Blog

The VoIP Market’s Gotten a Lot Tougher for the Little Guy (Pt 1)

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The government has never really known what to do with VoIP.

Rules and Regulations

On the one hand, VoIP is a telephony service, and as such some people argue it should be regulated and taxed in the same vein as other telephony services (such as traditional PTSN networks).

On the other hand, VoIP is an online service, a platform that isn’t so different from any other online application you might utilize, and one that should be open to new, small service providers. Seen from this angle, the notion of taxing and regulating VoIP has been a thorny issue, to say the least.

Over the years, as VoIP has increased and improved the services it’s offered and gradually transformed further and further into a full-service telephony platform, VoIP has seen increasing regulatory and tax burdens placed upon it. These burdens have dramatically changed the VoIP landscape- especially for small VoIP providers and organizations looking to become VoIP providers.

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Is Telephony Dying? Depends on How You Look at It (Pt 2)

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The reasons behind the drop in the telephony market are made clear in a statement tucked away in Infonetics’ report, which says:

“In the first quarter of 2013, enterprise PBX spending dropped to its lowest point since mid-2009. The big squeeze is coming from hyper-competitive price pressure all over, with average revenue per line down across the board. But conservative spending by businesses is exacerbating the problem in some regions, while demand is actually flat-to-up in North America and Asia, reflecting uneven economic recoveries.”

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Is Telephony Dying? Depends on How You Look at It (Pt 1)

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We hear it all the time- telephony is dead or, at the least, dying. Not long for the world. On its way out. It’s a story that people like to tell, but like most stories there isn’t much truth to it, and the truth that lies in this statement has been heavily distorted, misrepresented, and viewed through the wrong lens.

The most recent news of telephony’s untimely demise comes from a report released by Infonetics, which found that the telephony market took a skydive in the first quarter of 2013. But is that what really happened, or are there more factors at play here than Infonetics took into account? Could the telephony market actually be growing at a rapid rate, even if this one set of data makes it look like it’s plummeting into obscurity?

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Gartner Predicts BYOD Boom by 2018

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In a recent report, research organization Gartner predicted that 70% of professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018. To translate- Gartner effectively predicted that 70% of employees will be working on their own smartphones or tablets by 2018, a concept generally referred to as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device.

If BYOD plays out as Gartner predicts than this will be a huge change in the workplace, and one that requires some extensive planning to implement properly, with minimal friction.

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Bandwidth Demand Spikes – Are You Ready?

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VoIP bandwidthWe’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that you need to make sure you adopt the Unified Communications solution that meets your organization’s needs- and part of that preparedness means making sure you provision the bandwidth your organization will require to run its telecommunication systems effectively. If your existing bandwidth supply doesn’t provide the connection speeds and reliability required to handle your organization’s existing needs, then it’s not going to cut it when you upgrade to a VoIP communications network.

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Hosted Telecom Solutions Reaching Tipping Point?

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Future TelecomWe’ve been talking about the growth of telecommunications networks for a long time now, and how explosively our technologies are taking over the traditional telecom landscape. But a recent prediction form Strategy Analytics really underscores just how popular our solutions are becoming- and just how quickly they’re supplanting the old guard. The news comes out of a recent statement from Strategy Analytics’ executive director of enterprise research, Andrew Brown, who stated that the switch to a hosted unified communications system makes the most sense in our increasingly collaborative workplaces. Brown stated that collaboration “…frequently involves people from different organizations on mobile and non-mobile devices….” and that these new networks further enable the sorts of device-agnostic and location-independent organizational philosophies being adopted en-masse these days. Yet Brown backed up his statements with more than just forward-thinking platitudes, and brought in some hard data to support his assertions. These telecom networks accrued $7.4 billion in revenue over the last year, providing 12% year-over-year growth. At this rate, Brown argues that adoption of these telecom solutions will reach a tipping point soon, and that within two years these remote solutions will earn more annual income than traditional on-premise solutions.

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Do Customers Care About Phone Systems?

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It’s easy to think about your organization’s phone system as a purely internal affair, something that impacts your own employees and doesn’t really touch anyone else.

This just isn’t the case. While it’s certainly important to take your organization’s internal operations into consideration when adopting a new communication system, it’s a bad idea to ignore the ways your organization’s communication systems impact everyone else you handle during your day-to-day operations.

Even though these external individuals and the impact of your telecom system on them may not be right in front of your face (the way your employees are), when it comes down to it your organization’s long-term success depends a lot more on having effective telephony systems than you’d likely guess.

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Enterprise VoIP Market Prefers Private Cloud Over Public Cloud (Pt 2)

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As previously stated, enterprise-class organizations are jumping onto the private cloud at much higher rates than the public cloud. Why are they doing this, and will this choice of private-over-public really spell the doom of a whole generation of Chief Information Officers, as some public-cloud boosters argue?

Public vs Private: Defined

The public cloud is the cloud we’ve all heard about, a space of shared storage, of software-as-service, a place where your organization doesn’t have to own any hardware of its own. In fact, the public cloud is sold as a place where your organization doesn’t need to hold any software of its own either, or really much of anything other than a few shipments of smartphones and tablets.

By contrast, the private cloud is a remote-hosted network solution that offers just about all of the streamlined benefits of the public cloud, but with a lot more control and security. In the public cloud the infrastructure hosting your network is shared with a bunch of other organizations. In fact, the infrastructure is shared with as many other organizations as your service provider thinks they can cram on theirs. By contrast, in the private cloud your organization’s data and applications are stored and managed through infrastructure that’s used exclusively by your own organization.

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Enterprise VoIP Market Prefers Private Cloud Over Public Cloud (Pt 1)

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When you hear about virtualized business environments, remote-hosted network solutions and IP telephony services, you might think that all of these terms represent a single monolithic technology. While it’s clear the qualities of these services vary from vendor to vendor, not everyone is aware of the fact there are plenty of different deployment methods for each of these. In fact, the differences between one remote-hosted network deployment and another can be rather dramatic.

One of the biggest divides in the world remote-hosted networks lies between private and public cloud deployment. And while public clouds may be getting all the press, private clouds appear to be the deployment method the enterprise market is jumping to.

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What UC Features Do Businesses Actually Want?

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The promise of UC is great for the future of business, but what features do businesses, their employees and their managers, actually want from this communications advancement? A new survey conducted and released by a top UC provider offers some clues to what elements of modern communications technologies businesses find most frustrating, and what they want to take advantage of when they decide to make the change over to a UC solution.

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