One day after its second quarter earnings report, West (the Interactive division) announces another major acquisition: San Jose, CA-based TuVox. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but something tells me that TuVox isn’t doing too well and its investors wanted an out. From its website, 2007 was the last time TuVox received any sort of industry recognition; its blog hasn’t been updated since June 2009. Digging through its website reveals no recent news…
It wasn’t too long ago that West scooped up Holly Connects, an IVR platform provider which I think wasn’t doing too well, either. While the Holly Connects acquisition was a platform play, today’s buyout of TuVox appears to complement it with a portfolio of on-demand IVR solutions and IVR applications.
I suppose West has done well in identifying buying opportunities, especially in this distressed economy, and using its cash wisely to expand its products and services. Could it be the Oracle of Omaha in the contact center industry?
Press release:
OMAHA, Neb., July 22, 2010 – West Interactive, a leading provider of hosted and managed automated customer contact solutions, today announced it has acquired TuVox, a premier provider of on-demand speech and IVR applications.
TuVox has pioneered a unique agile development methodology for speech applications that can yield a superior caller experience in less time and with less risk when detailed requirements are difficult to specify in advance. “TuVox collaborates closely with our clients throughout the development process,” said Mark Lazar, CEO of TuVox. “We find this allows us to better understand their fundamental business needs and respond with creative solutions that produce great results from the start.”
TuVox constructs applications using proprietary development tools that address all aspects of the application lifecycle, from initial design through ongoing operations and tuning. The tool set includes features often sought by clients, including support for the leading VoiceXML platforms, a replaceable runtime component, and a multi-tenanted administration console for configuration and reporting. The addition of TuVox to the West Interactive Hosted IVR platform enhances the current best-in-class applications that optimize the results of our clients businesses.
“We are extremely impressed with the TuVox staff and their ability to rapidly deploy a high-quality application even when clients had difficulty articulating their precise requirements,” said Pam Mortenson, President of West Interactive. “We believe this capability combined with our best-in-class platform and scale will create a truly unique solution that will be particularly beneficial when working with clients on cutting-edge applications.”
West does not expect results from TuVox to have a material impact to its 2010 financial results.
About West Interactive:
West Interactive is a leading provider of hosted and managed automated customer contact solutions. We help our clients connect with their customers more effectively, deliver superior service and maximize the value of every customer interaction. We provide advanced technologies and a highly scalable standards-based infrastructure to help businesses more efficiently conduct multi-media transactions. We have the people, technology and experience to handle the simplest or most complex solutions. Services include custom speech applications, customer surveys, network based call routing and analytic services.
West Interactive, a subsidiary of West Corporation, is located in Omaha, Nebraska, and serves Fortune 1000 clients in nearly every vertical market. For more information, please call 1-800-841-9000 or visit www.westinteractive.com.
About West Corporation
West Corporation is a leading provider of technology-driven, voice-oriented solutions. West offers its clients a broad range of communications and infrastructure management solutions that help them manage or support critical communications. West’s customer contact solutions and conferencing services are designed to improve its clients’ cost structure and provide reliable, high-quality services. West also provides mission-critical services, such as public safety and emergency communications.
Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, West serves Fortune 1000 companies and other clients in a variety of industries, including telecommunications, banking, retail, financial, technology and healthcare. West has sales and operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Latin America. For more information on West Corporation, please call 1-800-841-9000 or visit www.west.com.
