You may have heard recently that Ebay purchased Skype for $4.1 billion.

You may also have seen that Google, MSN and lots of other companies are entering into the voice market.

You might also be wondering why this is happening and with all these changes and choices which one is right for you.

With all of these changes going on in the market place it becomes very difficult and risky to chose the right technology and supplier.

So, how can you side step these pitfalls and put your self ahead of the game?

Well there are some interesting parallels. Either history is repeating itself in some way or there is a revolutionary shift going on.

Firstly from the voice side of things the traditional PBX or telephone system is already dead.

There are now 3 ways of getting a state of the voice solution or voice over data - ivoip or internet voip, cvoip or hosted voip and pvoip or private voip.

VoIP is just the beginning or the first step in the process of IP Telephony or a fully converged communication platform, which integrates numerous applications such as voice, data, video etc.

Chosing which or even a combination of those technologies requires a strategic view and some planning for the future.

You should be considering the follwing 12 criteria:

• Performance
• Scalability
• Management
• Resiliance & Tolerance
• Flexibility
• Security
• Quality of Service
• Data location/protection
• Matching of business objectives
• Communications and services
• Cost of ownership and price comparisons
• Financial stability
• Human and business traits