Amongst the early adopters, two-thirds of organisations gave cost saving as a reason for implementation, followed by wanting to improve productivity (42%) and wanting to enable a mobile workforce (36%).
Danny Williams, Marketing Director, Telindus, comments, "The benefits of VoIP/IPT are certainly being realised by businesses - EMEA-wide, Telindus has over 110 IPT customers, with 30,000 IP phones in use daily. Reduced call and infrastructure costs and enhanced functionality are driving adoption, as businesses seek greater productivity and mobility."
Although a quarter of those not already implementing VoIP/IPT said they are planning to do so, one in ten companies feel there is no need for VoIP/IPT in their organisation. Other perceived obstacles to take up include:
• Waiting for the market to decide which is the best system (20%)
• Think it's too expensive (19%)
• Unplanned downtime and reliability still an issue (8%)
• Speech quality not consistently good enough (7%)
Convergence
Whilst 51% of IT managers believe that the convergence of networks is already commercially viable, almost half do not - most (64%) because they believe it costs too much. Other perceived barriers to adoption are:
• Lack of understanding and technical skills needed to implement it (49%)
• Quality of Service and unplanned downtime (44%)
• Security (33%)
"Convergence is happening. 51% of businesses believe it is viable and we've seen from our client base that it does lead to real business benefits," says Williams. "With the right processes and SLAs, a converged network can help CIOs and IT managers deliver vast improvements to the business in terms of flexibility, manageability and Total Cost of Ownership, as well as give them the ability to support applications that can deliver competitive advantage."