About TuVox
TuVox provides mission critical IVR hosting and managed services to companies who envision voice automation as a strategic part of their customer experience. Since 2000, TuVox has become synonymous with superior caller experience. Throughout its history, TuVox has delivered IVR solutions that have both revolutionized how people use the phone and mobile devices to access information, solve problems and transact business and have achieved the expected business outcome for its clients. TuVox On Demand applications are available as configurable solutions for industries such as banking, financial services, insurance, communications, consumer electronics, technology, utilities, entertainment, healthcare, publishing, retail and travel.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as “may,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “intends,” “continue” or similar terminology. These statements reflect only West’s current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance or results. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the effects of global economic trends on the businesses of West’s clients; competition in West’s highly competitive industries; West’s ability to keep pace with its clients’ needs for rapid technological change and systems availability; the loss, financial difficulties or bankruptcy of any key clients; the non-exclusive nature of West’s client contracts and the absence of revenue commitments; increases in the cost of voice and data services or significant interruptions in these services; the cost of pending and future litigation; extensive regulation affecting many of West’s businesses; security and privacy breaches of the systems West uses to protect personal data; West’s ability to protect its proprietary information or technology; the cost of defending West against intellectual property infringement claims; service interruptions to West’s data and operation centers; West’s ability to retain key personnel and attract a sufficient number of qualified employees; increases in labor costs and turnover rates; the political, economic and other conditions in the countries where West operates; and West’s ability to complete future acquisitions and integrate or achieve the objectives of its recent and future acquisitions. West is also subject to other risk factors described in documents filed by the company with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which the statements were made. West undertakes no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law.
Media Contact:
Mack McKenzie
402-963-1324
Companies must be gearing up for SpeechTEK coming up in a couple of weeks because of these major upgrade announcements. ShoreTel let loose its Contact Center 6. Avaya continues to build upon its Aura foundation.
Everything’s about real-time interactions — calls, emails, faxes, IMs, social media, ponies, and pigeon carriers.
Avaya Aura Contact Center aims to better manage the customer experience by making sense of all the interaction channels in order to easily assign a task to service the customer. It allows the customer to choose whichever method of interaction he (or she) prefers at the moment, and even later when using a different channel to follow up, Aura is supposed to keep up with the various interaction paths taken by the customer.
I’m sure this has happened to you before:
YOU: Hello. I am calling about a billing issue which I’d first notified via email about a week ago.
AGENT: I’d be glad to help you. What’s your account number please?
YOU: But I’d already entered it into the IVR… Anyway, here it is…
AGENT: Sorry, but I have no record of that email.
YOU: Okay, I’m going to start tweeting about this horrible experience…
AGENT: Um, what’s a tweet?
All right, maybe not the tweet part. But sill, somewhat frustrating, no? Only to the Web generation. Grandmas and grandpas would be happy just to speak to an agent after talking to the machine. Avaya is preparing for the flood of tech-savvy customers who aren’t shy, demand instant service, and have a very short attention span. And with Aura, it’s preparing for this future on many fronts, from Contact Center to UC to Conferencing to Session Border Control (yes, even that!), as you’ll see in the press release.
Aura will be a platform to be reckoned with.
Extra long press release here:
For Immediate Release: 20-Jul-2010
Basking Ridge, N.J. – Avaya, a global leader in enterprise communications systems, software and services, today announced a suite of new and enhanced product innovations and services based onAvaya Aura™ that redefine the economics and effectiveness of real-time, multi-media enterprise communications. These new tools and services make it possible to simultaneously accelerate decision-making and achieve meaningful financial impact, while moving enterprises towards a more people-centric approach to collaboration.
“In today’s evolving business communications environment, companies demand the right technology approach to ensure superior experiences for employees and the customers they serve,” said Kevin Kennedy, president and CEO of Avaya. “Avaya’s latest series of innovations accomplishes this through faster, more efficient orchestration of people and information. Making smart business decisions quickly can be difficult, but connecting the right people to solve issues in real-time should be both simple and cost-effective.”
New and enhanced capabilities in Avaya’s suite of Contact Center (CC) and Unified Communications (UC) applications drive improvement in the quality of customer service and employee collaboration for mid- to large-sized businesses while lowering the total cost of ownership. In addition, Avaya Aura 6.0 now features increased security, scalability and flexibility, plus common management and expanded use of virtualization across the entire platform. Avaya Aura can save large enterprises approximately 23 percent in capital expenditures and another 33 percent in operating expenditures, according to a recent survey conducted by Avaya. Mid-sized enterprises typically save even more1.
