Toshiba Aims to Move UpmarketToshiba Aims to Move Upmarket

Toshiba has always had a strong position in the small-business market for PBXs and now IP telephony, but the company today announced a new product release that scales into a higher tier.

Toshiba has always had a strong position in the small-business market for PBXs and now IP telephony, but the company today announced a new product release that scales into a higher tier.The new Strata CIX1200 supports 1,152 ports, besting the capacity of Toshiba's previous high-end offering, the CIX670, by 480 ports. The CIX1200 supports up to 1,000 users, almost doubling the 560-user capacity of the CIX670.

A major motivation for the bigger release is that many of Toshiba's 350 dealers in the U.S. had been asking for a bigger system to sell, to try and go beyond their current installed base, according to Jon Nelson of Toshiba.

I asked Jon if Toshiba was feeling any heat on the low end from Response Point, Microsoft's small-business IP-PBX. "All of my dealers' response was, oh my god, just what we needed; another competitor, and a 600-pound gorilla at that," Jon said. But "now that the dust has settled from Microsoft's annoucement of this product, we're not hearing the chatter so much."

One place Toshiba is seeing some effect from Microsoft is in unified messaging, a capability that Toshiba provides but that some of its customers are choosing to get via Microsoft Exchange, Jon Nelson said. Toshiba sells its own UM, but can also interface with Exchange if that's what the customer wants.

In another technical area, Toshiba has been active in certifying the CIX line's SIP trunking compliance with multiple carriers, including CBeyond, ABS, and, most recently, Paetec and AT&T. SIP trunking holds lots of promise for money savings at the low end, where customers might be able to combine voice and data traffic on a single SIP trunk, instead of having to order separate trunks. A Toshiba dealer who's working with a multi-location business can act as the middleman and put together a network that connects, say AT&T SIP trunks in one city with Paetec trunks in another.

Nevertheless, Jon Nelson says the SIP trunk market has been slow to take off among Toshiba customers. "It has not been adopted a lot so far," he said. "I would say that it's slow but growing."

This came as a surprise; Jon said he thought there'd be pent-up demand, but "it has not flown off the shelves like we thought it would," adding, "I don't think most of the carriers have priced their SIP trunking offerings much lower than their traditional offerings."