(now eng)...leverage + voip = :-), page-2

don't miss the boat...PE now 4.04 lol!
If you buy at this price, when ENG hit's the sector average you'll more than tripple your money...JOY :-)

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Line clear for VoIP in morphing market

By Fleur Doidge, CRN CRN, Issue 176
11 July 2005 Mobile & Wireless

Australia’s Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) market is certainly on the rise. People have stopped talking and started acting. SMBs are now leaping into what was once an enterprise-only fray.

Yet views differ on the benefits.

Geoff Johnson, a research director at Gartner, says what is happening in Australia broadly follows the situation in Western Europe. The market research firm surveyed European users in November 2004 and came up with a mixed bag of results.

SMBs are certainly starting to adopt VoIP, it found, but the total number of adoptees is quite low. Survey analysts Susan Richardson and Katja Ruud said many firms still believe VoIP offers “no real benefits”.

Service providers, they said, must concentrate on making SMBs aware of potential cost savings from the technology.

That will boost a rapid migration of voice traffic from basic PSTN and ISDN services to VoIP and mobile telephony.

VoIP usage increased from 7 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2004.

“However, most of that usage was via customer premises equipment (CPE), such as IP PBX,” Richardson and Ruud said.

“[But] 34 percent would consider using VoIP by the end of 2005. The impact of broadband has positive spinoffs into the VoIP segment. More than 30 percent of the respondents would consider using voice over broadband.”

Johnson could not give figures on the size of Australia’s VoIP market. However, the "best or most likely" way for resellers is to think of VoIP as an underpinning network infrastructure, he says.

VoIP is really a part of the much bigger picture that is IP telephony. Johnson says resellers are most likely to win deals as equipment suppliers -- such as analogue terminal adapters -- system integrators that upgrade PABX to IP telephony or network providers that sell cheaper voice calls.

“The real secret is to understand that voice, once carried as an IP stream, will be available to be readily embedded in more than half of an enterprise’s IT applications within the next two years,” Johnson says. Johnson warns that the VoIP market might look large and grey but is changing fast. Some players might get caught out, especially if they fail to keep their eyes open.

“[Those at risk are] the guys who mistakenly think they own the market, because it is changing so radically,” he says.

Estimates on the size of the market differ. However, Gartner’s main rival IDC released a study in 2004 that forecasts Australia’s VoIP services market to hit $288 million by 2007, meanwhile enjoying a compounded annual growth rate of 62 percent. That means the market may double every year until 2007.

“VoIP services should be measured by enterprises from the value resulting from its integration with enterprise applications rather than the traditional view of cost per minute to end users,” says Landry Fevre, a telecommunications analyst at IDC.

That sounds like there might be a lot of opportunities, not just for VoIP resellers but for those building applications and services around VoIP.

Diverse VoIP products and services are already appearing, many targeting SMBs. Where VoIP was until recently largely an enterprise game, resellers and vendors now argue that trickle-down is happening in earnest.

Some small vendor-sponsored studies -- such as one released by AT&T this year -- suggest 40 to 50 percent of corporations might go VoIP by the end of 2006.

One relatively new service provider, engin, on the other hand, is consciously targeting the tiny end of town. Matt Farmer, national sales manager at engin, says the take-up is good so far for its products and services targeting SOHOs, SMBs and consumers. Farmer says engin customers want to move from traditional PSTN into VoIP mainly because it is cheaper. “It is saving people money and lets people use their existing broadband network infrastructure and hardware.”

One chief executive using engin had cut monthly phone bills from $400 per month to $10 per month. SMB customers were saving around 40 percent, Farmer says.

Engin offers a softphone application that lets people put a softphone on their laptops or PCs -- a boon for international travellers seeking lower cost ways to stay in touch with the office.

Resellers like Leading Edge and Queensland’s Allstar Computers are selling engin’s flagship Voice Box offering, which comes in two varieties.

Voice Box is plugged into a broadband connection to give “fully-featured” telephony, including familiar capabilities like call forwarding, voicemail and call waiting, Farmer says.

Engin’s anywhere connect service, meanwhile, targets mobile convergence. “You can bring your number and telephone with engin Voice Box connected and route it anywhere around the world into engin,” Farmer says.

“If you make a lot of mobile calls, that’s really expensive, but now you can route your calls through your home number.”