Today’s announcements include:
- Avaya Aura™ Contact Center, announced in a separate release today, is a new multimedia contact center application that extends to all types of media, including voice, e-mail, web chat, and instant messaging/SMS. Designed to further enhance the customer service experience, the new offering will help businesses more effectively manage customer experiences in an always-on world. Avaya Aura Contact Center complements the large enterprise solutions of Avaya Aura Call Center Elite and will serve as a multimedia extension to Call Center Elite in the future.
- Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE) facilitates the development of communications-enabled business applications to speed business workflow. Avaya ACE 2.2 includes Event Response Manager, a new packaged application that reduces downtime and increases efficiency by automatically notifying the right people with the right skills to respond to and manage unexpected events, such as inventory shortages, security breaches, etc. A new developer toolkit makes it easier to embed timely and personalized communications into business applications. With Avaya ACE, enterprises can communications-enable their business applications up to 80 percent faster than by using traditional methods.
- Avaya Aura Conferencing, now available in Standard Edition, provides rich audio, video and Web conferencing features on a single server that reduces management and power requirements. The Enterprise Edition, available later this year, will expand capacity and features to enable internal operator assistance, emergency blast dialing and more. Both editions integrate with UC applications from Avaya, Microsoft®, IBM® and Adobe® to offer a high-quality, integrated collaboration experience.
- Avaya Aura Messaging provides rich multimedia messaging with choices for accessing and storing messages. The first release of this Linux-based solution is specifically designed to enable Octel users to easily migrate to the new platform by maintaining the familiar user interface while delivering new features such as speech-to-text and speech-based virtual assistants.
- Avaya Aura Presence Services offers an open standards-based, native instant messaging solution providing federated presence for IBM Lotus Sametime, and IM and Presence across Microsoft®, IBM, Avaya one-X® Communicator, Avaya one-X Agent and Avaya 9600 SIP phones.
- Avaya Aura Session Manager 6.0 now scales to over 100,000 users, including 50,000 SIP phones and video capable endpoints.
- Avaya Aura Communication Manager 6.0 can now be deployed as an Evolution server for easy migration of mixed H.323/TDM endpoints to SIP environments or a full SIP-based voice and video feature server.
- Avaya Aura Session Border Controller (SBC) allows enterprises to securely connect real time, SIP-based unified communications to the rapidly growing number of IP-based devices, smart phones and applications both within and external to a company. The SBC protects a customer’s network and connected devices from attacks such as denial of service, spoofing attacks, “man in the middle,” or access through unused VoIP ports.
- Avaya Aura System Manager 6.0 provides for a common management system across Avaya Aura that now extends to Presence Services, Conferencing and Messaging, making it easier to administer and manage Avaya Aura components from one central location.
- Avaya Aura System Platform 6.0, Avaya’s virtualization technology, now encompasses all elements of the Avaya Aura architecture and applications portfolio, eliminating up to 80 percent of hardware compared to competitive solutions while reducing management, power requirements and costs.
- Avaya 9600 family of desk phones now offer larger, color touch screen displays at a lower price point, function on lower power and provide a low total cost of ownership. A new value-priced SIP model, the Avaya 1603SW-I, provides a low-cost option for small- to large sized businesses.
The company also issued a new release of Avaya Communication Server 1000 (CS1000), which increases scalability, adds support for the IPv6 protocol and enhances SIP support and connectivity. The continued investment in Avaya CS1000 provides installed customers with a smooth migration path into Avaya Aura and supports many of the applications announced today.
Avaya Aura has already enabled more than 400 enterprises to improve business efficiency and increase responsiveness since its introduction last year. Anchored by the open standards, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based, Avaya Aura Session Manager, Avaya Aura instantly reduces complexity and provides the foundation for rich, contextual applications in broader, more flexible, unified communications and collaboration deployments.
German energy provider, Energiedienst Rheinfelden, is among the first customers to adopt the new Avaya Aura 6.0 platform. The company provides electricity and other related services to more than 750,000 residents in southern Germany and Switzerland. With the adoption of the Avaya Aura 6.0 platform, the company is able to deliver superior collaboration and communications capabilities to its employees across its 26 locations, while creating a migration path for future communications investments. According to Friedhelm Bäumer, CIO at Energiendienst Rheinfelden:
“Avaya Aura is strengthening our communications infrastructure for the future. It enables staff-members to communicate and collaborate in an immediate, fast and efficient manner, even across sites. It is also making the switch from ISDN to SIP telephony a gradual one, allowing us to use existing equipment.”
