Enterprises of all sizes are making a serious commitment to full deployment of Voice over IP technology. The majority of organizations now have the technology in place, apparently satisfied with the strong economic case for VoIP and impressed with the technology’s flexibility and functionality.
Adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology increased significantly between 2008 and 2009. For the first time more than half of all organizations had the technology in place and are continuing to invest in it, according to our study, VoIP Adoption, ROI, and TCO Trends.
Figure 1 shows that 57% of organizations had VoIP technology in place in 2009, up significantly from just 43% in 2007 and 45% in 2008. Meanwhile, the percentage of organizations currently investing in VoIP increased steadily, from 43% in 2007 to 54% in 2009.
The increasing popularity of VoIP is likely caused by several factors. The technology has become more reliable, accepted, and mainstream during the past two years, and business users have become more comfortable with the technology, no longer perceiving it as risky. This is in part due to large cable and telecom carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, Time-Warner, Cox Communications, and others switching more of their own networks to VoIP. At the same time, VoIP has become much more attractive to businesses with a dispersed workforce because cost savings in long-distance service are easily demonstrated. The fact that new IP-based VoIP systems can co-exist with existing PBX telephone systems is another factor.
The full study examines the technology’s adoption trends, providing data on how many organizations have the technology in place, how many are in the process of implementing it, and how many are expanding implementations. To give additional insight, we look at the economic experience of those that have adopted the technology: We examine return on investment (ROI) experience in terms of the percentage of organizations that report positive and break-even ROI within a two-year period. We also balance the potential ROI against the risks, measured in terms of the percentage of organizations that exceed budgets for total cost of ownership (TCO). We conclude that VoIP has become a useful and viable technology that has moved well beyond the testing stage to the full implementation stage.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, VoIP Adoption, ROI, and TCO Trends. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).