[December 09, 2010]

U.S. SMBs Increase Migration to VoIP and IP PBX

According to new research, AMI-Partners forecasts growth in the VoIP market among small and medium businesses (SMBs). Over 30% of small businesses (SBs, 1 - 99 employees) and 50% of medium businesses (MBs, 100-999 employees) say that VoIP will become critical to their business operations.

SMB decision-makers see benefit 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," according to Karen Nielsen, Senior Consultant with AMI. "Moving into 2011, cost savings, as well as the advanced features available with IP, will impel more and more SMBs to IP architecture implementation."

Most SMBs have limited IT resources; 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," says 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."

From a supplier perspective, it is still early. The players are not fully known. The architectures are not completely defined. The markets are not structured. But AMI believes that down the road, the same things that are important to analog/TDM users will be important to digital/IP users: reliability, security, andquality. 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.

About the Study

AMI's 2010 VoIP Update - U.S. SMB Market report provides an in-depth analysis of Voice over IP usage by U.S. small and medium businesses. AMI believes that the market for IP based voice communications, i.e. VoIP, IP PBX (News - Alert) will eventually merge. The last several years have been dogged by a difficult recession and many SMBs put on hold technology decisions. In the end, the migration of voice and data continues, the chance to leverage data networks with voice communications continues, and the opportunity for greater market penetration of IP solutions among the SMB community remains large.

This report explores the possibilities and challenges for vendors, IP Solution providers and channel partners alike.

For more information about this study or AMI's partner targeting solutions, please call 212 944 5100, e-mail [email protected] or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence - focusing on global small and medium business (SMB) enterprises. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest-quality data, business planning and go-to-market solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years' experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.

AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 30 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.

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