More than 200 individual beta trials and or full implementations of Avaya solutions announced today are already underway. All Avaya solutions announced today are available now or will be available during the third quarter of 2010 through Avaya or authorized Avaya Connect Channel Partners.
This wide range of new and enhanced enterprise communications products and applications announced today are supported by Avaya Advisory Services, which provide consulting expertise for multi-vendor communications infrastructures and Avaya’s broad ecosystem of developer and channel partners. New to the Avaya Advisory Services is a Self-Funded Roadmap to help companies transform cost savings from prior technology deployments into process improvements to fund future technology investments.
“Avaya spent time with us to really understand our business challenges and, using their Self-Funded Roadmap, we improved our customer satisfaction scores, achieving a 40 percent reduction in call waiting times, and the ability to handle call volumes with 30 percent fewer agents,” said Arnt Eirik Johnsen, controller customer operations, Ventelo. “This has allowed us to re-invest in our business and improve customer service.”
Avaya Aura applications and architecture are complemented by Avaya’srecently announced data networking solutions and network management products, which offer up to 50 percent less total cost of ownership (TCO) than the leading competitor, and are specifically built to handle the demands of real-time communications. Designed from the ground up to optimize video, mobile and voice interactions, Avaya’s fit-for-purpose, enterprise communications and data solutions deliver peak performance, efficiency and resiliency with a smaller footprint that reduces the cost and energy requirements of converging communications networks.
For additional information, including a detailed backgrounder on the Avaya Aura products and a white paper, please visit the Avaya press room online at: http://www.avaya.com/gcm/master-usa/en-us/corporate/pressroom/index.htm
JOIN AVAYA FOR THE LAUNCH: Avaya will host a series of global one-hour webcasts on today’s announcement for customers, partners and other interested parties. To register for the webcast associated with your location, please click on one of the following links:
- For the US, starting at 1:00 pm EDT today, click here.
- For Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America and South America, starting at 2:30 pm EDT today, click here.
- For Asia-Pacific, starting at 11:30 pm EDT today, click here.
- For Europe, Middle East and Africa, starting at 5:00 am EDT, Wednesday, July 21, click here.
About Avaya
Avaya is a global leader in enterprise communications systems. The company provides unified communications, contact centers, data solutions, and related services directly and through its channel partners to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, collaboration, customer service and competitiveness. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.
This guest post is by John Stepp, President of Free Tech Consultants. It’s typed entirely on his Nexus One. Just kidding (but he could’ve).
I know that many are saying that the phone is dead, at least the desktop and landline phone. If that is the case then why is the mobile world so utterly controlled by the phone? First people were going crazy to get their hands on the iPhone 4, now many are incensed to find that it has a flaw. Nobody seems to care much about the revelation that every single iPhone ever shipped has been exaggerating the signal strength of the carrier, AT&T. No, it is all about the phone. It is all about the user interface and the user experience. I understand. I feel the same way.
When my Nexus One was not perfect and needed to be repaired because of a hardware issue, I had the option of returning it. Although having calls dropped and having slow data speed was frustrating, I finally decided to just get it fixed. Just like the Apple iPhone users, I was too enamored with the phone to give it up. Now that it has the Android 2.2 software on it, the phone is better. Sure, there is still a dropped call from time to time, but the user interface is great and the data speeds are fast. Even as the Nexus One is discontinued, CNET tests show that the Nexus One on T-Mobile has data speeds equal or superior to the newer phones. Whoopi Goldberg was so disgusted with her iPhone 4, she ran over it with her car, but then she went and bought an Apple 3G instead of going to a competitor. The similarity between the Android and Apple infatuation is the great application suites that come with these phones. From the stunning displays, to the audio/optical communications tools to the immediate access to information, there is much to like.
