Looking For ROI In VoIP

To VoIP, or not to VoIP, that was the question. And the answer, according to the Networking Pipeline Voting Booth, is that many enterprises are already adding VoIP to their technology mix.

Granted, our survey was inherently unscientific and the sample size (just north of 100 votes) may not be representative of the entire networking diaspora. Still, 44 percent of the respondents indicated that they were already deploying VoIP, eclipsing all the other answers (including the 22 percent of respondents who voted for "What's VoIP?," showing that our readers share our sense of humor).

Given the recent flurry of vendor and service-provider activity, perhaps it's no surprise that the market in general thinks VoIP products and services are rapidly moving from a whizzy tech idea to a deployable, billable item. The next question that occurs to me is whether VoIP is being deployed simply for cost savings, or for the perceived benefits of integrated applications and administration, features that are probably more future-stuff than reality right now.

So far, in talking to enterprise networking professionals I've heard arguments on both sides of the ROI coin -- that VoIP has been rejected because it's too costly to install, and that it has been implemented because it can provide positive ROI within months of deployment. Let us know what you think, in the new poll that's live now -- and if you still don't know what VoIP is, here's a little stuffer for your knowledge-stocking.