Enterprises leading VoIP revolution

Voice over IP (VoIP) is finally being taken seriously by mainstream businesses, industry analysts have reported.

Although consumer adoption of the technology is currently attracting the most attention, VoIP is rapidly gaining business acceptance, driven by enterprise adoption of hosted services, according to IDC.

The analyst estimates the market for hosted IP voice services among US businesses to reach nearly $60m by the end of 2004, with spending to reach $7.6bn in 2008.

The fastest growing VoIP market will be hosted IP voice services for business customers.

By using hosted IP voice services companies avoid capital expenditure and maintenance contracts, and management is outsourced to a secure, central location.

In addition, IDC said that this option allows customers instant access to the latest hardware and software upgrades.

William Stofega, VoIP services senior research analyst at IDC, suggested that VoIP is finally poised to overtake and replace the ageing but reliable circuit switched infrastructure.

"IDC believes that the business market is ripe for adoption of VoIP and the features and functionalities that it promises," he said in a statement.

"Hoping to avoid the savage price wars that have decimated other business services, as well as fight off losses to IP PBX vendors, carriers are beginning to offer hosted IP services to business customers."