Australian business riding software-defined communications wave

Australian enterprises are following the international trend and starting to show a preference for software-defined communications.

A report from Telsyte indicates that penetration of software-driven communications technologies has now passed 10% of Australian private automatic branch exchange (PABX) systems. Cloud adopters are also increasingly reliant on software-defined systems.

Three in four respondents also indicated that they were at least as comfortable - if not more so - with a software-only PABX system instead of a hardware appliance.

Telsyte, an independent research subsidiary of Australian IT services and consulting company UXC Limited, surveyed 319 CIOs and IT decision-makers for the report.

Rodney Gedda, a Telsyte senior analyst, said the availability of software-defined communications products is expanding, with many traditional vendors offering virtualised versions of their PABX software.

“There are also a growing number of local enterprise telephony cloud offerings from telco and non-telco service providers which are mostly developed in software in order to scale to service many customers on common, shared infrastructure.”

Gedda predicts that expanding use of software-defined communications could finally spur on Australia’s sluggish adoption of unified communications (UC) features.

“The penetration of UC among Australian enterprises remains low at less than 10%; however, software-defined communications systems are more likely to integrate voice with instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing and email,” he said.

Image courtesy of Christopher under CC