A recent study by Infonetics Research (News - Alert) indicated there is no doubt companies are abandoning their traditional telephony based PBXs for relatively cheaper IP based voice systems.

 

The enterprise telephony market grew 6 percent in 2007, Infonetics said, growing in value to $9.6 billion.

 

Cisco (News - Alert) crawled up the vendors ladder to achieve second place and Alcatel-Lucent slipped to fifth place in the global market. (Third and fourth places were held by Nortel (News - Alert) and Siemens, respectively.) Avaya, the study said, shipped more units than any other enterprise telephony vendor last year.

 

Shipments of IP desk phones and softphones increased 29 percent, as more enterprises attempted to cut operational cost with the help of latest technology. Softphones enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to install new applications, such as Find Me/Follow Me, ensuring that no important calls are missed.

 

“2007 ended up being a good year overall for the PBX (News - Alert) market, despite rapidly declining sales of TDM systems, which were down over 20 percent,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics, in the report.

 

Machowinski added: “We continue to witness the migration to IP PBXs, but new in 2007 was evidence that end-users are benefiting from IP in a direct and meaningful way. Until now, most of the benefits have gone to the network manager, such as IP trunking – things the user couldn’t care less about. But this is starting to change, slowly but surely.”

 

The market, according to Infonetics, was buoyed by strong IP PBX systems equipment sales, and dragged down by TDM PBX/KTS equipment sales. The top five PBX/KTS system vendors accounted for three fourth of total market revenue.

 

Hybrid IP PBX systems, meanwhile, accounted for two-thirds of all lines shipped in 2007 while pure IP systems accounted for 18 percent.