According to a new TelecomWeb white paper, there is a significant gap between the percentage of U.S. businesses that believe IP Telephony (IPT) can change the way they do business and the percentage that actually are achieving business value from their IPT investments.

The IP Telephony Business Value Gap: Top 10 Reasons Why Businesses Aren’t Getting Full ROI From VoIP reveals that while a majority (55%) of North American organizations implementing technologies like Voice over IP (VoIP) believe the investment will enable converged applications that can deliver business value by improving business processes significantly, only 15% said they currently are implementing applications that offer business value.

The white paper verifies the existence this gap and discusses its Top 10 causes:

1. Organizations haven't started implementing IPT yet

2. Solutions target bigger companies

3. The IPT business case often is based on hard savings

4. Executives are reluctant to be pioneers with third- party applications

5. Organizations are waiting for early adopters to prove IPT in first

6. Vendors haven't proposed any business-value applications

7. IPT sales reps aren’t comfortable selling business value

8. Channels lack understanding of key business issues

9. Vendors lack sales tools that quantify business benefits

10. IPT vendors lack tech support for third-party apps

The white paper was prepared by Terry White, vice president and senior program director of the InfoTrack for Converged Communications program at InfoTech: The Telecom Intelligence Group, the market-intelligence division that is a TelecomWeb sister company.

To download a free copy of the paper, please visit http://www.telecomweb.com/whitepaper1reg/