Enterprise telephony stats can be misleading

Stuart Corner
Monday, 14 May 2007 17:47

IT Industry - Market

Secondly these legacy markets, although declining at 7.2 percent (PBX) and 9.6 percent (KTS) still account, along with circuit switched wireless PBX for half the market. In fact F&S's figures show them dipping below 50 percent in 2006 for the first time).

Also, surprisingly, according to F&S, the IP telephony market declined slightly in 2006, which would have helped boost NEC's ranking. However, F&S expects this to be a temporary glitch.

"As the vendors start to concentrate more on the product portfolio for the SMB segment, in terms of cost and one-box solutions, independent small and medium-sized businesses will start to take more interest in deploying IP telephony....As the next wave of business productivity improvements come due to IP telephony will increasingly become adopted across enterprises."

The real take-away from this research for NEC is this. Critical to the success of NEC and other major players in the legacy market - notably Siemens, Ericsson and Nortel with 10.8, 23.7 and 21.6 percent respectively of the PABX market - will be the rate at which they can convert these legacy customers to new IP solutions in the face of fierce competition from the likes of Cisco and Avaya and new nimble and innovative companies like Zultys and ShoreTel at the other end of the market.

A F&S observes: "...Ericsson, Nortel and Siemens...combined...have over 56.1 percent of the [PABX] market share. And they are also fast moving their customer base towards IP communication solutions."

Becoming overall market leader and increasing market share in a market which has not grown overall but where your competitors are all shifting focus, and revenue streams, to the new technologies could be a sign of failure rather than success: of not moving your sources of revenue to the new technologies as fast as your competitors.

So, rather than put out self-congratulatory press releases based on selective use of the available data, perhaps better to say nothing. Because inquisitive people like me will always dig a bit deeper.