"The whole concept of mobility is absolutely becoming pervasive in accounts," Freres said. "Customers are starting to leverage their networks to get greater productivity," he said.
VoWLAN remains a niche technology today, but more customers will adopt it in 2005, Freres said.
Research shows that VoWLAN deployments are on the rise. The VoWLAN phone market for the first three quarters of 2004 climbed to $37.9 million, up from $19.9 million in the first three quarters of 2003, according to Synergy Research Group.
"It's going to be as mainstream in our accounts as wireless has been," Freres said. "Once you get a few people using it, it becomes a huge productivity tool," he said, noting that his own company uses VoWLAN technology internally to showcase its possibilities for customers.
While many customers are keen on VoIP's promised productivity gains, for others the most compelling argument for the technology still is old-fashioned cost-savings, said Scott Klemm, vice president of operations at Distributed Computing Inc. (DCI), an Avaya partner in Baltimore.
One DCI education client in Pennsylvania, for example, shaved $12,000 per month off its telecommunications bill by moving over its 30 office employees and 100 field employees to a VoIP system, Klemm said.
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