This may be the year that we finally saw some movement in the enterprise voice market.
For last month's Enterprise Connect Orlando 2015 show, we asked market researchers from MZA and Current Analysis to report on a number of trends for a session we called, "UC Market: What's Hot, What's Not?" One thing that definitely was hot: This session -- it was one of our best-attended at the show. And some of the numbers are worth noting.
According to MZA figures, Microsoft seems poised to overtake Avaya as the number-two player in enterprise call control in North America. Principal Analyst Peter Hale's presentation shows Microsoft's share of 100+-user license sales rising from 12% in 2013 to 15% in 2014. In the same period, Avaya's share fell from 20% to 19%.
However, a development that's possibly even more striking than Microsoft's gain is which company was the big North America market-share loser: Cisco. MZA shows Cisco falling from 44% in 2013 to 38% in 2014; besides Microsoft's growth, the market research shows small share gains for Mitel, ShoreTel, and Unify. Cisco continues to far outpace the rest of the market, but its lead is shrinking.
In some ways, this was probably inevitable: MZA's historical numbers show Cisco peaking in 2011 at 48% market share in this segment, and ebbing a bit over the following two years, before last year's more significant decline. It's been rare in the competitive era for any company to hold close to 50% market share in enterprise voice for any extended period of time, and clearly this dynamic is asserting itself again -- this time around, with Microsoft in the role of powerful challenger.
The question is, over the next several years, what even constitutes the "voice" market -- or if there even is one. For one thing, the PBX market is flattening out if not declining slightly; however, it'll be a very long, very slow fade.
What replaces it may look less like a pie chart of vendors carving up a market for a clearly defined set of device sales. Instead, it may look more like this diagram that Tim Banting, principal analyst with Current Analysis, presented during the EC15 session:
Voice/telephony, traditionally dominated by the logos you see at the bottom of the figure, will continue to have a "pure" component to it -- sales in which the business purpose is for standalone telephony or a core platform that provides this functionality to other applications. But I don't think Current Analysis is wrong to include players like those on the left labeled "Other (Cloud)." These are companies that don't necessarily specialize in voice/real-time communications, but can (and in the case of vendors like Salesforce, already do) provide this feature to their offerings.
Does that mean an enterprise that uses applications like these won't still be buying core communications platforms? No. It just means they may need to buy less capacity on those platforms, as these other applications offload some of the work. The same thing goes for the enterprise software ("ESN") vendors on the right-hand side of the chart, which could further co-opt "pure voice."
The job for communications professionals is to get their arms around this whole new picture. It means looking horizontally, across this communications/collaboration environment, to understand what applications the enterprise uses and how best to provide communications capabilities to those applications. And that means looking below the applications to make sure the infrastructure that's serving them it can deliver the most important application traffic effectively.
It's a complex, multifaceted, overlapping set of challenges -- for both the enterprise and the vendors.
Follow Eric Krapf and No Jitter on Twitter and Google+!
@nojitter@EricHKrapf
Eric Krapf on Google+
Tags:
Articles You Might Like