Gartner recently said that smartphone sales were up almost 50% year over year. And the latest information from ChangeWave Research shows that the next ninety days will have the most explosive growth in smart phones ever with Apple and HTC (Android) leading the way. However, Research in Motion, the BlackBerry maker favored by most businesses will see its’ market share erode further. Why are phones that businesses favor in a funk while consumer phones are in such demand that there are now four week backlogs for all the favorites? The user interface, the phone itself is driving demand and driving change. E-mail delivery and simple conversations are not enough anymore. We want pictures, video, social media and immediate access to information.
Businesses will be adapting to this changing landscape on mobility and on the desktop. Productivity in the workplace will accelerate when the devices employees use in business match that of the devices used in people’s personal lives. The business telephone and video manufacturers are providing easy to use high value applications for their user interfaces be they computers, netbooks, display phones or video portals. The future is bright for the companies that decide that the phone (user interface) is everything. The businesses involved in bringing these “smart” business communications devices to market will grow quickly and sooner than many predict. And the improved productivity will help businesses grow faster as well, just like the digital revolution did in the nineties. The phone may morph into many different types of devices, but the future of the phone is as bright as the new displays on the smartphones.
The latest ShoreTel contact center suite, a free upgrade for existing customers, promises several major enhancements. In my opinion, the two highlights are:
- ShoreTel Contact Center 6 includes a new real-time event feed that generates group, queue and agent information through an open application programming interface (API). This makes it easy for systems integrators and customers to create custom applications and integrate ShoreTel Contact Center 6 with existing business applications. The API is accessible to all system integrators and customers through the ShoreTel Developers Network.
- ShoreTel Contact Center 6 introduces the ShoreTel Contact Center Agent Dashboard, a Web based application which enables supervisors to publish customized dashboards for agents. The dashboard, which can be deployed for use on iPads and mobile devices, also provides call center managers with a consolidated view of their call center while on the move.
The open API will open the data floodgates of the contact center to developers. Today’s contact center is a place where lots of data can be gathered about customers and the business, and the industry has started to realize the potential of leveraging a contact center’s resources. A lot of emphasis has also been placed on enabling company processes to be more holistic, having different systems work together to automate business processes, and often requiring custom middleware to complete the integration. The API will let brave developers tap into the real-time data of the contact center and create applications that are more dynamic and useful. After all, real-time is the only timeframe today’s businesses operate in.
With Contact Center 6, ShoreTel is also addressing the proliferation of mobile devices in contact center management. Going with a Web-based dashboard is a no-brainer as tablets and smartphones all have capable Web browsers. This also avoids having to invest in developing a native app for the various mobile platforms out there. Unfortunately there are no screenshots to determine whether the mobile dashboard UI is engineered specifically for mobile devices or simply a “lite” version of the full blown, desktop-sized Web app.
ShoreTel’s official press release:
SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 20, 2010 –ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today released ShoreTel Contact Center 6, the latest version of its award-winning call center software.
ShoreTel Contact Center 6 makes it easier than ever for organizations to integrate contact center activities with existing core business processes. New real time APIs and event feeds transform the call center into a dynamic contact center that feeds off the information to self adjust, react and reorganize to enhance the customer experience. This helps call centers improve responsiveness and improve flexibility. Increased scalability and high availability features also provide a robust foundation and flexible geographic footprint for large call centers
As with all previous ShoreTel releases, ShoreTel Contact Center 6 is available as a free upgrade for current customers with a ShoreTel support contract, as part of ShoreTel’s standard support service.
CONTACT CENTER 6: SUMMARY OF NEW FEATURES
- ShoreTel Contact Center 6 includes a new real-time event feed that generates group, queue and agent information through an open application programming interface (API). This makes it easy for systems integrators and customers to create custom applications and integrate ShoreTel Contact Center 6 with existing business applications. The API is accessible to all system integrators and customers through the ShoreTel Developers Network.
- ShoreTel Contact Center 6 introduces the ShoreTel Contact Center Agent Dashboard, a Web based application which enables supervisors to publish customized dashboards for agents. The dashboard, which can be deployed for use on iPads and mobile devices, also provides call center managers with a consolidated view of their call center while on the move.
