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With the economic down turn of the US economy, the credit crunch hitting the British economy and a looming world recession, all industries are concerned. However, every cloud has a silver lining. No more so that the emerging VoIP market which is well positioned to help business cut their costs.

During a downturn, companies look to save money and one way they can do this is by cutting down on their existing outgoings. Shifting from a traditional PBX system to a VoIP solution is one effective way of achieving this.

A secondondary yet often cited factor driving the take up of VoIP services is the high petrol prices. Higher fuel prices have meant that smaller businesses were changing the way that they work, allowing employees to work from home and having a disparate workforce. VoIP has empowered employees to become ‘geo-diverse’. In turn, this means less need for large and expensive head offices, again allowing for a reduction in rental overheads.

VoIP has gained maturity; it offers SMEs not just cost benefits but also functionality and flexibility that they would not have considered in the past. It is being said that the VoIP industry in evolving quicker and more dynamically that the traditional phone industry ever did.

The question is: ‘How can our business harness these savings without exceeding the IT and communication budgets?’ A phased adoption approach is one answer. By taking this approach businesses can converge their existing telecommunication networks (such as PSTN and ISDN lines) and migrate to a robust load balanced broadband network –with all VoIP, video-conferencing and data-based applications running on one single IP network. The maturity of VoIP ensures a reliability and quality of service for any mission critical business application.

The conferencing and instant messaging aspects of VoIP comes into its own as less employees converge to a central head office for business meetings. This allows the business to save on travel costs. Once a small business can comprehend these cost savings it is then worth considering the next stage of migration.

Whilst bearing redundency and failsafe in mind, all remaining ISDN and PSTN lines are replaced with VoIP connectivity. The legacy PBX can be replaced by an on-premises IP PBX, which can be managed by the SME or VoIP provider, or through a hosted IP service, that requires minimal on-site equipment.

These steps allow the business to make genuine cost savings that in turn can be used to fund the sequential upgrade to a full VoIP service.

Should you have any questions or wish to discuss this article further, then please give us a call on 0845 0000 500.

Some information for this article is taken from ITadviser, Issue 54, Summer 2008.