A few things caught my eye in Jeremy Duke's and Ken Landoline's article about taxonomy and sizing of the Unified Communications market, which is currently topping our feature column.It's a little hard to gauge today's market based on the article, since their data only runs through year-end 2008, and the first quarter of '09 has been pretty crummy, by most all accounts. Jeremy and Ken found that 4th quarter was typically off for the UC market, and 4Q08 especially so, given the economic collapse. Yet their trends showed a bounce-back in the previous two years' worth of 1Qs, and I don't think anyone expects to see that pattern continue when the numbers come out for 2009.
Still, a few items caught my eye. One is that, on the worldwide stage, This has got to be troubling for the other vendors. Cisco has proven its ability to add to its market share, and if the others can only keep up by cutting prices, that's a losing game.
Synergy's next conclusion that's sure to get some attention is their report that the UC leader in the SMB market is...ShoreTel. They make the case that ShoreTel's bundling of UC apps into their systems is what's driving this. Given that Nortel has traditionally been a powerhouse in the SMB market, ShoreTel's moment may have come. Jeremy and Ken write that ShoreTel's next move is to go up-market, which the company is trying to do. That'll be a much tougher haul.
Finally, the biggest wallop, I think, is packed into the final paragraph of the feature, which I'll reproduce here:
Another interesting by-product of our research was Synergy's ability to measure the actual size of Microsoft's OCS voice deployments. While Microsoft has done well in presence/IM deployments, the company's success, while promising for OCS voice, is still far behind that of the traditional PBX vendors. As a point of comparison, Synergy estimates Microsoft is shipping fewer than 50,000 voice lines per quarter in comparison to the top PBX vendors shipping over 1 million lines per quarter. We believe if Microsoft wants to be a leader in enterprise voice, the company will need to make an acquisition to do so. However, the reality that we are seeing is that Microsoft and IBM are enjoying very healthy partner relationships with the PBX vendors, incorporating their presence/IM servers into multivendor UC deployments.
Microsoft has done an effective job getting the OCS voice customers that they do have front and center, and letting them argue that the transition has been successful. And again, you have to remember that these Synergy Research numbers don't take 1Q09 into account. Still, I don't think Microsoft could argue that they've really gotten that close to closing the gap with their legacy rivals, and it's useful to see Synergy put a number on the task ahead of Microsoft.
I agree with Jeremy and Ken that, given these numbers, the only way for Microsoft to make a quantum leap into the top tier of voice vendors is via acquisition--but that move just doesn't seem to be in the cards. Instead, Microsoft seems to be betting on a paradigm shift, a tipping point, call it what you will--something that happens in the customer base over the next few years that fundamentally erodes enterprises' interest in building their voice capability around a PBX.
Or, as has been widely expected, Microsoft may be planning to come out with an OCS release that targets the PBX market head-on and takes the fight directly to its rivals. That's a slower process, but given Microsoft's size and strength, they'll be a PBX player if that's what they decide to be.
