Still, when you think about it that means that in 2008 perhaps 1.08 million softphones did wind up as the end user’s primary communications tool, which would represent an 8% growth rate over the previous year’s 1 million number. And that growth rate of 8% is probably artificially low, since no doubt a chunk of the 2007 shipments also represent bundled deals in which the soft clients never actually got used—in other words, the actual implementation in 2007 was probably well below 1 million.
So if IP desk phones are commoditizing or at least can be had at bargain prices in these days when vendors are desperate to make system sales, then maybe even after the economy recovers, enterprises will be inclined to scrutinize this line item more closely. In some cases, they may already own unused softphone licenses, as Melanie’s data suggests, so they have an option to buy fewer hard phones anyhow. Also, hardware isn’t supposed to go up in price—is anyone really going to be willing to pay more for an IP desk phone in 2011 than they paid in 2009?
Our newest feature on No Jitter summarizes Synergy Research’s findings about the size and shape of the Unified Communications market. The authors, Jeremy Duke and Ken Landoline, spend the first portion of the article laying out their taxonomy of the market and explaining why this particular classification makes sense. They include a helpful “organizational chart” showing how they consider the pieces to be put together.
They also discuss the size of the market, and, like other market researchers before them, find the numbers to be rather modest, considering the hype over UC. Synergy sizes the overall global market for “collaborative applications,” at $4.6 billion, which is not a huge number when you consider that “collaborative applications” is Synergy’s overarching term for essentially everything in this space, from unified messaging to the desktop apps that others refer to as “UC dashboards,” plus conferencing and presence/IM. Furthermore, that “desktop UC” category comes in at just over half a billion for the entire global market.
Along the way, there were a few examples of innovation in phone design. Siemens put iPod-style touch-wheels on some models. Mitel built consoles that housed a WLAN access point. This was actually a somewhat cool idea; the device could act as either a WLAN endpoint—using WiFi rather than wires to connect to the network, in places like retail outlets where wiring is tough; or it could be a WLAN access point, boosting your office’s coverage while giving you landline survivability and voice quality when you used it as a traditional desk phone.
The point is, this sort of out-of-the-box thinking was pretty rare. Some phones looked a little different than phones used to look—ShoreTel put a lot of effort into ergonomics and design. Yet in general, the IP-PBX manufacturers overlooked the “cool” factor just as it was coming to dominate consumer communications devices.
The obvious conclusion here is that both your emergency response plan and infrastructure need to be kept current, so they can be put into action quickly and implemented as the situation demands. And you need to include scenarios where everyone works in isolation from everyone else. Telepresence (any room-based video, in fact) seems like a particularly bad fit here; if your telepresence units are in your offices, and you close your offices in an attempt to forestall transmission of the disease, the telepresence rooms are wasted.
An equally important corollary is to understand your service providers’ emergency response plans. If they have to close their facilities, how well equipped are they to continue to support high-end network services that require more than just basic connectivity? And if your carrier’s own operations are affected, can you at least assume that, one way or the other, basic Internet service will continue to be available, and so you can count on some lowest-common-denominator service?
