VoIP: Cisco Goes to Number Two

Love ‘em or hate ‘em you most certainly have to respect the VoIP folk over at

Cisco. According to Infonetics, they’ve just moved into the number two spot behind Avaya in worldwide IP deskphone and softphone shipments.

Cisco grew at the expense of its competitors. "Cisco took a little bit [of market share] from everyone else," Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst of Enterprise Voice & Data at Infonetics, explained to eWeek’s Paula Musich, The others either "went down by a half a percent" or were "flat," he added. Alcatel-Lucent had the second spot for 2006.

Overall, the enterprise telephony market topped $9.6 billion in 2007 with worldwide IP phone shipments climbing by 29% from 2006. In my work with Osterman Research, we found that  ultimately, only 64% of organizations will employ only IP handsets, 13% will deploy only soft phones, and the remainder will run both.

 Other report highlights:

• The top 5 PBX/KTS system vendors account for 3/4 of total market revenue: Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and Alcatel-Lucent (in that order); Cisco was the only one of these with a meaningful increase in market share, and jumped from 5th to 2nd in 2007
• Sales of TDM systems managed to stay above the $1 billion mark in 2007, likely for the last time
• Hybrid IP PBX systems account for 2/3 of all lines shipped in 2007; pure IP systems account for 18%
• The North American market had the weakest overall line growth in 2007; CALA had the strongest line growth, Asia Pacific the second strongest.