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In a new report out this week, AMI-Partners predicted that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), defined as companies with up to 999 employees, are on track to invest $6 billion in on-premise voice communications systems in 2008. That includes IP-PBX/converged systems, pure TDM/Keysystem, multi-line analog/digital and DECT (News - Alert) systems.

 

As vendors are developing and implementing solutions specifically designed for SMBs, this market segment is getting extremely competitive. AMI conducted several interviews with SMBs that already implemented these solutions, and found that such investments typically pay for themselves in less than a year.

 

AMI also released its 2008 Global Forecast Model, which includes a detailed focus into telecom equipment and services. This study covers the period 2006-2012, and is broken out by industry verticals — including agriculture, mining, transportation, utilities, and construction; manufacturing; wholesale; retail; professional business services; finance, insurance, and real estate; and other services.

 

The study indicated that the key to improving SMB migration to IP-based voice systems is helping companies achieve faster return on investment (ROI), considering current priorities and the economic environment. Various benefits such as higher employee productivity with unified messaging, reduced costs through use of unified communications (UC), improved revenues, and low toll charges are all available to SMBs who adopt IP-based voice systems.

 

This study assessed spending, penetration, country/regional growth rates/distribution and overall assessment of telecom market trends. Various new categories such as unified communications (unified messaging, mainstream communications, instant messaging, and conferencing) and IP/SIP trunking were included.

 

“The global IP-PBX (News - Alert)/converged system segment is set to grow from $2.77 billion in 2006 to $4.32 billion in 2012,” said AMI-Partners analyst Sanjeev Aggarwal, in a statement. “That's a compound annual growth rate of 7.7 percent between 2006 and 2012. The encouraging results from the early migrations from TDM-based PBXs (including key systems) to IP-based PBXs have positively influenced worldwide demand.”