Recent changes to South African legislation lifted many of the restrictions on voice-over IP. As a result of reduced tariffs from new players and greatly reduced complexities of infrastructure, the telecoms market is abuzz with new cost-saving opportunities.

Many companies are not aware that these benefits have been available to the corporate market for some time now, albeit in a reduced manner.

Looking back, the motivations companies had for implementing IP telephony before the legislation changed tended to vary, but most of these motivations focused on exchanging the complexity of two separate IT and telecoms infrastructures for the relative simplicity of managing a single converged network. It is this reduction in management overhead that delivered savings to the early adopters and put them in a leading position.