US Enterprises Use Security As a Crutch To Ignore IP Telephony Operational Issues

The Yankee Group 2005 Economics of IP Communications Survey looked closely at how North American enterprises prioritize deployments of IP telephony (IPT), conferencing applications (audio, video, web) and other forms of IP communications. Because most organizations will deploy IPT as the underlying foundation for other forms of IP communications, the survey asked several questions to reveal the breadth of IPT adoption (that metric will be a leading indicator of how fast other forms of IP communications will be adopted). At first glance, the survey indicated broad strength for IPT: 85% of the respondents have either tested or deployed IPT. Digging deeper, the survey shows that a paltry 7% of the respondents have deployed IPT across the entire company. The majority of enterprises (75%) have IPT in only a few locations. The survey also investigated, among many things, the factors that continue to inhibit the wide-scale rollouts of IPT. Past Yankee Group research indicates that the primary inhibitor was uncertainty about the cost/benefit aspect of IP communications. We believe there are other operational issues directly related to TCO that must be examined for costs to come down and deployments to gain traction.