Rick Spielrein, the managing director of telecommunications infrastructure vendor Redport, said many of the larger telecommunications providers were considering offering VoIP technology as a value-added service, so as not to lose their customer base entirely.
"We don't believe in a centralised capital requirement in every business," Spielrein said. "Because we are offering the technology to run everything from the exchange - so the end user doesn't need to install their own VoIP connections - they can just buy access to VoIP technology from the exchange."
While Spielrein conceded telecommunications providers continued to be concerned about the potential for revenue erosion from the implementation of VoIP services, he pointed out that many will be forced to rethink their approach as the technology becomes more pervasive.
"The telcos need to pull their head out of the sand and start to talk about revenue replacement rather than revenue erosion," Spielrein said. "They need to realise that if they don't move on VoIP and MoIP (multimedia over Internet Protocol) service provision one of their competitors will."
Claiming dominance over 54 percent of the VoIP market globally, and 71 percent locally, Cisco business development manager Paul Todd said VoIP service providers will start to become increasing prevalent in 2003.
"While the core of our product line is targeted at companies with 100 users upwards, we are also starting to see a lot of solutions offered at the lower end as the VoIP service providers start to come online," Todd said.
However, within the mid-market and high-end, where VoIP technology is currently deployed on a company-by-company basis, rather than being offered as a service from the exchange, Spielrein believes concern over security is a key barrier to growth.
"A lot of the CTOs in those enterprises, really don't understand VoIP or MoIP technology," Spielrein said. "They are concerned it will weaken their firewalls, and in many cases the CTO simply does not know how to configure around it."
Nonetheless Spielrein believes such concerns will be alleviated with the increasing prevalence of VoIP service offerings.
"With a managed service the CTO doesn't have to do a think, they just set up their firewall, and start to save money on conferencing costs," Spielrein said.
