But Avaya’s director of IP telephony and mobility Lawrence Byrd said the future of VoIP is not about the network, it’s about applications.

Roughly 10% to 12% of all enterprise phones leverage IP today, but adoption is widely expected to grow significantly during the next five years.

For the past five years, the IP communications industry has been focused on companies having a single, converged network that runs both voice and data, Byrd said during an interview at the Internet Telephony Conference in Florida last week.

The focus has been on the network, on quality-of-service, reliability and business continuity . . . and along the way TDM has become IP and IP has become SIP, Byrd said.

What is the value of this new [VoIP] technology? It’s about applications, productivity and customer responsiveness . . . it’s not about saving money on the network.

Rather than thinking about having a real-time enterprise as a result of VoIP, enterprises need to think about having an intelligent enterprise whereby a company’s applications can talk, Byrd said.

IP mobility and collaboration are examples of applications that can change the business processors so that more workers are engaged, he said. In other words, IP communication applications need become embedded in the fabric of an enterprise’s applications.

The biggest latency in processes is people, Byrd said. Presence, the ability to see whether a contact is available or not to chat, is just part of VoIP’s value proposition. Key drivers will be the broader growth of SIP and Web-service-based applications, as well as those based on service oriented architecture, or SOA, Byrd said.

In short, these technologies enable different applications to work together. A simple SIP-based application example would be a user having their e-mail, cell phone and speech access in sync. And, while speech can be integrated with existing apps with Web services, Web-service-based applications in a SOA makes those integrations simpler and faster.

Last week, Avaya announced integration of voice with IBM’s Lotus using Web services and Avaya is in ongoing discussions with other vendors to integrate its voice applications, Byrd said. You’ll see more of that from us, he said.

Avaya has inked integration other deals with IBM for its WebSphere appliance, as well as with Microsoft, Siebel and SAP.

Of course, a converged IP network must come before these advanced applications, which are slowly trickling onto the market. But it’s a marketing pitch that’s not always heard in the enterprise VoIP world.

Avaya’s strategy to draw businesses to IP communications has been one of migration; enabling its old technologies to work with the new, Byrd said.

He reckons a 20-year-old digital phone from the company can be rejigged to a soft-phone control from the desktop, with instant messaging and SIP presence.

Indeed the vast majority of Avaya and other vendors’ customers have transitioned to IP, with forklift upgrades happening mostly at so-called green-field locations — ones that required a new network deployment anyway.

We shouldn’t expect the world to change overnight, Byrd said. Enterprises want to leverage existing investments.

The company’s approach is to sell IP add-ons, notably mobility, presence and collaboration.

Avaya’s strategy contrasts to its chief rival Cisco Systems Inc, where it’s IP technologies are all new, Byrd said. They tend to have an approach relative to Avaya, that if it’s not all new, it’s not good. You can have all new from us or you can mix your way forward.

As enterprises transition to VoIP, Avaya’s managed services business grows, Byrd said. Managed services drove 7% of the $5.473bn in total Avaya revenues last year. (All services combined, including regular product maintenance, drove almost half, or 48%, of total revenue).

In the R&D labs of the Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based company, about 90% of the efforts are on software, thanks to the advent of IP communications, Byrd said. The increasing amount of our value is now software.