10/31/2006 -- Thanks to a shift in the worldwide Voice-over-IP equipment market segment, enterprises will spend more than $1.27 billion on network support services by 2010.

That's according to new research from market watcher International Data Corp. (IDC), which says the long-standing wall between telephony and IT will ultimately crumble as network equipment vendors embrace software running over dedicated servers, instead of the proprietary hardware and software solutions that have been part-and-parcel of VoIP since its inception.

In the past, vendors had to contend with little in the way of competition for VoIP support services, in part because of the proprietary nature of their products.

As the market shifts over to software solutions that run on general purpose servers, however, IDC says this will change -- drastically. One upshot of this shift, IDC researchers suggest, is that a slew of third-party systems vendors and services providers will emerge to vie for market laurels.

"As the IP PBX market shifts from proprietary systems to software applications running on a general purpose servers, the model for support services will begin to look more like the model for other mission-critical software applications," said Matt Healey, senior research analyst for IDC's Software and Hardware Support services program, in a statement. "In this model, the VoIP vendors will be responsible for supporting the software in partnership with a systems vendor, or a third party will be responsible for supporting the hardware."

Elsewhere, IDC says, we'll likely see more server vendors partnering with networking vendors, mostly in an effort to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. One consequence of this is that VoIP equipment vendors -- if they're to weather the projected market shift -- must evolve from hardware-centric to software support models, the researcher says. -- Stephen Swoyer