Thursday, April 21, 2011

Fixed-Mobile Convergence: 33% Growth in 2010

When is 33 percent annual growth a disappointment? When you thought it would be higher. Frost & Sullivan estimates that in 2010, the overall worldwide enterprise fixed-mobile convergence market reached 3.33 million FMC units shipped, growth of 32.7 percent year-over-year.

While this growth is significant, it’s lower than what Frost & Sullivan had anticipated, the company says Analysts suspect that emerging enterprise mobility solutions such as collaborative applications, team spaces, social tools and enterprise tablets with built-in mobility software clients are competing for the attention of both IT and technology vendors. Frost analysts suspect that diverted attention from FMC.

Frost defines a basic FMC solution as one that delivers first-level PBX-to-mobile extension, including such capabilities as single-number reach, simultaneous ring, single voicemail, and call-control features. An advanced FMC solution requires a mobile client to deliver call control and PBX features to the mobile device, as well as more advanced capabilities such as mobile and corporate IM/presence, unified messaging, conferencing, and dual-mode voice call handoff (manual or automatic) between networks.

In some ways, the slower than anticipated growth is not new. Most forms of enterprise IP telephony have been adopted more slowly than many of us had predicted.

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