A recent survey on UK companies implementing

IP telephony found that nearly three-quarters of respondents said cost reduction would be the main reason for implementing an IP network.

More than 80 per cent of respondents said that IP telephony made it easier to do business, 36 per cent believed that IP telephony systems were difficult to manage.

David Quirk, CEO of C21, said: “It is our main focus to help our customers easily implement and manage the IP telephony systems we deliver".

While 70 per cent of respondents are focused on cost reduction before they start a project, once the VoIP system is installed, it’s the productivity improvements that add the most value.

A plethora of recent studies are showing that IP telephony in the UK is following the global trend.

The total market for business VoIP and IP VPN services will grow from $6.4 billion in 2006 to $15 billion in 2012, according to a study by telecommunications research consultancy and benchmarking firm Atlantic-ACM.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services, which last year counted less than 38 million subscribers worldwide, should have a subscriber base of over 267 million in 2012, according to a new study released by ABI Research.

While traditional telcos have been slow to embrace VoIP due to their huge investment in conventional telephone networks, their desire for total control of service quality and their fear of upsetting their existing customer relationships, the development of VoIP markets will play out differently in the world’s major regions.

In the US it’s driven by competition: cable operators are offering VoIP, hoping to take some customers away from the telephone companies. Eventually the cable operators will start offering converged services, and to compete, the telcos will have to go to VoIP as well.

The rapid growth of hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is set to continue, according to a new report, with projected revenues expected to exceed $2 billion (£1 billion) in the US market by 2010.

Research from market analysis firm In-Stat indicated that it was small businesses that were the key driver of the trend towards hosted IP telephony, as many smaller companies found that they were not able to manage voice systems themselves.

In Europe, though, many telecom operators are currently upgrading and implementing Ethernet networks for increased operational efficiencies. (BT is doing this on a huge scale right now.) When they do so, they’re taking VoIP into consideration and making it part of their network upgrade.

Meanwhile in Japan, the drive isn’t coming from the telecom operators or even from the cable operators, it’s really the third-party broadband players such as SoftBank.