Consumer VoIP to find more success in the SMB market
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 04 October 2010, 23:01 IST   |    1 Comments
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Consumer VoIP to find more success in the SMB market
Bangalore: VoIP is gaining pace in small and midsize market as consumer graded technology companies like Skype and Google are entering the industry with VoIP solutions. Large enterprises like Cisco Systems, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens have made heavy investments in their VoIP systems. For several years Microsoft has offered VoIP services called Microsoft Office Communications Server renamed as Microsoft Lync Server for large enterprises.Their VoIP solutions were enterprise graded technology. Popular company Skype which has been in the business communication market for quite a while now , stepped into the VoIP technology through a partnership with Avaya to link their communication system to Skye's own service ,allowing consumers to use Skype connect. Internet giant Google also launched its VoIP service in late August, which allows its users to use phone over internet via its web email service, Gmail. According to the company, 1 million calls were made in the first day after the launch. Also the company is working to extend the features to its Google apps users. Skype and Google are facing difficulty in the market as the VoIP solution they provide is consumer graded technology where both a consumer or an enterprise can use it.Due to this the information shared is not secure and thus puts the company or the consumer on risk. Shivanu Shukl, associate director at Frost & Sullivan, told Liau Yun Qing, of ZDNet Asia that the enterprise market will however prove tough for Google and Skype because their IP telephony services are currently viewed as "consumer grade technology" and that they will find success in the small market. The technology is vulnerable to losing information. Hence Skype and Google will have to keep a watch on their security systems and show that they are reliable to their consumers. It is difficult to compare both services because each player addresses the market differently, noting that Google adopts a more holistic approach toward enterprises with its communication and collaboration tools. They have brought in many countries under their wing, but India is yet to establish VoIP as the service providers have many norms and regulations to follow. India's Telecom regulators have cracked down on VoIP being used in the country as illegal and they have gone as far as arresting some of the operators. Department of Telecommunications' (DOT) estimated that these unlicensed service companies provided 30 million minutes of internet telephony per month to corporates, call centres and BPOs in the country. This was causing a great revenue loss to the government as they did not pay the 12% service tax and 6% revenue share on internet telephony in addition to the level disturbing bonafide licensees. DoT also stated that Foreign Service providers could be a serious threat as they did not come under any Indian regulator and policy framework. Only as of recent times (since this year) has the country seen changes brought into the policies but the law specifically talks about only certain sets of players who follow all rules and regulations being able to do VoIP legally in India.

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