17% per annum for the next five years, reaching EUR12 billion in Western
Europe and, by 2010, 1.6 million corporate employees in Western Europe will
have discarded their traditional fixed office phone and have only a mobile
phone handset.
“New technologies and novel approaches are causing fresh disruption in the
enterprise voice market as vendors attempt to deliver the new ultimate goal
of enterprises: to reach anyone, anytime, anywhere,” says Margaret Hopkins,
the report’s author. “VoIP has become the de facto future of voice systems,
and, consequently, vendors are ceasing development of the older TDM (time
division multiplex) systems.
“VoIP systems allow users of softphones to have their office phone wherever
they plug in their laptop, and mobile solutions, including email and smart
phones, can now behave as if they are extensions on the company’s private
telephone network (PBX),” adds Margaret Hopkins.
However, says Analysys, enterprises cannot necessarily justify spend on
VoIP outside of the contact centre unless they need a new voice system
anyway. “Existing TDM equipment cannot compete with the new features but it
works adequately for most situations. It is only in the contact centre,
where performance is closely monitored, that upgrading to VoIP can be
justified,” adds Margaret Hopkins.
The new report looks at the drivers of change in the enterprise voice
market, and the convergence of fixed and mobile solutions. Overall, spend
on enterprise voice systems and services is expected to fall at the rate of
about 1.3% per annum, with VoIP and mobile spend growing at the expense of
TDM. (Chart available to journalists on request).
“Deployment has started of ‘mostly-mobile’ systems, in which almost all
employees use mobile phones for all voice communications,” says Hopkins,
“In effect, new ‘mostly-mobile’ systems are VoIP systems in which there are
no IP handsets – thus eliminating one of the big costs of migration to
VoIP.”
The new report examines the current state of enterprise voice systems. It
details the improved functionality VoIP and mobile systems can bring and
includes case studies of corporate voice networks to show how far this
functionality meets the communications managers’ needs. The report contains
forecasts of spend on fixed and mobile voice services, equipment,
management and connectivity for European enterprises of 20-499 and 500+
employees for 2005 to 2010.