Small and Medium Businesses Predict VoIP Market to Grow

New research from Ami-Partners, which involves opinions from small and medium businesses, indicates that VoIP market will grow in coming years. According to the research, over 30 percent of small businesses (1 – 99 employees) and 50 percent of medium businesses (100-999 employees) say that VoIP will become critical to their business operations.

The small and medium businesses expect to reap benefits from VoIP in improved staff productivity, streamlined dispersed communications, and lower costs.

“The last several years of recession caused many SMBs to put new technology purchases on hold,” said Karen Nielsen, senior consultant with AMI, in a press release. “Moving into 2011, cost savings, as well as the advanced features available with IP, will impel more and more SMBs to IP architecture implementation.”

Due to availability of limited IT resources with most SMBs, they will rely heavily on channel partners for VoIP installation and turnover, and to help with the crossover from analog to digital.

“The moment of conversion from analog to digital voice is the single biggest pain point for SMBs,” adds Nielsen. “Suppliers and channel partners should be prepared to make this switchover seamless. Partners should also understand and be able to prove that economic benefits stem not only from lower ongoing costs but also from a lower TCO.”

However, seeing growth opportunities from a supplier perspective, it is still early to say. The major problems for suppliers can be unknown players in the market, not completely defined architectures and unstructured markets. However, despite the problems, AMI believes that in the recent future, the same things that are important to analog/TDM users will be important to digital/IP users: reliability, security, and quality. The winners will be those providers who can provide not only a reliable service, but an alternate back up, as well as the channel expertise to serve SMBs from soup to nuts if needed.

Rahul Arora is a virtual-pbx contributor. He has worked as an editor and freelance writer for several reputed organizations in India. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf