Competition Driving Healthy Revenues For VoIP
0Overall Score

Increased competition in the voice over internet protocol (VoIP) market is driving revenue growth with businesses are ramping up their investments in VoIP technologies both on customer premises equipment (CPE) and hosted VoIP, according to new data from ABI Research.

Both CPE vendors and hosted VoIP service providers are using product differentiation, attractive pricing and improved customer service to win and keep customers. As a result, the integrated unified communications suites market, which was adversely affected by the GFC, is poised to see consistent growth to reach revenues of $4.8 billion by 2015, says ABI Research.

Asia Pacific and North America are the two most aggressive regions using hosted VoIP deployments.

IP PBX vendors are expected to ship just over 35 million IP lines (including native IP and hybrid lines) worldwide during 2010. IP telephony shipments will continue to see robust growth throughout the forecast period as enterprise communications systems converge on the IP platform.

In the North American market, hosted VoIP services are buoyed by an additional set of drivers including the slow economic recovery, employee mobilization, and a more distributed workforce. 
 
“Senior analyst Subha Rama says: “Even large businesses that traditionally shied away from hosted services for mission-critical communications are deploying hybrid models, experimenting with hosted services in smaller doses.” 

Practice director, Dan Shey, said: “Hosted VoIP is a ‘safe investment’ and offers flexibility for businesses in a slow, uncertain economic recovery. Consequently, hosted IP PBX services are expected to finish the year with a 15.3% increase in revenue to $3.4 billion, worldwide. Besides North America, Asia-Pacific will also be aggressive with hosted VoIP deployments.”