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March 2, 2009

Open-source PBXs already account for about 18 percent of all PBXs installed in 2008 in North American companies and organizations of all kinds, and with today's global recession problems, that number can only go even higher.

According to a recent study by Eastern Management Group, because open source solutions usually cost less, they may become more attractive to a greater number of corporate users as their budgets are reduced, laying the groundwork for a growth increase.

"Today, the cost of a typical open-source PBX system is so low as to attract more than passing attention,” says John Malone, president and CEO of Eastern Management Group (EMG).

This simply means that open source vendors as a group are selling more PBX phone lines than any single PBX vendor that makes the usual list of market leaders.

With surveys of IT executives as well as open-source PBX vendors and VARS, the study also suggests that use of open-source PBXs actually grew about 40.2 percent in 2008, and will probably grow another 30 to 35 percent in 2009, partially fueled by tighter IT budgets.

According to North American numbers on PBX and key systems measured by the number of PBX lines, open source systems account for almost 18 percent on average.

Give credit to the Asterisk open source PBX, while financially-strapped Nortel comes in second for 85 percent of those deployments or over 15 percent of overall installations in 2008.

Then, Cisco comes in third with about 12.52 percent of market share and Avaya comes in fourth with less than 12 percent.

EMG ranks Nortel, Cisco and Avaya as one, two and three for sales as measured by the number of PBX lines last year, but had open source vendor marketshare below 1 percent.

But Eastern’s findings are at odds with studies done by other market analysis firms that follow PBX sales. For instance, Infonetics sets growth of overall PBX sales at just 1 percent for all of 2008, a far cry from the 40 percent Eastern Management Group reports, says Mattheus Machowinski, a directing analyst for Infonetics.

“We expect the market to stabilize next year, resume growth in 2011 and hit double-digit annual growth by 2012,” said Machowinski.

He seemed surprised at the Eastern results. “It’s provocative; its headline grabbing,” he said. “If it’s really almost 40 percent, don’t you think the PBX market (as reported by himself and other analysts) would have declined quite a bit last year?” he says.

“I would have expected the PBX market to have plunged,” said Machowinski.

Source: Operating Systems Today.

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