Not one leading domestic PBX system supplier from 1980 is still around today in its then-corporate state. AT&T divested its manufacturing arm in 1996, and the resulting Lucent Technologies in turn spun-off Avaya in 2000. Among the domestic system supplier casualties from the 1980s were corporate giants IBM (buyer of Rolm, before selling its development and manufacturing arm to Siemens in 1988), United Technologies (short-term owner of Lexar Systems) and Exxon (who even then had money to burn). For a time in the early 1980s, Intecom (funded by Exxon Enterprises) threatened to become a major competitor, but its momentum stalled and it bounced around between several owners (Wang, Matra Communications, EADS) before landing with its current Canadian owner Aastra Technologies (who recently acquired the enterprise networks division of Ericcson as well). Other Fortune 500 companies would also withdraw from the PBX market over time, including Rockwell and Harris (who had acquired Digital Telephone Systems, a pioneering digital PBX developer).
There were also several infamous homegrown start-ups in the mid-1980s that didn’t survive the decade, such as Ztel and CXC. A less well-known system supplier that went as fast as it came was Cyber Digital. Datapoint, an early market leader in office automation and local area networks (its ARC solution was highly popular before there was such a thing as Ethernet) also flamed out fast as a voice system supplier.
The potential market for an integrated voice/data PBX system appeared too attractive not to take a crack at. It seemed that domestic system suppliers were popping up all over, at various times in the 1980s, but only AT&T remained a major domestic market force by 1990 (see table below).
During the 1980s, the collective market share of American system suppliers fell by almost half, from 74% to 38%, due to a combination of flame-outs, acquisitions by overseas suppliers, and bad management decisions. Between 1980 and 1990, Nortel and Mitel combined to more than double Canadian companies’ market share, from 13% to 27%, while European firms’ market share increased substantially, 5% to 20%, primarily due to Siemens’ acquisition of Rolm Systems. Japanese suppliers, led by NEC and Fujitsu (the latter of whom acquired GTE’s PBX operations) increased their collective market share from 8% to 14%. As the 1990s began, American suppliers may have been in the lead, but they no longer held a majority share of their domestic market.
