Over at Vanguard Communications, Jason Alley has a post taking off from the Eastern Management study on Open Source market share, and Jason ties in a few other industry trends.Here's a key paragraph:
Open Source, Microsoft [UC] and On Demand Communications all have in common the promise of significant cost savings for enterprise communications (among other things). Whether we like it or not, we are all being asked to cut budgets and do more with less. While it may not make sense to jump ship today, or ever for that matter, it would be prudent to investigate and track these lower-cost alternatives as we move forward with developing Unified Communications and Contact Center strategies.
I think Jason makes a good point here, or actually several good points. The Eastern Management Group study has gotten a lot of attention for pegging Open Source as 18% of the PBX market, but if you read carefully what John Malone wrote here on No Jitter, he's not suggesting that Open Source PBXs are necessarily grabbing business away from proprietary vendors; rather, he writes, "were there no Open Source PBX, then the traditional PBX and key system market might have been larger by the same 18%." The question here becomes whether Open Source can move out of the shadows and up into the portion of the SMB market that is already on people's radar screens. Those are the folks that I think are the likeliest to be giving Open Source a new look in these budget-constrained times.
The Microsoft example grows out of a pretty straightforward prediction by Jeff Raikes, former head of Microsoft's Business division, when he claimed a few VoiceCons ago that the migration from software to hardware would drive voice system prices down 50%. Long-term, this is going to happen, at least the migration--hopefully the lower prices are equally inevitable. It seems to me that the thing for enterprises to do now is not necessarily to push this migration up in the schedule, in hopes of capturing these savings now. Instead, it's important to remember what folks like Mark Straton of Siemens said in response to Raikes's prediction: Yes, software prices will go down and the software will run on commoditized hardware, but integration and related services costs will rise. So the challenge is one of risk avoidance--how do you make sure software-based voice implementations don't become the kind of money pits that other big, amorphous software implementations have? And, for that matter, how do you make sure the stuff just works? So it's a defensive play.
When it comes to on-demand services, I'd defer to the superior knowledge of Jason and his dad. I know that contact centers have traditionally been a place where flexibility and virtualization have paid off big, so there may be real potential there. I don't think we've really seen enough of Cisco WebEx Connect, or "Cloud Computing" in general, to know whether it's a passing fancy or not. I hope to learn more at VoiceCon at the end of this month, when Zeus Kerravala and I co-moderate a session on Cloud Computing's relationship to enterprise communications, featuring service provider and equipment vendor representatives.
Meantime, Jason's post offers some food for thought. Give it a read.
