PBX Sales Drop as Cloud Communications Grows

Some trends, even when they take a longish time to become clear, are perhaps predictable.

With the growth of cloud-based voice systems--consumer and enterprise--it was inevitable that the legacy ways of doing things would stall, then decline.

That is as true for enterprise voice as it is for consumer voice.

As businesses continue to hold off new phone system purchases, global enterprise PBX revenue fell six percent in the first quarter of 2015 from a year ago, according to the IHS Infonetics Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment report.

“The enterprise PBX market remains challenging, with revenue down yet again in the first quarter of 2015,” said Pure IP PBX was the one segment to post year-over-year growth due to strength in Asia Pacific,” said Diane Myers, research director for VoIP, UC and IMS at IHS.

“Things have started to slow on the unified communications (UC) front as well, which we attribute to movement to the cloud as businesses look for ease of management and flexibility,” Myers said.

The worldwide PBX market (TDM, hybrid and pure IP) totaled $1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2015, Myers said. PBX line shipments were up three percent, year over year.

Sales of unified communications (UC) applications dropped five percent, year over year.