As Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) access and session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking services continue their respective rise up in the business world, enterprising leaders are finding new ways to use the technologies to their best advantage. They’re doing so as more and more companies realize VoIP access and SIP trunking services are well on their way to eclipsing the old-time legacy digital telecom, due mostly to advanced capabilities and overall lower costs.

Need some numbers to back that up? According to new research from industry giant Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) titled “Analysis of the North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Market”, it was discovered that VoIP and SIP earned revenues of $3.22 billion in 2014. Even better, that number is expected to more than triple to $10.29 billion by 2020.

"Modern unified communication platforms natively support SIP trunking as the default interface," said Frost & Sullivan Unified Communications (News - Alert) & Collaboration Industry Analyst Michael Brandenburg. "For businesses migrating to these new platforms, VoIP and SIP trunking services are, therefore, an obvious choice."

Indeed, the research showed that SIP trunking services will play heavily in the emerging trend of hybrid cloud communications. Many businesses are now incorporating a mix of on-premises and cloud-based unified communications (UC) applications and services to most effectively deliver unified communications to their users. But on the flip side, the study also found that competition from other cloud-based services such as hosted unified communications limits adoption. And the time taken to deploy SIP trunking services also poses a challenge to large-scale growth.

"Simple, optimized deployments will be the stepping stone to faster migration," Brandenburg noted. "As service providers find the right balance between price and performance, product differentiation will be the key to thwart commoditization and open the doors to success in the North American market."