PBX Sales Are Growing Again

According to a study released in June by Eastern Management Group, sales of PBXs in 2010 grew 16 percent over 2009. Moreover, SIP Trunks are installed on 45 percent of newly installed IP PBXs. This remains consistent with what many of the Broadvox VARs are experiencing. The growth in PBX sales is crossing SMBs and enterprises with each looking to benefit from decreased cost and improved productivity through PBX upgrades, replacement and new installs.

The market leaders are the usual suspects with a couple of surprises. Cisco improved its position as the market leader with 34.76 percent of the market. Among large systems, only Avaya is close with a 23.33 percent share. I very much agree that Avaya has proven to be quite resourceful in absorbing the Nortel enterprise business and growing it in conjunction with their existing and new product lines. However, the biggest surprise has been the success of Panasonic.

SMBs are the target for Panasonic sales. As such, Panasonic has targeted business with communications requirements of 50 lines or fewer. This has led to a 4.07 percent overall market share. Eastern Management Group estimated that 40 percent of its North America PBX line sales are from offices with under 20 PBX lines and 75 percent of its sales from others with up to 50 PBX lines. Therefore, it is quite logical that Panasonic would roll out a new marketing campaign and new products to grow even more revenue in the SMB segment.

Here there is also a consistent trend, with the open source PBXs claiming 18 percent market share. Open source PBXs are being adopted mostly by small businesses with the average install around 60 lines. Given that small businesses represent 40 percent of the total North America market, having a solution attractive to them is very important. The largest segment of Broadvox sales is to buyers of open source platforms (Asterisk, Digium).

Broadvox GO! SIP Trunking products interoperate with Cisco, Avaya and Panasonic. In fact, we have completed interoperability testing with most of the other PBX market leaders (NEC, Vertical, Toshiba, ShoreTel, Aastra, Iwatsu).

There are general concerns about the economy as a whole but for those delivering IP based solutions, the market is robust and growing.