Hosted IP Telephony Maturing for Mainstream Enterprise Adoption

Network World — IP telephony adoption has progressed slowly for more than a decade, however with hosted voice vendors now offering modular consumption models and shifting away from simply viewing hosted voice as a way to sell broader unified communications solutions, organizations can now pursue IP telephony services as a highly scalable stand-alone service.

The roadblocks imposed

Beyond the roadblocks imposed by a struggling economy, enterprise adoption of IP telephony has been hampered by multiple factors. For instance, many legacy TDM systems provide acceptable performance and reliability, and since many PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange)s are fully depreciated, it can be difficult to make a compelling case for their replacement.

Limited knowledge of underlying communications infrastructure and uncertainty about potential requirements and costs to upgrade infrastructure to support VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), as well present challenges, as do delays around gaining organization-wide consensus and vendors' lack of a compelling value proposition to make the switch.

There are operational benefits as then, including business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities that are wrapped into the service, removing the need for complex research architectures and operational processes to support system resiliency. Enterprises as well avoid the risk of innovation obsolescence as the multi-tenant model encourages the hosted voice provider to maintain telephony platforms at current release levels.