Beancounters at In-Stat have been adding up the numbers and dividing by their shoe size and come up with the idea that small businesses are investing in Voice over IP systems.

New In-Stat research, forecasts that the small office spend on broadband IP telephony will increase by 83 per cent from 2010-2015. Greg Potter, Research Analyst said that nroadband IP telephony offers a number of advantages for small businesses and SOHO; primary among them is the low monthly service fee and negligible costs for long distance. The only downside is that it does not provide the scalability associated with hosted and IP PBX solutions, Potter said.

It also does not typically come with the service level agreements (SLAs) and quality-of-service (QoS) afforded by other systems, which are general requirements for enterprise and medium sized businesses. However his report claims that Application-Based VoIP, will increase over 50 per cent from 2010-2015. As a segment, mid-sized business (100 to 999 employees) spending will have the greatest growth, increasing in excess of 10 per cent between 2010-2015.

The professional services vertical market segment will spend over $3 Billion in 2013.