Crn21 1200 300.jpeg

Vendor shake-ups to continue in telecoms

Business telephony market shrinking as well as consolidating

The global enterprise telephony market of PBXs and unified communications (UC) shrank nine per cent in Q4 to achieve $7.4bn (£4.4bn) for the 2013 year, says Infonetics' research.

Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IP multimedia subsystems at Infonetics, said its figures show the market continued to shrink and consolidate in Q4 of 2013.

"It isn't revenue growth or big shifts in market share that are making news in the enterprise telephony market; it's shake-ups in the vendor landscape," Myers said.

The global enterprise PBX market – including traditional TDMs, hybrids, and pure IP kit – totalled $7.4 bn in 2013, down nine per cent from 2012 and also down nine per cent from Q4 2012, she said, with migration to cloud-based PBX and UC services part of the reason for the slowdown.

She pointed to Mitel's merger with Aastra, moving the consolidated firm into the top five, and Alcatel-Lucent's announcement of a buyer for its enterprise business China Huaxin. Meanwhile, Siemens had changed its name to Unify and begun a "complete management overhaul", she said.

And further vendor shake-ups are expected this year, she added. "The market is too tight to maintain the number of vendors in existence right now."

The strongest segment was UC, which enjoyed an overall global revenue rise for the year of 31 per cent. Microsoft leads the market, which is tipped to grow at seven per cent a year until 2018, with a 43 per cent share.

Cisco has the largest share of the PBX market, 26 per cent, with Avaya in second place, Myers said.

Myers' figures are from Infonetics' 4Q13 and year-end Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment report, due out in March.