Cloud-Based Telephony Use Rising, Figures Indicate

Synergy (News - Alert) Research Group has recently published the Q1 2010 Enterprise Voice market shares, finding that the worldwide market for Enterprise Voice totaled $2.4 billion in Q1 2010.

Latin America and APAC posted the largest increases. The US and China were somewhat flat with one percent growth. EMEA was the only major region to post a decline.

Year over year, the study found, the worldwide Enterprise Telephony market grew only three percent. "However when looking deeper into regional numbers, we see some standout countries posting strong double-digit growth," Synergy officials say: "For example, in APAC, India and Taiwan posted 32.8 percent and 27.7 percent growth, respectively and in Western Europe the UK experienced strongest results with 24.4 percent year-over-year growth."

With the recovering economic environment some vendors fared better than others navigating through increased competition and conservative customer spending, according to Jeremy Duke, Principal Analyst and Founder, Synergy Research Group: 'The effects of strong country growth, where vendors had a strong presence, was a significant contributor to vendor performance in the quarter.'

Western European vendors negatively impacted by this trend included Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), and Siemens, all of which showed year over year decreases. In contrast, both Cisco and Avaya gained share and drove strong revenue growth in Q1 2010.

Other vendors gaining share in the quarter included Mitel (News - Alert), Panasonic, ShoreTel, and Toshiba.

"Today in the world of cloud computing there are basically depots where one can go in and out and pick up, or use any available IP application on a per-use basis," Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber wrote on TMC (News - Alert) recently. "This adds to the convenience factor of the public Internet and further compounds the economic benefits as more applications are brought online. A recent and very logical one is voice applications."

The key, Newby says, "is the service that can be accessed… The interesting dimension with cloud telephony is that while it is essentially enabled by VoIP Peering (News - Alert) it also provides for an alternate destination for the session rather than a specific endpoint for the purposes of a full-duplex call."