Market research firm Infonetics (News - Alert) Research recently announced results from its first quarter 2010 Enterprise Unified Communication, VoIP, and TDM Equipment forecast report.
“We expected the acquisition of Nortel's enterprise assets to put Avaya in the clear lead for overall PBX (News - Alert) equipment market share leadership, and while Avaya did receive a nice bump this quarter, softness in the acquired Nortel business combined with strong results by Cisco (News - Alert) meant that Cisco and Avaya essentially tied for revenue market share,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics, adding that Avaya (News - Alert) “is ahead in terms of line shipments.”
This “unfolding battle,” as Machowinski called it, should be interesting to watch over the coming quarter, “as both companies bring certain strengths and weaknesses to the table.”
The report’s highlights include finding that Cisco maintains its lead in the overall enterprise telephony market in 1Q10, “but only by a hair over Avaya, which saw a 25 percent quarterly jump in PBX revenue after absorbing Nortel’s (News - Alert) enterprise solutions business.”
Both vendors posted their strongest PBX revenue standings since the end of 2008, and manufacturer revenue from PBX and KTS system equipment hit $2 billion in 1Q10, a “four percent sequential dip,” the report says.
But despite the quarterly decline, overall the news is good: “The enterprise telephony market continues to grow from the lows set in the first half of 2009, and is up seven percent year-over-year from the first quarter of 2009,” the report concluded.
The North American PBX equipment market posted the highest year-over-year (1Q09 to 1Q10) growth among all regions, and there’s even a shout out to IP phones, which continue to recover from their 1Q09 low point, “up 32 percent year-over-year to 3.9 million phones shipped in 1Q10.”
The news isn’t so good if you’re in sales of unified communication applications, which are temporarily down due to expired promotions. But hey – the UC market, led by Cisco and Avaya, is expected to resume growth in 2010.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Marisa Torrieri