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A recent report from Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) indicates that the market for VoIP access and SIP trunking will more than triple between 2013 and 2020. It also found that the typical enterprise is likely to implement a combination of solutions that best fits their needs rather than a one-size-fits-all package.

The numbers alone tell a story of significant growth in VoIP access and SIP trunking, both in the short and long term. In 2013 alone, the market grew nearly 35 percent in terms of number of users and 19 percent in terms of revenue. The latter is expected to grow at a rate of 21 percent, from $3.22 billion in 2014 to $10.29 billion in 2020.

The report also found that a typical enterprise’s communications solution is a mix of different services and products. These businesses have unique communications needs that an all-encompassing package cannot fulfill. This results in a growing number of companies using solutions that are a hybrid of hosted and on-premises cloud environments.

Several obstacles have limited the growth of the market for VoIP access and SIP trunking. Restrictive contracts that keep customers locked in for longer terms limit their ability to choose the combination of products that best fit their needs. The good news, according to the report, is that this will become less of a factor over the next decade.

Deployment time is another obstacle to market growth. A combination of integration between the different SIP environments that an enterprise uses and the fact that implementation is a largely manual process make it take longer for enterprises to obtain the communications solutions they envision.

The next ‘better mousetrap’ for VoIP access and SIP trunking will be a system that meets an enterprise’s unique communications needs, yet be deployed quickly. The difficult question is how exactly will this be accomplished?

Will it come at the vendor level, where a solution is designed to be so flexible that it can be easily customized without the integrator losing money, or will it come from an integrator that can make numerous disparate systems work together without taking a long time to get up and running? Whichever can achieve the objective first will become a market leader.