A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:

UCStrategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit our website for more detail: http://www.ucstrategies.com/

Over the past several months I have been briefed by some of the major PBX/IP-PBX vendors. While they all have great plans for migrating to the new world of Unified Communications, they are not there quite yet. In the meantime, however, they need to continue selling PBX/IP-PBXs.

They all agree that enterprise VOIP solutions (read: IP-PBXs) will drop in price over the next few years, and that creates a big problem for them: How to make up the lost revenue?

Higher volume is one obvious answer, but it is unlikely that sales will increase enough to offset the lost revenue. And a lower top line will almost certainly mean a lower bottom line, not a good situation for any public company—Wall Street punishes companies that cannot show top- and bottom-line growth.

The ideal scenario for PBX/IP-PBX vendors is for prices to stay the same and for sales to increase over the next several years while these companies re-engineer their businesses.

Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen either. With the overall VOIP market growing at about the rate of GDP or inflation, the main hope for growth looks to be a major shift in market share, as demonstrated by Cisco and, to a lesser degree, ShoreTel.

So, here’s the dilemma: PBX/IP-PBX vendors need to continue selling new systems, but increasingly it makes sense for buyers to hold off until they’ve developed a strategy for unified communications. And, in fact, there are a variety of reasons why you may not need a PBX/IP-PBX to achieve your UC objectives, including:

1. When integrating communications into business processes, today’s standard SIP call control features may be sufficient for most applications.
2. If you require more advanced call control features you can:
   • Interface your current PBX with Microsoft OCS, IBM SameTime, Genesys GETS, or other CTI/CSTA-based packages or,
   • Install a small/departmental IP-PBX without replacing the main system.
3. Adopt a mobility solution that does not require a new PBX/IP-PBX.
4. Since many early UC adopters have found that PBX-based call volumes decrease considerably when communications is integrated into business processes, your existing PBX may be sufficient. If you choose to repurpose the phones, your users will have to move to a different solution.
5. The cost for a PBX/IP-PBX may be difficult to justify when compared with emerging UC-based solutions. As one PBX vendor explained to me, “We still have customers asking us for new features, but will they be willing to pay $235 per station for call control when a SIP peer-to-peer solution is (nearly) free?”

All of this does not result in a rosy picture for PBX/IP-PBX vendors who seek to preserve the status quo while they transform their company. I am sure many of them have a different view from the one outlined above, and it’s important that you, the enterprise customer, hear their point of view. So, to encourage discussion of this idea, I have set up a discussion forum on the UCStrategies.com website. I encourage vendors as well as their customers to offer their point of view including real experiences. UCStrategies.com was established to be an information portal for the UC industry. Use it and enjoy.

What do you think? Drop me a note at jburton@ct.link or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum or at the UC Strategies discussion forum.

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

Posted in Market Trends, Equipment, Tech Trends, Jim Burton, Unified Communications |

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