Robert Poe, chief analyst with VoIP Evolution (www.voipevolution.com), says:

Why is hosted telephony gathering so much attention?

Several reasons:

– It alleviates the need for companies to shell out a lot of money up front to buy phone equipment.
– I makes it unnecessary for companies to pay for in-house or outside technical expertise to install, operate, manage and maintain a phone system.
– Flexibility: It allows companies that are expanding, relocating or otherwise changing their work forces and facilities to make rapid changes without having to buy or move equipment. It allows them to precisely match their expenditures to their needs.

It will make it less necessary for corporate IT departments to host, manage and otherwise handle enterprise phone systems. It may require additional bandwidth in the data center/IT space’s broadband Internet connections to handle the higher traffic volume that adding IP voice calls to their existing data traffic entails.