We see that HP has acquired 3COM and we think their respective product ranges are very complimentary, however it is now interesting to note that part of the 3COM portfolio is their VoIP product line the 3Com NBX and VCX IP PBX and handset lines. 3Com currently has less than 0.5 percent share of the total $16 billion enterprise telephony market, according to Dell’Oro Group. But that is still more than the zero share HP has, which up to now addressed the market through partnerships with Avaya and Microsoft, among others.
The prospect of a VoIP product line branded as HP and with the backing of the HP marketing might should be a very interesting prospect and some of the current VoIP providers will be sitting up and taking notice.
View the Press Release here
This story has been widely covered so we will not go over it again but as this is one of the biggest news stories in our industry we could not let it go without adding our comments.
In recent times we have heard various stories about Nortel and their highs and lows, for sure this is an all time low and we can only wonder what will happen now, will the company break up, will it lose it’s management team, will major partners such as Microsoft will be scared off, how long it can hold on to it’s skilled talent – lots of unanswered questions and we can only watch from the sidelines to see how the saga plays out.
We hope a new Nortel will come out of the other side as it is not good for our industry to see one of our giants disappear, how ever many competitors will be happy to see Nortel suffering hoping to pick up a lot of their business and staff.
We see that Google have launched the Beta version of their Chrome browser – there has been an awful lot written about it and the impact it may have in the market place. We see many discussions about Google trying to take Microsoft head on.
We like it, in fact we have used it to write this post and it seems a very clean and simple to use product, Google always go for the ‘clean’ uncluttered look with their products. We will use it from now on and it will be interesting to see how it performs when we try to use it for configuration of Telecom and Networking products which all seem to have their own little foibles when it comes to browsers.
Whatever the affect Chrome has in the marketplace we like Opensource products and welcome Google putting it out.
Get yours here
Well an interesting twist for the PBX market – you can now go to costco.com for your IP PBX. The warehouse wholesaler who is better known for its discount prices and free food samples will now be selling Quanta Computer’s Syspine Digital Operator Phone System which is based on Microsoft’s Response Point phone system software.
It is interesting to see such a system sold on line without direct technical backup, but Microsoft seems confident enough that the product is easy to setup. If a small business does need help, Microsoft is more than happy to point out their list of Response Point specialists is available on line.
The Syspine includes a base unit appliance with a four analogue trunk lines, four desktop phones and Response Point software that provides features such as Auto Attendant and Voice Mail. The system supports up to 50 Syspine IP310 business phones to create a complete small business phone solution without additional license fees (these are bought on line in packs of 2)
This announcement will grab headlines but in reality it is just an on line reseller who sells many hi-tech products adding to their range an IP PBX which these days is not so new, earlier in the year we saw that Fonality partnered with Dell to make Fonality’s Small Office software available in an IP PBX bundle on Dell hardware.
Those of us who are long in the tooth have heared this so many times that the PBX is dead. First of all the advent of server based systems meant no one would need a PBX and then when Asterisk Open Source was produced we were told that no one would buy ‘tin’any more so what is the latest twist on this ?
According to Bill Gates Microsoft’s Office Communication Server means the death of the PBX. In a speech at the launch of OCS, Gates claimed Microsoft software marks the end of traditional legacy telephony systems. He compared PBX systems to mainframe computers – useful enough in their time, but ultimately neither as flexible or as useful as smaller software based systems. Gates did acknowledge the disappearance of the PBX won’t happen overnight, but will be a gradual process as software improves and product cycles mature.
Well lets see what happens for sure Microsoft will mix the market up and gain some traction from the data resellers but lets see how a data orientated company is going to deal with voice, Microsoft are comfortable producing the server software but where are the peripherals going to come from, what about phones whose badge will it have. The ‘traditional’ companies spend a lot of development money producing a turn key solution where everything has been designed to work together as one.
For sure those of you who have experience of SIP will know that there are nearly always some interworking problems between devices that lead to limitations so it can often be difficult to produce a strong solution from multi vendors.
Time will tell what happens in the market place but one thing is for sure a box running software with phones connected is still a PBX…..regardless of which badge it has on it 
Category VoIP | 
Author admin | 
13 November, 2009 1:53 pm | 
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