IP PBX Market on the Upswing

The pure IP category of the PBX market reported a robust 36 percent revenue increase in 1Q05 over 1Q04 according to Infonetics Research. The IP PBX growth is in stark contrast to the rest of the PBX market, which is trending downwards.

The $223 million in 1Q05 revenue for pure IP PBX represents a 10 percent gain over the preceding quarter. IP PBX revenue is expected to continue to grow at rapid pace up to $277 million by 1Q06, a yearly gain of 24 percent.

Pure IP PBXs currently account for 15 percent of Global PBX/KTS revenues, while TDM is at 28 percent and Hybrid PBXs are at 57 percent. By 2008, Hybrid is forecast to represent 67 percent, IP 23 percent and TDM will decline down to only 9 percent.

In 1Q05 the combined revenues for Hybrid and Pure IP PBXs hit a total of $1 billion in revenue.

In terms of North American IP PBX vendor share, Infonetics reported that Avaya and Cisco are tied in the top spot, each with 23 percent of the 1Q05 revenue pie and each holding 17 percent of all lines.

The Infonetics study does not track open-source IP PBX deployments, like those from Asterisk and SIPFoundry.org.

“We don’t have plans to track these, mainly because of the difficulty in doing this,” Infonetics Research Analyst Matthias Machowinski told EnterpriseVoIPplanet.com. “I believe they release download figuress, but we don’t know how many of those are actually being used, and also how many users/lines behind any given download.”

On an overall global basis 1Q05 PBX/KTS revenues were reported at $1.5 billion, a 2 percent gain over the previous year but a 12 percent decline over the preceding quarter. The total number of PBX/KTS lines shipped globally declined to 6.3 million in the first quarter of 2005, a 15 percent decline over the fourth quarter of 2004.

By the first quarter of 2006, Infonetics has forecast that the PBX revenues will reach $1.7 billion as the market shift towards IP technologies and the economy improves.

Infonetics Machowinski said that he not surprised by the 1Q results, mainly because it was a repeat of what happened a year ago.

“There tends to be some seasonal weakness in the first quarter. Also, the emerging pure IP category was able to buck the seasonality decrease,” Machowinski said. “We conduct annual end-user research on the IP voice market, and based on that we know that demand is shifting from TDM-systems to IP PBXs.”

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