A report recently released by Infonetics (News - Alert) Research claims that managed service providers (MSPs) will most likely see the number of seats for hosted VoIP and unified communications (UC) services double between 2012 to 2016.

While VoIP services have been available for years, MSPs now have the chance to take advantage of this industry in a whole new light by taking advantage of VoIP monitoring in a multitude of ways. Increased VoIP penetration in the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) market is expected to take off with flying colors. Even more, the report found that global service provider (GSP) revenue within business and residential VoIP services have totaled to almost $60 billion last year alone – up 16 percent from the previous year of 2010.

Clearly, these stats show no sign of slowing down of the explosive VoIP market, and while the usage of VoIP services continues to grow, end users are not accepting any downtime for their businesses’ phone systems – a critical part of their business service and performance. 

The biggest challenge of keeping up with the VoIP hype and high performance expectations is that it all falls on IT professionals who depend on VoIP vendors and their service level agreements (SLAs).

So how can MSPs capitalize on this? For starters, they can embrace the trend by offering VoIP monitoring as a standard IT service as part of clients’ ongoing monthly retainers. By doing so, they will be able to deliver value-added service and boost revenue.

We all know that VoIP provides a number of advantages for small businesses, such as cost-savings and portability, but other features such as sound quality and system functionality are “only as good as the bandwidth resources within an organization,” this eChannelLine article states. Needless to say, in order to help keep companies running efficiently, valuable resources such as time and money cannot be wasted simply on downtime caused by bandwidth issues.

Additional ways MSPs benefit from VoIP monitoring services are with VoIP quality metric monitoring, reporting/alert systems, remote monitoring, and network traffic analysis. MSPs definitely have an opportunity here; they can use it for delivering server and network support, and VoIP support can be offered in a reseller and service management role as well. MSPs can even use VoIP management in a specifically strategic way as a stepping stone to sell managed service contracts.

As UC service revenue continues to grow, having increased by 33 percent last year and the number of seats growing 44 percent, one thing is clear: MSPs should definitely look into investing their time and resources into VoIP monitoring.

Want to learn more about Managed Service Providers? Then be sure to attend MSPWorld, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Since its inception, MSPWorld has been the only event with a single, vendor-agnostic focus of supporting Managed Service providers and their respective ecosystems. MSPWorld in Austin will delve into the most pressing channel and end-user issues that MSPs and their customers confront every day. For more information on registering for MSPWorld click here.

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