In annual surveys of companies conducting VOIP deployments, the average time a company devoted to upfront planning, installation, troubleshooting and training in 2004 was 52 minutes per user, which increased to 133 minutes in 2005, according to Nemertes Research Inc. in New York.

"Companies in 2005 had the realization that they needed to spend more time on upfront tasks," said Nemertes analyst Robin Gareiss, in an interview today. "Implementations are now getting more complex."

Gareiss said that adding more time for upfront activities will obviously increase costs for a project and cut into the return on investment an IT management team projects when lobbying higher management for VOIP funding.

The findings, which have not yet been published, indicate that companies generally "are realizing how much time it really takes" to implement VOIP, Gareiss said. She gathered her data from interviews with 90 IT executives in 2004 and another 90 IT executives from different companies in 2005. The companies were based in the U.S. and abroad and reflected a range of sizes.

Some of the data has been shared with communications vendor Avaya Inc. and might have been what prompted recent keynote comments by Avaya CEO Don Peterson at VoiceCon Spring 2006 in Orlando. "We don't believe IP telephony is a cost-reduction case," Peterson said in his address on March 8. "I fundamentally believe that the real value is how it changes the business."