Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Although SMB’s (Small and Medium Business) in USA have been slow in adopting unified communication, it looks like they are beginning to change, according to a market demand study by AMI-Partners. The industry analysts estimate the total SMB U.S. IP communications and managed services opportunity to be over $30 billion in 2007 and growing at a CAGR of 15.6 percent through 2010.

Some of the key findings from the report include:IP Telephony

• US SMB IP-PBX shipments now exceed traditional TDM-PBX (including key systems) systems.
• IP-PBX penetration among US MBs rose from 20% in 2005 to 25% in 2006.
• Hosted VoIP penetration, currently under 5% of US SMBs, is now entering a high-growth phase that will drive SMB productivity well into the next decade.
• Collaborative communications such as webcasting, calendaring and scheduling are now being used by over 15% of US SMBs.
• Skype has become a convenient communication tool for quick long-distance chats and is being used by over 5% of US SMBs.

Managed Services

• With in-house IT staff busy addressing basic break-fix issues, both SBs and MBs are looking to outsource non-core IT services.
• Key functions outsourced to managed service providers are security, backup/business continuity, network management, e-mail services, web-hosting, applications and database hosting, and IT Infrastructure management.
• Over 10% of U.S. SMBs now use a managed firewall service and over 15% are using managed VPNs.
• The opportunity for online/off-site data storage and backup is also increasing, driven by business continuity and disaster recovery needs, and has risen to 11% among SBs and 15% among MBs.

You can read more and find out about the study at Tekrati.