Total market of the enterprise voice solutions during 2004–05 reached 832 crore, up from 702 crore during 2003–04 registering a growth of 19 percent. Enterprise voice solutions market grew on the expected lines with Avaya retaining its leadership position with a total sale of Rs 327 crore, though its sales declined from Rs 401 crore in 2003–04.

The lower figure is largely due to the new accounting norms implemented at Avaya. Call centers contributed to about 46 percent of Avaya's total business, while convergence solutions comprised 30 percent of the total business. Tata exited from the JV with Avaya resulting in renaming of the company as Avaya GlobalConnect in September 2004. Services component of Avaya's business grew due to a higher margin than in products. Avaya's revenue from its Australian operations was Rs 7 crore as per Avaya's new revenue recognition method.

Cisco, which plays only in the pure-IP segment, did a business of Rs 110 crore. IP telephony formed the second largest segment under the advanced technology segment which did a business of Rs 335 crore. While Cisco's sales comprised primarily of all IP products, Avaya's revenue also came from the sale of hybrid systems, apart from IP systems. State Bank of India's extended contract to network its branches was Cisco's main achievement of the year. State Bank of India installed 5,000 of the total of 6,000 IP phones during the year connecting 4,200 branches.

Alcatel also appointed GTL as its premium partner thus ending the monopoly of ABS India for distributing enterprise products of Alcatel. Siemens' sales figure grew to Rs 140.4 crore. Its major orders came from the Indian Army, IIT Madras, Uppals Orchid and Marriot, ONGC, and IBM. Siemens did a business of Rs 140 crore during last financial year. It also introduced the HiPath 1100 range of digital key telephone systems for the small office home office and SME segments. Siemens also announced its strategic alliance with Enterasys Networks to provide end-to-end secure and reliable convergence solutions to the enterprise market in India. According to the alliance, Siemens will integrate its HiPath Enterprise Convergence Architecture for voice-over-IP with Enterasys' full line of Secure Networks. This alliance promises to provide enterprises with high levels of integrated and secure voice and data networks.

HCL Infinet, which represents Ericsson's enterprise business in India, continued to push Ericsson MD110 and BusinessPhone 250 in the Indian market. It did a business of Rs 60.5 crore. HCL commissioned a 14,000 lines Ericsson MD110 PBX communications system at IIT Kharagpur, which is one of the largest hybrid PBX deployments in any campus in India and provides 8,000 traditional circuit-switched lines, 6000 IP extensions and 500 ports of ADSL 2+ lines. Incidentally, Cisco Systems also announced the expansion of its IP converged network at IIT-Kharagpur which included IP telephony apart from other things.

Besides providing the analog telephone sets, the system has digital phones, IP telephones, and IP softphones. Ericsson also strengthened its offerings on BusinessPhone 250 by introducing mobile extension and unified messaging as a built-in feature.

Nice systems, an Israeli company, got repeat order from Sutherland BPO for its Mumbai and Chennai operations. German vendor Snom also made some inroads into the IP telephony market and inked deals with ABB and Dhanalakshmi Bank. It sold 4000 units of IP phones last year.

There was some good news for PBX last year. BSNL floated an EoI for PBX. BSNL will provide services to public sector undertakings, government organizations, corporates, hotels, housing societies, and all other commercially important customers (CIC's) through the EPABX at their premises on a rental-cum-usage charge basis and seeks to empanel eligible parties for providing such EPABXs on a revenue share basis.

All vendors including Cisco continued their push into the IP telephony market. There are indications to believe that large and medium enterprise who are setting up new networks have seriously started considering IP as the technology from day one. As regard migration from traditional TDM to IP, Cisco surpassed the 50,000 mark in IP Phones. Per line cost came down by 10 percent thanks to the customs duty cut.

Outlook
The outlook is good with the booming contact center market. Industry is moving towards unification. Enterprise and carrier networks are overlapping in functionality. The way forward in such scenarios is to offer comprehensive solutions catering to the different market segments like SOHO, SME, and large enterprises. Users today need easy graphical user interfaces. Most of the time, end users do not use the rich telephony features because of their complexity. In such situations, intelligent terminals with context-sensitive help for users are in demand. End users also look for easy moves, changes, and relocations.

Enterprise voice industry is witnessing a drastic change on the technology front. With introduction of technologies like IP telephony, the definition of enterprise communication itself has changed. So continuous enhancement of product line, to cater to the latest IP technologies and simultaneously decreasing price levels, are the main challenges faced by the PBX industry. Also, many more customers are looking for pure-IP deployments but the prohibitive cost of IP terminals restricts large-scale deployment of pure-IP systems. On an average, the converged systems are available at Rs 4,000 per user while pure-IP systems, including IP terminals, are available at Rs 15,000 per user. In the coming years, traditional PBX market will shrink. In a nutshell, the market for enterprise communications systems will grow at the rate of 25 percent annually. Another important feature, which enterprises will look for, is integration of enterprise networks with mobile services to provide real connectivity to offsite workers rather than mere call forwarding. However, on the SOHO market front, customers will continue to go for the regular EPABX/KTS systems till the price of IP-ready systems comes down considerably.

Sudesh Prasad