Bumpy Ride Through a Flat MarketBumpy Ride Through a Flat Market

If you really, absolutely needed an enterprise-grade communications platform today, chances are, like it or not, you'd buy an IP-PBX.

The week I worked as a deck hand on a cruise ship off the coast of New England (before I jumped ship), I learned about one of those entertaining intra-regional rivalries that you always find charming when it doesn't involve your own home territory: A fellow deckhand from Vermont was given to deriding a Connecticut-born colleague for being a "Flatlandah." I'm from Illinois, so Connecticut didn't seem all that flat to me. I know from flat.

So what does it mean when a market, say the PBX market, is flat?

Of course it means vendors sold about as many this year as they did last year, and they're projected to sell about that many again next year, and for some years into the future. What it doesn't mean is that they didn't sell any at all.

So the PBX market is flat, but PBX vendors are still selling PBXs. What if that continues to be the status quo for the next several years?

I can't recall a more interesting time in our industry, in terms of technology innovation. You can integrate communications into all sorts of applications and interfaces--you can actually do that. You can find ways to use communications to effect all kinds of incredible capabilities for business applications. There's literally never been a time of more creativity and potential within the communications industry. A technology that was silo-ed, tightly controlled, dominated by monopolies, duopolies, or oligarchies of one kind or another, is in the process of being democratized. That's not an exaggeration--it really is happening.

But if you run a very large enterprise, how do you actually make that work for you, at enterprise scale? Are there really platforms that can enable that today? Tons of vendors are standing by, ready to shout an enthusiastic, "Yes!" to that question, but are they right? We haven't seen many enterprises ready to take that plunge.

So if you really, absolutely needed some kind of communications platform today, and it had to be enterprise grade, and it had to work, what would you buy? Chances are, like it or not, you'd buy an IP-PBX. Your decision making would probably center around a shorter time horizon, and would focus on a migration path, but in the end, you need a platform that can support phones. If you're a public utility or a hospital or a municipal public safety department, what are you going to do? Not have a phone system?

Here's where it maybe gets interesting. If you're a retailer, your needs might be a little different than those examples above. Your business requires you to engage with a public whose communications lifestyle is rapidly evolving and generally doesn't involve telephones like it used to. Maybe you see a need for creative solutions sooner.

If you're a financial institution, the situation is complex in different ways. Your customers and employees likewise need new ways of communicating, but you're likely bound by significant regulatory constraints. So there's that to balance.

As we've gotten deeper into the planning of Enterprise Connect, these are some of the issues with which we've started to really grapple. The world of the enterprise communications professional is no longer a single reality shared across industries and business models. There's a technology transformation under way, but it will be long and drawn out for many enterprises, while others may be on the verge of making significant changes.

Whichever scenario describes your enterprise--or if you're somewhere in between the extremes--we're designing programming to help you make the best choices that will help your enterprise make money and save money with communications. We hope to see you in Orlando.

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