tIPicall, the UK-based Channel-Only SIP and hosted carrier, has witnessed a significant rise in demand for mobile applications on its Hosted PBX service, One PBX.
"Just a year ago, around 10% of hosted license sales were mobile," said tIPicall Managing Director Guy Miller. "Now 40% of licenses sold by our resellers are either converged or solely mobile applications."
The report coincides with tIPicall launching its latest upgrade to OnePBX which includes improvements to converged licenses and introduces Call Monitor where supervisors can listen in to their employee's calls as a standard included feature.
"There were two important upgrades to be done to reflect the changing market," added Miller. "Originally, hosted telephony was a replacement service for onsite PBXs however increasingly companies are turning to hosted for its additional feature set, in particular mobility and call centre functionality.
"We therefore took the decision to focus on upgrading the mobile applications and introducing call monitor for all users without additional charge."
This shift to mobile apps is not without its challenges, continued Miller: "You can make the perfect app with a great interface but we are still heavily reliant on the mobile providers having stable data services over 3G and 4G and not blocking VoIP traffic, something that not all mobile carrier are meeting their promises on. We still have to build in features such as seamless transfer to GSM because the signal is not always good enough, even in the centre of cities."
Miller sees this trend is only going one way, adding: "We expect this to continue and be 50% by the end of the year, the cost savings and flexibility achieved by mobile voice apps is too compelling an argument for customers to ignore."