Whilst there may be four main types of telephony, these are not equally adopted, nor do they represent a logical journey e.g. organisations don’t start with traditional telephony, progress through IP telephony, service provider hosted telephony and ultimately reach Hosted UCaaS.
It is important to also note that many organisations have more than one voice solution deployed. Therefore, for the purposes of this white paper, we are focusing on the main solution deployed by organisations e.g. the solution most widely used in the organisation, ignoring pockets of other usage types that almost certainly occur.
With these principles in mind, TNC’s research shows the most common journey taken by most organisations so far is from traditional telephony to IP telephony, and there they have remained. There certainly has been some take up of service provider hosted telephony, but this is a relatively niche pursuit. Even more niche is Hosted UCaaS.
The next logical question therefore is why is this the state of the market?
TNC’s research in this area is very clear:
- Organisations move from traditional telephony for very many reasons – to reduce costs, to gain flexiblity, to deploy new functionality
- Organisations have historically found IP telephony attractive – replacing ISDN with SIP typically generates cost savings, and the solutions are generally as reliable as traditional telephony
- By contrast, organisations have not found service provider hosted telephony particularly attractive. The feedback TNC receives is that organisations find it expensive, lacking in flexibility (typically it is sold on long-term contracts with considerable “lock-in”), and TNC has also received a lot of feedback about the pain of migration and performance challenges in-life
So far, so clear – there are sensible reasons why most organisations have started a journey from traditional telephony, and why most of these organisations have alighted on IP telephony.
However, the question we want to answer in this white paper is whether organisations are now going to set sail on a journey to hosted UCaaS.
The good news is that TNC’s research on this question is also clear.
From a conceptual perspective, hosted UCaaS is extremely attractive. It aligns with the wider trends in IT of moving away from owning and operating infrastructure to consuming services on-demand, and it often involves service provider partners who may be part of the wider cloud strategy, such as Microsoft and Google.
However, TNC has identified a number of challenges which is putting many organisations off hosted UCaaS at the present time.