- ShoreTel also introduces a fast and efficient ShoreTel Contact Center Interaction Viewer that allows supervisors to get an end-to-end view of all interactions, including multimedia interactions. Complete call details, including information collected in the IVR from database dips, are available for organizations interested in creating deep analytics into their call center traffic.
- ShoreTel Communicator is a fully integrated unified desktop client for all users, whether they are call center agents or front desk operators, executives, managers or assistants. Users in a call center role can answer calls, chat, and email while receiving detailed interaction information right on this unified client. This completely eliminates the need for IT administrators to manage and train users on specialized clients for call centers.
- ShoreTel Contact Center 6 increases support for up to 1,000 concurrent agents and 2,000 total agents, making it perfect for enterprises and midsized organizations with large call centers. Advanced redundancy features allow large call centers to effectively deploy their agents in multiple sites while increasing the reliability and uptime of their centers.
- Enhanced reporting, and dramatically fast report generation, now make it easy to track calls from the moment they hit the system until they are resolved or exit the contact center.
QUOTES
Kevin Gavin, Vice President of Marketing, ShoreTel
“ShoreTel Contact Center 6 is a testament to the our focus on making complex application brilliantly simple through massively open interfaces, tight integration with the UC system and most importantly applications that really make agents, supervisors and mobile managers more informed and productive. With its open interface, increased scale, and new applications, ShoreTel Contact Center 6 makes it easier and more cost effective than ever to integrate contact center operations with core business processes for fingertip access to important caller information.”
About ShoreTel, Inc.
ShoreTel, Inc., (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.
Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan posted some highlights of her latest research into the worldwide enterprise telephony market. To me it looks to be a good snapshot of the overall global economy, too…
Traditional systems made up 25.8 percent of total line shipments, declining at a rate of 18.1 percent year over year. NEC was the undisputed market leader in this category, with around 3.6 million TDM lines shipped; it’s followed by Panasonic and Siemens.
The decline in traditional-line shipments is expected to be even greater in the coming years as customers continue to acknowledge the value of IP communications and vendors gradually phase out legacy TDM/KTS PBX systems.
This is a fairly impressive number — TDM lines still account for 1/4 of total shipments. And if we fool ourselves for a moment into thinking that the economy is no worse than last year’s and there is no decline, then the TDM lines add up to 1/3 of total shipments. NEC, being the “undisputed market leader” in TDM shipments, continues to enjoy a slightly better economic condition in Asia whereas North American and European markets are spiraling deeper into trouble.
I also believe that traditional-line shipments will decline in the coming years, but I’m not so sure about the “even greater” part. I think the lack of any uptick in the global economy — at least in the coming year or two — will prevent customers from leaping into the IP pool. Vendors may push for IP communications solutions, but customers won’t be buying in droves, instead opting to milk the most out of their TDM PBX systems. After all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Especially when money’s tight.
Cisco was the market leader in total line shipments, with 13.6 percent market share, followed by NEC (13.3 percent) and Avaya (12.9 percent).
There’s only a 3.3 percent difference between Cisco, the IP leader, and NEC, the TDM leader, in total lines. That’s not a whole lot. There’s still a lot of TDM lines to be phased out, eh?
Traditional systems made up 21.4 percent of market revenues, declining at a rate of 27.3 percent. NEC was the market leader with a 33 percent market share, followed by Panasonic, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens, in that order.
IP systems (converged and native IP) accounted for 78.6 percent of market revenues, declining at a rate of 24.2 percent. Avaya’s voice system market revenues were greater than Cisco’s, with a total market share of 17.1 percent.
It’s no surprise that both traditional and IP systems showed revenue decline. It’s no surprise, either, that revenues from IP systems command such a big chunk of the pie. After all, going from TDM to IP requires a lot more hardware and professional services.
Overall, Avaya is the enterprise telephony platform revenue market leader with a market share of 15 percent, followed by Siemens, Cisco, NEC and Alcatel-Lucent.
Come on, Alcatel-Lucent… You can do better. Put those high-profile acquisitions to good use. Being the laggard in a market which the leader only commands 15 percent is a red flag, especially when the economy isn’t getting any better soon.
