June 18, 2001 Enterprises will migrate their voice systems from traditional networks to data networks at a rate that will create a $16.5 billion IP-PBX market worldwide by 2006.
June 18, 2001 Enterprises will migrate their voice systems from traditional networks to data networks at a rate that will create a $16.5 billion IP-PBX market worldwide by 2006, according to a new study from Allied Business Intelligence (ABI—www.alliedworld.com). ABI says the upturn is due to the number of potential benefits and limited drawbacks in this early stage of IP-PBX development.
The study is entitled "IP-PBX, Hosted Solutions and IP Telephone Sets: The State of Convergence in the Enterprise." It states that the value of the total market value for hosted solutions will grow at a compound rate of 137% over the next six years. "Enterprises can use hosted solutions to become familiar with IP technology without laying out the capital for customer-premises equipment," said analyst Erin Thompson, the report's primary author.
The report says that hybrid solutions—those that allow users to use IP's openness while maintaining PBX's feature set and reliability—will become increasingly prevalent.
The European market for IP-PBXs will surpass the North American market by next year, and will dominated the hosted-solutions space beginning in 2004. "As Europe deregulates, it will open the doors to competition and innovation," ABI said in a release announcing the study. "Europe also has less baggage than the U.S., both in terms of investment in traditional PBX equipment and negative association with the idea of outsourcing telephone systems."
