Cornered!
Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.

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Technology news and Jobs arrow Cornered! arrow Enterprise telephony stats can be misleading
Enterprise telephony stats can be misleading E-mail
by Stuart Corner   
Monday, 14 May 2007
NEC Australia this week issued a press release boasting that it had "regained the lead in Australian enterprise telephony market in Q4 2006." However this achievement in isolation is nothing to brag about.

The basis for the celebration was the latest figures from industry number cruncher, Frost & Sullivan. On F&S's research, NEC was indeed the market leader in Q4 2006 with a market share of 16.72 percent, snatching the lead from Cisco which, for the year as a whole, came in at number one.

Toshiharu Iwasa, managing director NEC Australia, said: "We will continue to engineer products with the ability to integrate new technologies based upon business needs without foregoing the reliability and functionality customers expect and judging by these latest figures the business community agree with our strategy."

Well not exactly. Statistics can always be misleading, especially when used selectively to promote one particular player, and so it is in this case. The statistics do nothing to support Iwasa's claims.

Had NEC wanted to really impress it could have talked about its market leading 24.9 percent share of the key telephone systems (KTS) market and its commanding 39.3 percent share of the PABX market (the number two player, Ericsson had only23.7 percent). The reason it did not, of course is that, in F&S analysis these are circuit-switched not IP products representing rapidly declining legacy markets (PBX sales down 7.2 percent year-on-year and KTS down 9.6 percent according to F&S). Unlike IP telephony, they are not at all sexy. However, in this sexy, IP PBX, sector of the market NEC fares nowhere near as well: a mere 5.0 percent market share in 2006 according to F&S.

So how come NEC has taken the overall market share lead? First and foremost, the lead IP telephony player Cisco (34 percent) and players two and three (Avaya with 17.1 percent and Alcatel with 12.6 percent) don't rate at all the circuit-switched technology (PBX and KTS) markets.

 
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Cornered! - Telecoms blog
Cornered! is a blog on all things tele-communication from the perspective of one who has observed, analysed commented and reported on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition).