By Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President

Executive Summary

Employees are increasingly distributed and far-flung. As recent Nemertes Research studies have repeatedly shown, about 90% of employees work away from the headquarters facility or campus. The bulk of those people work in branch offices ranging in size from 1 to 1,000 employees. There are good reasons for this: Branch offices afford organizations huge advantages, ranging from less-expensive real-estate, wider geographical selection for employees, and reducing commuting time for employees. And the trend is continuing: the average growth rate for branch offices is 8.9% annually, according to Nemertes’ Spring 2006 Convergence & Next-Generation WANs research benchmark.

But branch and remote offices also pose challenges for IT and network managers. Managing remote devices—including switches, routers, PBXs, network optimization devices, firewalls, intrusion-detection/prevention systems—imposes significant challenges to IT staffs, which are increasingly centralized even as their internal customers are distributed.

Hosted services can be a compelling alternative, particularly when it comes to voice over IP offerings. But in assessing hosted VOIP offerings, enterprises should keep in mind their own requirements, the services available, and the feature-functionality that best matches up with their own organizations.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com [1]