IDC Australia research director, communications, Joel Martin, said this would mimic the world-wide trend, with the overall market growing at an average compound growth rate of 45 percent to hit revenue of AU$15.1 billion by the year 2007. The highest growth will be in enterprise systems such as IP-PBXs, according to IDC.
"The market for IP telephony really began heating up in the later part of 2002, with vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, NEC, and 3Com all having strong acceptance to their solutions," said Martin. The equipment will be purchased by enterprises, governments and educational institutions, according to IDC.
Martin expects managed IP services to come to the fore, where traditional outsourcers, integrators and telcos will offer managed IP services including telephony, VPN, storage and firewalls.
"The true benefit of having IP telephony...is being able to manage one IP network," said Martin. He gave the example of a bank, which has a lot of small sites around Australia. Having individual IP managers at each site would be expensive, so the bank opted to consolidate its Internet applications into centralised data centres.
If the voice network is overlaid onto the IP network, the advanced features of the PBX can be managed at the head office and pushed out to the remote offices.
Martin said delivery of an effective IP telephony system had been held up by quality management issues, but was now possible thanks to advances in technology over the last two years. Networks can now determine what type of data is being transferred through the network. This allows the networks to give higher priority to real-time situations such as voice and lower priority to things such as e-mail, ensuring the quality of service.
