What’s trending in VoIP?

Recently, we were featured in an industry view piece by VoIP system reviewer Software Advice, Trending VoIP Terms Reflect Market Shifts, which shed some light on the top trending VoIP terms in 2014. (Software Advice, 2015) Much of it was explained by industry experts to help business owners find a path through the often daunting task of picking (and understanding) business communications technology.

Let’s take a look at some of the key trends we’re seeing in the VoIP industry.

Moving to the Cloud

In the article findings, terms directly relating to cloud-based UC (unified communications) deployment (e.g., UCaaS) are some of the highest ranking on the list. This is primarily due to the rise of the cloud in the past few years. Additionally, “hosted PBX” has been gaining ranks within search terms due to its increasing popularity among small businesses. Hosted, unlike on-premise, has arguably a lot more economic benefits, both in terms of the feature set and the total cost of ownership.

According to Software Advice, although the term “hosted PBX” peaked back in 2006, it shows a rather steady level of interest among search queries, whereas “IP PBX” shows a gradual descent in interest. At this rate, it is safe to say that hosted PBXs will continue to dominate in search queries over IP PBXs in the next few years.

BYOD movement has become integral

Software Advice took a look at the features that UC provides (desktop sharing, unified messaging, video conferencing and more) within Google Trends, and although “desktop sharing” was once a hot term, it has gradually fallen close to “videoconferencing.” “Presence”, on the other hand, has slowly and steadily gained interest, which makes sense with more and more workers on-the-go. Much of this could be due to the rise of the BYOD movement.

WebRTC and UC

According to Google Trends, “WebRTC” has gained lot of momentum and popularity since June 2011. Although adoption is quite slow at the moment, industry experts say that because of its powerful simplicity, its popularity has yet to crest. It is likely we’ll see more of an adoption of WebRTC within the customer support industry, which will be driven by the click-to-call links/support offered to customers for real-time audio/video conversations.

VoIP security shyness

According to this report, the issue of VoIP security continues to be a hot topic in the industry due to several high-profile incidents of data breaches. One of the emerging security tools for the VoIP industry is Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP), which allows encrypted transmission of voice streams; however, this technology still has not seen widespread adoption. Meanwhile, another protocol called Transport-Layer Security (TLS), used to encrypt SIP messages that control sessions, has steadily more popularity than SRTP, according to Google Trends.

SIP trunk market is growing

The SIP Trunking market has grown steadily at a rate of 50 percent annually, and anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of enterprises are in some form of SIP migration. While these numbers do represent impressive growth, we will likely see an even more dramatic spike in adoption as enterprises continue to realize its significant advantages over traditional PSTN, including cost savings and scalability, which are in great demand from small and big enterprises.

Summary

Overall, the PBX migration to the cloud is a hot trend. UC features like video conferencing and presence have become more and more popular in the BYOD movement. WebRTC, which is in its early adoption stage, will still be a trending technology. VoIP security will continue to be a hot discussion topic, as the industry is trying to find an ideal solution to encrypt voice calls.