Here's a VoiceCon eNews newsletter I did a couple of weeks back. Basically, I was arguing that the IP telephone desk set market would be a kind of transitional, comparatively short-lived market.
In that newsletter I quoted from Allan Sulkin's Market Review article in the Feature section of this website, and added my own thoughts:
Thanks to the one-two punch of mobile phones and Unified Communications clients/PC softphones, “The days of ubiquitous $500 desktop telephones for professional white collar workers are slowly fading into oblivion,” Allan writes.
In response to that newsletter, I heard from our friend Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST, who questioned Allan's projection about a 2009 crossover of the installed base to IP, but who also made a case for an enduring IP phone market, at least at the low end:
Referring to the data from our webinar in November (see below) and based upon ongoing conversations with many, many enterprise customers, I really doubt the installed base of IP Phones will exceed the TDM phones by 2009. I believe that the combination of MS [Microsoft] and FMC are going to slow down the “Cool and Expensive” IPT Phone deployments – which is why Cisco, Avaya and Nortel are in trouble. However, when you can put a good reasonable featured “white box” IP Phone on the desk for under $100 (in the near MS future), why wouldn’t they upgrade in the future anyway? I would always much rather have a call to a desk phone if I am in the office then to a cell or soft phone.
This is the data that Hardy refers to as (below):
I agree with Hardy on this, but I think it's almost a distinction without a difference. The $100-a-set telephone market is not one that Avaya, Cisco and Nortel want to be in; if the high-end sets become a niche market (and if by high end we now mean anything that costs more than $100 and does more than just a few basic things), then that does sap a major revenue stream for the "voice" vendors. So from the big-vendor perspective, a $100 desk set is essentially no desk set at all.
Hardy also made one other point that I've advocated for:
One final comment for you to consider – If AT&T (and Verizon) get the FMC thing really right, the PBX manufacturers and MS could both be in trouble – Virtual PBX in the Sky! Once again the network wins except this time it will be wireless instead of wireline.
I totally agree, though that's one of the biggest "Ifs" ever....
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