To compete in the increasingly aggressive market, equipment vendors, ISPs, carriers, service providers and system integrators will have to target specific industrial verticals and provide value and usage based solutions rather than technology solutions. In its research, IDC finds that vendors are introducing VoIP applications along with their IP PBX solutions to provide improved productivity and work efficiency to their customers. "As VoIP market penetration increases and the complexity of deploying applications decreases we expect to see wider use of open standards. In addition we predict the integration of voice functionality into critical business applications that can be deployed out of the box," added Fevre.
IDC concluded that as IP telephony penetration is increasing across companies of all sizes, competition will become increasingly aggressive. “Besides providing appropriate solutions, equipment vendors will also need to constantly condense their margin to maintain market share. This becomes more important if they want to lead on the SMB front. Consequently, they need to find additional ways to generate profit, such as VoIP application licensing fee and system upgrade services.”