For VoIP, enterprises prefer step-by-step migration

Integrated Research--a strange name for a company that offers Voice over IP (VoIP) and IP Telephony management solutions--conducted their own survey (they are a research company after all, right?) called the 2004 IP Telephony Market Study. More than 15,000 executives responsible for IT infrastructure were invited to participate in the online study in September 2004. Heres the key finding:

Three out of four respondents stated they already had, or intended to deploy IP telephony within the next 12 months. Of these respondents, 67 percent had an initial implementation of less than 500 phones. It is then interesting to note that 66 percent stated they would expand their IP telephony deployment to over 1,000 phones within the next 24 months. A simple conclusion can be drawn from these results that a phased implementation is the preferred integration approach for IP telephony.
Sure, Ihesitate to take at face value what technology vendors say when they sponsor or produce their own research to highlight the growth and importance of the market they target. But this seems to make sense logically. And when you look at results from a study from ABI Research,there is more evidence that supportsa slow transitional approach for VoIP migration. According to Michael Arden, a principal analyst at ABI, "larger enterprises that have legacy PBX systems have a decision to make: do they rip out an expensive legacy system and write it off? Or do they build a 'bridge', and make a gradual migration to VoIP?" The latter choice is common, said Arden in a report.

So enterprises are taking a transitional approach to migrationfrom both ascale and technology perspective.

Meanwhile, IP telephony vendors are stepping up their management offerings. Avaya introduced a remote software-based service, Avaya Remote Managed Services for IP Telephony, that can help businesses manage their converged voice and data IP telephony networks. Gartner (reg. req.) says this is good news, (as it usually does when talking about Avaya). In this case, heres why:

Gartner tracks more than 100 providers of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services. However, we see a vacuum of capabilities in managing large IP telephony deployments. Therefore, we view Avayas entrance into the RMM services market as a positive for the successful adoption of an enterprise-class, converged voice and data infrastructure.