Summary
Despite constant media and supplier hype around voice over IP (VoIP), a careful analysis of US enterprise-class facilities-based VoIP services and providers reveals there is no single market leader across all relevant evaluation criteria today. This is because of the youthfulness of the genre, which currently lacks many important attributes, such as full public switched telephone network (PSTN) feature parity and robust service-level agreements (SLAs). Given these challenges, enterprises will migrate to VoIP over an extended period of time, likely five to 10 years. Consequently, organizations will find it expedient from both an economic and a functional perspective to use suppliers that can closely link both legacy PSTN/time division multiplexing (TDM) and VoIP offers. In that regard, the providers that we studied enjoy an advantage that virtually none of their competitors can attain. To assess how well they are supporting US enterprise customers' VoIP requirements, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of five service providers along 123 criteria. Although there is no clear market leader, AT&T is first in the current offering category, while Verizon Business is best in strategy, and Qwest is ahead in market presence.
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