Column: Ask Steve – VoIP and UC for SMBs

Ask Yankee Group analyst Steve Hilton. Send your questions to asksteve@yankeegroup.com. Please include your name, city, state and a phone number. Only first names and locations will be published.

IP telephony and unified communications: these are two great tastes that taste great together. These topics are near and dear to our hearts as we enter 2008. IP communications and SMB adoption are our topics this month in Ask Steve.

Q: Who are the leading VoIP vendors to SMBs by market penetration?

Ed, New York City

A: No single vendor owns the VoIP and IP PBX space today. While the major telcos (i.e., AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Qwest Communications International) have been watching the hosted VoIP market slide away from them, the premises-based vendors have been cobbling together as much market share as they can.

Based on Yankee Groups 2007 SMB IP Communications Survey (click here), U.S.-based market shares for businesses with 100 to 499 employees is fairly fragmented. Cisco Systems Inc./ Linksys holds the No. 1 spot with 29 percent of the market. Avaya Inc. has 11 percent and a mish-mash of other companies has 7 percent share. Microsoft Corp., Nortel Networks and open-source solutions share the No. 4 spot at 5 percent market share each.

We anticipate Cisco will increase share over the next 12 to 24 months as it continues its relentless push into the SMB space with new products and enhancements to its SMB Select channel program. We also believe d-Link/Microsoft Corp. will increase share with the new Response Point solution (currently available through d-Link and Quanta, Aastra sometime this year).

Q: What unified communications solutions are being bought by small businesses?

Bruce, Tupelo, Miss.

A: Great question, Bruce. Unified communications (UC) applications are often linked to VoIP purchase decisions. According to Yankee Group data, as an SMB decision-maker gets further into the VoIP decision-making process, his interest in a variety of UC applications increases. For example, while an SMB is evaluating vendors for VoIP solution, its interest in speech-recognition applications is 15 percent. After going through a VoIP testing phase and allocating budget for purchase and implementation, an SMBs interest in speech-recognition applications is 36 percent. In another example, 24 percent of SMBs have interest in softphones during the vendor evaluation phase, but 54 percent have interest once budget is allocated for VoIP.

Once an SMB purchases a VoIP solution, actual adoption of UC applications lags their pre-purchase intentions. Why? Generally SMBs dont have the resources to implement all the UC applications they intended. In addition, neither channel partners nor internal SMB IT staff has the time or financial motivation to train SMB employees in use of the UC applications. As such, adoption of the UC applications lags. That being said, actual adoption of UC varies between 6 percent (for applications like mobile phone integrations, industry-specific UC applications) to 17 percent for unified messaging (click here).

Increasing UC application adoption requires vendors to create more plug-and-play solutions, thereby minimizing the implementation fees that many UC applications require. In addition, channel partners need to set aside part of their implementation timelines and budgets for train-the-trainer time associated with UC applications on the new VoIP solution.

Steve Hilton is the vice president of Yankee Groups Enterprise Research Group with an expertise in converged solutions for SMBs. Hilton manages a team of analysts delivering consulting, research and programs to help vendors and service providers better serve SMBs, midmarket enterprises and large enterprises globally. Visit Yankee Group online at www.yankeegroup.com.