing initial investment."

Steven Kokinos, Thinking Phone Networks CEO agrees, adding: “the hosted model is ideal for many organizations. We are able to help our customers reduce both up-front capital expenses and operating expenses. To do that while providing deep integration across business applications is very compelling for today’s enterprises, especially in challenging economic times”.

 

Thinking Phone Networks, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) provider, offers a reasonably priced hosted PBX service, called C3Voice. This service eliminates the cost and complexity of a premise-based system. Since the PBX is located centrally within the company’s distributed network, it provides a dependable, scalable voice platform with unique integration possibilities across the entire C3 (News - Alert) Suite.

 

C3 is the industry’s first solution combining customer communications with customer management applications on a single hosted platform. It is also the first and only hosted service platform that leverages advanced analytics to provide a coherent view of customer interactions including voice, instant messaging, e-mail, Web, sales and support activity. With C3, managers can make fully informed business decisions.

 

In an interview with Technology Marketing Corporation last week, Steven Kokinos, president and CEO of Thinking Phone Networks, shared his thoughts on his company’s achievements and makes his predictions for the IP Communications market in 2009.