VoIP services catching on among larger businesses

Larger firms are adopting VoIP services as part of their move towards cloud computing, it has been suggested.

According to Carl Weinschenk, hosted VoIP services have traditionally been aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, but their adoption is increasingly coming to be seen as a valuable exercise for larger enterprises as well.

The technology expert wrote on IT Business Edge that hosted IP PBX services are being deployed on "massively scalable cloud architectures", something that makes them ideally suited to firms replacing their legacy systems, no matter how big they are.

"It seems that bigger companies started looking at off-premises approaches during the recession as a way to refresh technology without massive capital investment," he suggested.

Mr Weinschenk was responding to the publication of a new report by ABI Research, which indicates that the market for VoIP services will grow at an accelerating rate over the next five years.

According to the analyst, the global market will be worth $20 billion (£12.7 billion) in 2015.