Tight Budgets Drive SMEs to Hosted VoIP

Doug Mohney — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:49:49 -0400

Hosted IP PBX services are breaking out across North America and it's a good thing because tighter budgets are motivating SMEs to hosted solutions, says Frost & Sullivan.

F&S expects nearly 4 million hosted users in 2013, a large increase from the 860,000 in 2007. Lack of capital budgets for many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is cited as the key driver for the North American hosted IP telephony and VoIP access service markets. Companies can get an advanced solution without spending a lot of money up front and avoid ongoing operating expenses.

The downside to this is a lack of in-house IT staff that can delay the adoption of new IT and/or telecom solutions, forcing smaller business owners to have to sort through and figure out options for themselves. Other problems to adoption include negative perceptions around traditional Centrix services and vendor reliability concerns. SMEs are still judging hosted providers by service quality, reliability, provisioning, pricing, and feature diversity.

For more:
- Read Frost and Sullivan's announcement of its SME Hosted VoIP report

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Helpful Hints for VoIP SME

Doug Mohney — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:17:00 -0400

Small to medium-sized businesses looking at VoIP solutions need to weigh a number a number of factors and processor.com does a nice job of summing up the more salient technie points.

SIP support is a must, both for stock voice and more elaborate multimedia transactions including instant messaging and video. Hosted PBX systems deliver a number of advantages, including a pay-per-seat model, minimized upfront capital expense and less physical infrastructure to deal with. It's always good to think about VoIP as the stepping stone to unified communications.

More complicated headaches include NAT traversing, especially when it comes to a remote and/or constantly moving phone, and choosing the best codecs to fit the task and bandwidth available.

For more:
- Processor's points to ponder on SME VoIP

Related articles:
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Fonality, Allworx top SMB IP PBX appliance reviews

sme

Tight Budgets Drive SMEs to Hosted VoIP

Helpful Hints for VoIP SME