Orange says SMBs in England find VoIP rosy

Small companies are keen to embrace VoIP, but still aren’t seeing the real advantages of convergence. An Orange-commissioned report, which goes under the catchy title of Small and Medium Enterprise Business Communications in the UK, is drawn from on-line interviews with 181 UK SMEs and asks about their current spending as well as plans for the future.It turns out that 57 per cent of the SMEs interviewed are already using VoIP, with many planning to invest in the technology over the next six months: either starting to use it or increasing their usage. However, most of those interviewed were not sure of the kind of convergence that VoIP would bring.

VoIP is still seen mainly as a cost-saver and there is not much information on the kind of applications that an IP-based architecture can enable.

A significant piece of information from the research was that 17% of the SMEs were prepared to work with a single provider for all their communication needs even if it were a slightly more expensive alternative than having more than one provider.  What does that say to me?  In order for internet telephony to go mainstream, providers must have a clearer and more consistent message in their marketing to inform decision makers on the benefits, other than cost, of switching to IP-based telephony as well as making the switch as easy as possible.

For more detail head over to Silicon.com and catch a video of the report with Jonathon Steel, CEO of Bathwick Group, who carried out the research.