TMCnews Featured Article

Even though the market has been tough for enterprise telephony this past year, a new report from market research firm Infonetics (News - Alert) Research indicates that the PBX segment is still doing quite well.  The report is the latest update to the firm’s quarterly Enterprise Unified Communications (News - Alert) and Voice Equipment research, offering information for the third quarter of the year.

“It’s been a rough year for enterprise telephony, as demand remains flat to down and pricing continues to drop. Global PBX (News - Alert) revenue grew five percent sequentially in the third quarter of 2013, but it wasn’t enough to pull the market into positive territory from a year ago,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research (News - Alert). “Businesses worldwide remain conservative in their telephony spending, relying instead on existing solutions. There are pockets of growth, but they’re too modest to lift the overall market this year from last year.”

Indeed, the overall global enterprise PBX market — which includes TDM (time division multiplexers), hybrid and pure IP — grew five percent sequentially to reach $1.9 billion, but this is still down eight percent from the same period a year ago. The excerpts released from the Infonetics report don’t break down the individual performance of hosted PBX versus physical and hybrid, however.

Meanwhile, sales of unified communications applications also grew five percent in quarter over quarter terms.

Other findings from the report include the fact that none of the major geographical regions posted year over year gains in PBX revenue, but most grew sequentially, with the major exception of North America. EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) did show improvement during Q3, though sales in the region continue to pose a challenge for vendors.

As for vendors, Cisco was first in PBX/KTS revenue for the ninth quarter in a row, followed by Avaya (News - Alert). Microsoft, meanwhile, expanded its share in the UC space to reach 49 percent worldwide revenue share.