Enterprises more than doubled their SIP trunking investments in 2011 compared with 2010, but the room for further growth is almost unlimited.
According to the industry analyst firm Infonetics Research, SIP spending was up 128 percent last year, making it one of the fastest-growing telecom services in North America. But even with that kind of growth, SIP Trunking accounted for only one of 10 trunks deployed here.
Network World featured a brief question-and-answer session with Infonetics analyst Diane Myers, and while you can read the whole thing here, we'll give you a brief rundown if you want to save a click.
What is driving this strong growth, Myers says, is enterprise infrastructure upgrades, with companies deploying IP PBXs that support SIP, along with a desire to centralize trunking assets to reduce costs and better manage their capacity. She adds that while lower costs are a good thing, the savings are really more of a bonus that rides along with the improved management of call volume.
Interestingly, Myers said that organizations that are turning to SIP still are not using it for 100 percent of their capacity. They haven't turned their back on T1s or PRI, so these legacy technologies won't be going away anytime soon.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. We see this in other areas too. There was a news story the other day about the rise in mobile payments – the use of a smartphone for paying for items that normally would be paid for with cash or a debit or credit card. Two out of three experts predicted that these payments would be the dominant form of payments by 2020, with cards and cash vanishing before long.
These kinds of predictions always seem to anticipate very rapid change, and it just doesn't happen that way. Maybe by 2050 the smartphone, 20 generations later, will be our only financial tool, but not by 2020. Heck, we can't even accomplish the elimination of the penny, and that's been a target for years.
In fact, we will boldly predict right here and now that virtually all business will be done in a SIP Trunking environment long before cash and cards bite the dust. Actually, probably before the penny disappears too.
