Crisis drives hosted VoIP adoption
Sunday, August 16th, 2009
According to a recent study by Forrester research, the current economic crisis has lead companies to prefer software as a service (SaaS) solutions over premise-based deployments. Nearly 50% of enterprises and nearly 40% of small businesses confirmed opting for hosted telecommunication services, citing limits in capital expenditure as well as focusing on core competencies.
It looks like Skype finally means business. Just a couple of days after we reported about the Skype-Asterisk connection, Skype is opening up to the entire SIP PBX world. The company today announced its beta program “Skype for SIP” which will allow SIP PBX’s to connect to the more than 405 million Skype users worldwide.
Many of our customers have considered using Skype as the main communication tool within their company. When asked for my opinion on that, I’ve always likened the use of Skype for business telephony with the use of Hotmail for business e-mail. Usually this gets the point across fairly quickly.
When faced with crisis, companies have to cut costs and delay investments. Cutting costs, leads to a slowdown in the economy, further stimulating a possible crisis. It’s safe to say 2009 will be a crisis year, this means companies going bankrupt and even more companies cutting costs, as such cutting profits in other businesses. So what does 2009 has in store for the VoIP market?
Once it was one of Canada’s biggest employers and a stock market darling, just a couple of days ago it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. Nortel has been struggling for years now, facing increasing competition from companies such as Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson. While its stock was once worth more than C$1100, it now plumetted to C$0.15