Earlier this month market research firm Infonetics released its latest findings on vendors and service revenue in the residential, small office/home office (SOHO) and business VoIP markets. The report states; “Following a healthy 2010, the overall VoIP services market is on track to grow another 17% in 2011” amounting for a global revenue growth upto $76 billion by 2015. They do not however credit this increast to VoIP services alone, as the rise is also in large part due to the market increase of supporting solutions like SIP trunking and hosted business VoIP services.
Hosted business VoIP services, similar to found in the Global Fibernet Cloud Hosted PBX solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs), are amounting for a larger than expected impact as the growth of the SMB market has only increased the pool of clients for the migration to business VoIP soultions. Increases in cloud-based services, IP Centrex and hosted unified communication (UC) service revenue grew 22% with seats growing 25% in the first half of 2011 compared to the second half of 2010.
VoIP, as an offering being ever more rapidly deployed throughout enterprises as well as SMBs, has since turned into a frequently used water cooler & conference call term. Researchers predict that the number of seats for hosted business VoIP and UC services will double between 2011 and 2015, ultimately driving the market value past $76 billion and the number of residential & SOHO subscribers to hosted VoIP services is expected to grow from 179 million in 2011 to 262 million worldwide by 2015.
According to Infonetics spokeswoman Diane Myers, "The residential segment continues to make up the majority of VoIP services revenue, but the real growth is in the business segment, particularly hosted VoIP and UC services."
