Before you can take advantage of forecasts about the VoIP and SIP trunking services market, you must ensure that your business strategy includes a plan to develop an end-to-end IP-based UC infrastructure. If not, you’re behind the eight ball and catching up to your competitors should be your priority.

The following predictions for the VoIP/SIP market from a ResearchandMarkets study suggest expansion options and the technologies can enable you to establish more viable business strategies as you look forward by either creating or continuing best communications and collaboration practices within your organization. Here’s a look at three trends that will shape the future of business communications:

  1. For those of you who have embraced a VoIP/SIP phone system, you’re keeping up with business trends. In fact, the aforementioned study confirms that VoIP has become the premier communications system between business customers’ premises and service providers’ networks. What’s more, SIP trunking was identified as a key component in the emerging trend for businesses to deploy a blend of on-premises and cloud-based unified communications (UC) applications and services to successfully deliver UC productivity benefits to their users.

What accounts for the popularity of this Internet-based communications solution? First of all, UC capabilities available as VoIP system add-ons provide organizational efficiency gains and, therefore, deserve much of the credit. Second, there are cost savings. For instance, the SIP trunks used in VoIP phone systems help businesses avoid paying for unused capacity, as would be the case with traditional PRI lines.

  1. As more businesses turn from legacy to Internet-based phone services with UC, VoIP and SIP trunking services are providing the infrastructure for the migration. That is, these technologies offer a solid underpinning for the transmission of voice, video and other data traffic over a business’s own wide-area network to its various locations. They also allow UC features (e.g., instant messaging and presence) from various vendors to integrate and communicate with each other.

For the most part, we’ve found that the businesses that are hesitating to make the move are misguided about VoIP reliability—specifically, they fear losing phone service during an electrical outage once switched to the public Internet. But VoIP systems designed to eliminate reliability issues already exist as do several other ways to ensure connectivity (such as routing calls to other phones, including mobile).

  1. Legacy platforms, those requiring a media gateway to connect to IP-based voice services, still make up the majority of SIP trunking services deployment. ResearchandMarkets interprets this finding as a testament to the “flexibility and cost-savings benefits of VoIP access and SIP trunking services.” Primarily, SIP trunking is a virtual (vs. dedicated) connection for voice transmission as well as a packet (vs. circuit-) switched model, meaning that it’s easy for bandwidth to be scaled up or down, and that there is only one site to manage vs. the equipment required to terminate calls and sessions using other methods. SIP trunking also protects businesses when disaster strikes. The technology allows for automatic call routing to pre-defined locations, for example.

Together, these trends signify the ongoing transformation of communications from circuit-switched plain old telephone service to Internet telephony via VoIP and SIP trunking. The market for these services are predicted to grow percentage-wise through 2020, at least as the newer services become the logical choice for businesses intent on increasing profitability by enhancing operational productivity and collaboration.