A growing volume of customers tapping into Avaya technical support was expected to drive rapid growth in Avaya's communications solutions and integration business unit, which was created two years ago and is growing rapidly in the face of a trend in which services are expected to account for 40 percent of converged telecommunications spending by 2008.

Much of that spending will come as customers realize they just don't have the in-house skills to handle VOIP and back-end integration themselves.

Susana Vidal, senior telecommunications analyst with IDC Australia, says such issues are particularly common within the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector, where companies are suffering from a lack of VOIP-specific training and growing interest in advanced services such as mobile VOIP telephony and back-end integration.

"In larger companies, their systems integrators generally put together good integration, but a lot of SMEs still don't have people in-house with any kind of IP telephony expertise," Vidal said.

"In companies of fewer than 200 people, you typically have an IT manager who has taken care of the software and security part, and is now also handling the voice area. Not all the deployments are going to stay in phase one only, and vendors and channel partners need to invest a bit more into educating their users."