IDC Predicts VOIP Battle

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- Emerging opportunities in IP Centrex will give RBOCs and other carriers a practical and immediate means of moving into voice over IP (VoIP) and a revenue-producing justification for deploying softswitch architectures, says a new report from IDC. These opportunities will drive IP Centrex revenue from $281 million in 2003 to $6.7 billion in 2007. The report also cautions that the RBOCs must move quickly in order to prevent further erosion of their existing Centrex customers. "Time is of the essence for these carriers. They need to quickly define and take action on their hosted services strategies since, in 2003 and beyond, enterprise solutions from vendors such as Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, Avaya, Alcatel, and Siemens will gradually begin to move into larger enterprises,” noted Tom Valovic, director of IDC's IP Telephony Program. Converged networks have a lot of appeal in the current economic climate. In fact, IDC research shows that economics is often a major value proposition, both on the carrier and premise sides of the market. Progress in enhanced services and applications (see diagram) will eventually give customers additional incentives to purchase but this adoption which generally take longer and will require companies to recognize the value in advanced features such as unified messaging and desktop integration. Over the longer term, applications convergence may be the big draw in the enterprise. SIP-based solutions could catch fire with end users, especially as they relate to user-defined communications (UDC), which IDC believes is the closest thing the IP Telephony market has to a "killer app." These are Web-based capabilities that allow telecom administrators to provision and change services and end users to control the flow of their communications at the desktop level. IDC predicts that UDC will achieve critical mass sometime in the next 2-3 years and become widely used in corporate business at all levels.IDC