Every so often, a technology surfaces that is as appealing to business leaders as it is to IT professionals. “That cross-departmental adoption appeal is Nirvana for a business,” says Joseph Staples, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Indianapolis-based Interactive Intelligence, Inc. “Internet Protocol communications exemplifies this phenomenon, demonstrating tangible and sustainable value for both sides. So it’s no real surprise that it has emerged as a hot, fast-growing technology.” IDG Research Services recently surveyed CIO Magazine subscribers from a cross-section of industries— including financial services, health care, government, high tech, manufacturing and more—regarding their thoughts on IP communications. Some interesting insight came to light, including the following:
- Most respondents have implemented IP PBXs or plan to implement them within the next 12 months.
- The migration to IP communications is marked by growth in key enabled solutions.
- Business considerations are driving enterprise IP communications investments.
- Network readiness and reliability are cited as top concerns.
Big Plans to Implement IP PBXs
Despite some lingering market perceptions to the contrary, IP communications is indeed a mature technology in the midst of broad industry adoption.
In fact, the IDG Research Services survey reports that 50 percent of respondents already have IP PBXs installed today and that 63 percent indicate that the technology will be part of their telephony infrastructure within the next 12 months. What’s more, the percentage of telephony users on hosted VOIP is expected to grow from 23 percent of users to 30 percent in the coming year. In contrast, traditional telephony usage is on a sharp decline. In the course of the year, the number of respondents with traditional PBXs in their infrastructure will fall 20 percent and the number of Centrex users is also expected to decrease.
What’s motivating this migration? For one thing, VOIP can deliver significant cost savings. Cost was the early driver of VOIP and remains important, but it is no longer the only driver of adoption. CIOs are turning to the technology also to gain access to various telephony-based applications and to deal with distributed business operations.
Take, for example, the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to Dan Rainey, director of information technology, the city is now in the planning process for an enterprise-scale IP communications project. With an IP-enabled call center already in place, Rainey is looking to move to a centrally managed telecommunications environment using VOIP technology. He’s hoping to eliminate some of the problems that come with a decentralized environment, including “line oversubscription, deployment of many mini-PBXs, call trees that are no longer relevant, multiple voice-mail systems and an inconsistent level of customer service for constituents.”
However, a “follower mentality” is definitely at play here too. “We’ve needed to upgrade our telephony infrastructure, and it simply made sense to head down the IP path,” says Alan Ariel, assistant VP, ITC, at Rollins Corporation, a North American consumer and commercial services company. This means that VOIP has become so trendy that enterprises are replacing fully depreciated traditional PBXs with IP PBXs simply because the market says it’s the natural next step. When pushed, followers may not even be able to cite a hard business case to justify the move. That doesn’t make the decision any less appropriate—it’s just a bit undefined.
IP Solution Adoption on the Rise
The migration to IP communications is marked by significant adoption trends for many innovative technologies. For starters, the survey reveals an expected increase, from the current 30 percent to 49 percent, in unified messaging deployment in the next 12 months. Unified messaging is a long-heralded “killer app” that, thanks to VOIP, may finally be taking hold.
The challenge is that CIOs must defend the purchase with a softdollar justification, because unified messaging is all about productivity gains—a tough sell in many boardrooms. The alternative is to make it “a side effect of the inevitable replacement of existing aging voice-mail systems,” as sevenEcho did, says Syd Weinstein, chief technology officer of this provider of profilebased personalized interactive entertainment platforms. Although the overall penetration is still small, two of the hottest IP telephony solutions show significant promise: Within the respondent base, the adoption of speech recognition is expected to grow from 15 percent today to 24 percent a year from now.
