Spot the telecoms winners
After a year of innovation and upheaval in the telephony and convergence market, the Comms Channel Expo in Birmingham offers an opportunity to see what the future holds.
Time, it is said, waits for no man, and it seems that the convergence market waits for no firm.
There has been an abundance of change since last year's Comms Channel Expo in Birmingham, but amid the market commotion and technology shifts, this year's show offers a glimpse of what the coming year could hold.
While converged and hybrid telephony saw massive upheaval, new markets have also appeared. Wireless Lan technologies are beginning to mature, with managed solutions from a plethora of vendors.
Mobile communications also look set to take off, with distributors leading the push into the mobile phone and data card market. There is also huge potential in the area of mobile applications.
It's now easier to sell mobile phones, cards and contracts, but resellers also have a chance to integrate these into what they are already selling.
This year's show is set to reflect yet more change. A survey by the organisers, iMark, found that 57 per cent of resellers want to sell convergence, a 15 per cent increase on the results of a similar survey two years ago.
Among the highlights of the 2003 show, Mitel moved further into the data channel with its hybrid and pure-IP telecoms products, distributor Westcon launched VoicePoint and Ericsson signed up Nimans as a distributor.
CRN's keynote debate saw analysts from QuoCirca, EuroLan Research and Canalys, as well as key executives from Anikti, Nortel and Norwood Adam discussing the voice market.
Since then, Azlan has joined Westcon in pushing into the voice market, new distributors and vendors have made their appearance, and large IP telephony vendors, such as Cisco, Nortel and Avaya, have realised that the SME market represents relatively easy pickings.
As a result, they've started chasing after big rivals such as Siemens, Toshiba, Panasonic and Mitel.
All of these vendors are facing competition from relative newcomers, including Swyx, Zultys, Altigen and Quescom. These smaller vendors are not shipping huge numbers of lines, but they are collectively taking up a large proportion of the market.
According to one of the speakers at the Convergence Summit this year, IP telephony is becoming impossible to ignore.
"Compared with last year, one of the things that is not in doubt is that IP telephony is here, and it's one thing corporates will consider. Last year was all about hybrid, but now it's about how resellers can capitalise on convergence quickly enough," said Sandy Fitzpatrick, senior analyst at Canalys.
"Vendors are becoming more important; in the past, it's been value-added distribution that has made markets, but now it's about how the vendors will take on that role. Vendors are doing things differently, and some are having more success than most."
It's all change for bandwidth and switched minutes too. Least-cost routing is continuing to attack BT's market share and BT is fighting back with some very competitive products and mountains of marketing.
Service providers such as Tiscali, Thus, Easynet and Colt are marketing some innovative broadband products aimed at home and business users, as well as providing back haul for a large number of Wi-Fi hotspot start-ups.
Hotspots and Wi-Fi have become a hot topic over the past year, and at this year's Comms Channel Expo there will be a number of presentations from analysts and vendors on GPRS, third-generation (3G) and Wi-Fi.
Wireless is certainly a big issue for reseller React Technologies. Teferra Daniel, vice president of business development, said: "The emergence of Wi-Fi is driven by user demand, as opposed to 3G, which is coming out without demand being there.
"We think wireless switching has enormous potential. People have brought in access points under the noses of managers, so there is a need for firms to begin managing all this. The next step is bringing Wi-Fi out. Hotspots will become hot zones, then hot counties, then hot countries."
A number of start-ups, such as Liberty Europe, are pushing hotspots-in-boxes to the channel. Older firms such as T-Mobile, Norwood Adam, working with Kooku, and BT, offer similar bundles, with hotspot aggregators potentially emerging as winners in the market.
T-Mobile's high-profile partnership with Intel's Centrino brand has won various markets and creating headlines by adding deals with aggregators The Cloud and iPass.
Mobile data and telephony has also hit the news recently. Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) was the first laptop manufacturer to offer products bundled with airtime and contracts in a deal with Hugh Symons.
The distributor was also the glue that tied together Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) PDA, phone and email offering, AccessAnywhere, late last year. HP is believed to be looking at a package similar to FSC's.
Bob Tarzey, services director at QuoCirca, who will be talking about mobility solutions for small businesses at the show, said: "It's possible to access data from remote locations via a land line, GPRS, 3G and Wi-Fi.
"There needs to be something that ties all of these together to remove the complexity, and what FSC is offering is a good place to start.
"The second, and perhaps bigger, element of this is applications. It's also driving Secure Socket Layer virtual private networks, which is another hot topic."
From everybody's point of view, the most welcome change over the past year has been the increase in spending, which has been felt over the entire telecoms, mobile and networking sector, even if by just a few points.
The enterprise telecoms market is seeing plenty of upheaval, with large system sales warping the market from one quarter to the next.
And there has been an increasing movement at the low end too, as smaller companies refresh their PBXs. Medium-sized corporate customers are finding new requirements and also helping to push the market along.
It's going to be an interesting year, and there's no better way of finding out what the vendors, analysts and distributors are up to than to ask them yourself.