VoIP Is For Real

You've spoken: VoIP offers very real benefits for corporations, and it's fast becoming an enterprise mainstay.

Those are the results of a recent Voting Booth poll we conducted on Networking Pipeline. The results couldn't be any clearer: 76 percent of you either currently deploy VoIP, have a test pilot underway, or are currently studying whether to deploy it.

Here's the drill-down: 40 percent are already deploying it, 14 percent have a test pilot underway, and 21 percent are studying whether to deploy. Only 24 percent say they have no plans to deploy it.

Those are pretty impressive numbers, and show that many of the problems that previously bedeviled the technology have been worked out. The many benefits, including cost-savings, the ability to manage a single, converged network, and a slew of new telephony features such as softphones have clearly won you over.

On the other hand, there's one surprise in the numbers - they're not dramatically different than a poll we did a year ago. Back then, 63 percent had either already deployed VoIP, had a test underway, or were studying it. The drill-down: 44 percent were already using it, nine percent had a pilot underway, and 10 percent were studying it.Now, the polls are unscientific, so we can't draw any absolute conclusions from them. But they seem to imply that most corporations are deploying or planning on deploying VoIP, with an increase in deployments and pilots over the last year.

It's one instance where full-speed ahead is the best policy. There are few drawbacks to VoIP, and clear, convincing benefits.