You have to have been in a coma to have not noticed all the noise in the media regarding the banking crisis and looming recession. There is an element in me that thinks it is all over my head, not being a banker with million pound bonuses to lose.

Clearly though it is affecting business confidence and a prudent manager will nurse his cash through this period of uncertainty. What the forward thinking manager will also do is to look at how he runs parts of his business to see where the use of technology can provide real savings.

One such area has to be in the use of VoIP to connect the different sites of a business. This effectively eliminates internal telephony charges and likely reduces the line costs because some existing ISDN or analogue lines can be dispensed with.

The technology to do this, known as SIP Trunking, is now pretty mainstream and most PBX vendors provide SIP interfaces to allow the interconnect. Old PBXs are not precluded from this efficiency measure with the use of media gateways.

This is one area of our business that has already been snowballing and I expect to see it grow further with the increased levels of economic uncertainties.