From: Joe Martin (joe@martinsweb.org)
Date: Sat Jun 04 2005 - 00:29:46 GMT-3
Andre,
Here are my $.02.
Owning a PBX today costs money even if its fully paid for. Most large
organizations spend lots of money on moves, adds and changes, maint. costs
and paying for upgrades.
The PBXs on the market today are requiring upgrades from the manufactures.
Nortel is forcing customers into Successions which is expensive and requires
a bunch of new hardware. While Successions would enable IP telephony for
those customers, this isn't necessarily why they are moving to it. Its
required for support from them. Avaya is doing the same thing. Got to move
to an S8700 or equivalent to be within a supported release. Again
Expensive. Avaya just announced end of life for some of the G3 chassis so a
customer would have to upgrade that. Nortel and Avaya have announced end of
life on many of their phone models.
Phones are the most expensive part of any medium to large PBX deployment.
In a PBX environment you have to look at the cost of the phone device,
license, line card and chassis space in the cabinet. In a Cisco environment
it's the cost of the phone, license and plugging it into the LAN port you
were already using for the PC at your desk. The numbers look fairly close
in my analysis.
So while many PBX manufactures talk about an evergreen approach where you
keep the system forever, we are finding that call processing is having to be
changed out, some chassis have to change, some core cards and line cards are
having to be replaced, voicemail systems are being end of life'd along with
phones. Yes, they are offering upgrades to the new models but charging
fairly high prices for it. They have been able to get away with it since
the customer is locked in.
Generally Cisco maint is cheaper than that of PBXs. One example is that the
cost for maint on a 6509 is the same whether the chassis is empty or whether
it has some voice T1 blades in it. A 2600 that may be at a remote site may
have voice cards in it, but the maint costs are the same as if it doesn't.
Maint on a PBX is based on each port the customer has in the switch even if
they aren't using it. I find that almost 100% of enterprises have maint on
their PBXs.
Moves are virtually free in a Cisco VoIP environment, including when E911 is
involved if you use their CER server. Changes are centralized in a Cisco
environment since many locations can be served out of one IP PBX. Up to 500
locations and 30,000 phones per system. This isn't true in a traditional
PBX as a tech need to move a jumper and if E911 is required then a database
change and upload is required of the PS-ALI information. Adds are also
cheaper since you can configure a phone, mail it to the user and have them
plug it in where ever in the office they want. The phone will use CDP to
automatically join the voice vlan, dhcp to get an IP address and communicate
again with CDP to create a trust boundary with the catalyst switch for QoS
and network protection.
Reliability and survivability are also important in business today with an
emphasis on business continuance. Cisco VoIP servers can be placed to
different data centers to provide geographic resiliency and the router at a
remote location can provide telephony services if the WAN goes down. While
remote survivability is available from other manufactures its much more
expensive, requires more management, requires another device to be on site
which also has maint charges. Some of the traditional players using
outboard call processors support geographic redundancy, but it requires
dedicated fiber between servers which has severe limitations.
The market agrees that IP telephony is the way to go for many reasons, but
for the business people its all about money. Its cheaper to own and operate
an IP Telephony system. So the ultimate goal is to have one end to end. So
with that in mind, customers need to get from pure TDM to pure IP. How long
does that take, and can it be done at the customers pace if you do a Cisco
deployment. Absolutely. For example you can setup a Cisco IP PBX and put a
gateway with T1s to the legacy PBX and setup a coordinated dial plan. This
would allow any users on the PBX to dial IP phones and visa versa by using
the private T1 and extension based dialing. You can pass caller name and
number. If the PBX supports Q.SIG signaling then you get a bunch more
features such as call diversion, path replacement and voicemail integration.
Most PBX manufactures used to charge to Q.SIG but now with Avaya CM 2.0 and
above and Successions 3.0 and above its included for free. Now I can move
users one by one over to the new system and support a coordinated dial plan.
So you can choose to cut single users, departments, remote sites or the main
campus. But again its at your own pace.
What are some of the other things users need. How about voicemail. I
already said that if they have a Q.SIG link between systems that it supports
voicemail integration. What I mean by that is if a customer has say an
Octel on their PBX, a user with a Cisco IP phone can continue to have an
Octel voicemail box and get full integration and message waiting lights.
When the company is ready to move to a Cisco voicemail or unified messaging
system they can do that and have options there also. They could
decommission the Octel and the users on the Avaya or Nortel PBX can receive
voicemail services across the Q.SIG link. If the customer keeps the Octel
for a while but adds Cisco voicemail, the Cisco voicemail supports amis,
vpim and octelnet to integrate to most 3rd party voicemail systems. Even if
the PBX doesn't have Q.SIG Cisco can provide integrations to the most
popular PBX systems with their dual switch integration feature of their
voicemail system. Cisco makes a conferencing bridge that can do IP or TDM
which makes for a nice migration. They have a call center solution which
can connect to the most popular PBXs and their IP PBX. Even their E911
solution can also support the PBX phones. Cisco realized early on that
since they originally had 0 market share that they would need the tools and
experience to migrate users over since a flash cut is a rare luxury.
I see that market share was also stated in your question. Its funny as you
look at all the different analysts on this. Some track IP LINES. These are
defined as any device on a PBX that has been enabled with software that
could do IP phones. So if you have an Avaya with an S8700 and 5000 TDM
phones, that would count as 5000 IP lines. Not sure how accurate that is.
Others track phones. Problem is Cisco is the only company that I know of
who will release the number of IP phones they have sold. So the analysts
guess on that for other manufactures. Finally analysts look at revenue.
They track US and World Wide Revenue. What I can tell you is that Cisco has
sold over 5M IP phones and has over 20,000 customers. Some really large one
also. This is more than all the other manufactures combined. In the latest
study of revenue Cisco just came out as number 1 in the US and number 2
world wide. Now this wasn't tracking IP telephony, but was tracking
telephony. So this compared telephony that Cisco has sold to telephony that
others have sold. So Cisco is now outselling all competitors in the US and
is number 2 worldwide for sales of all types of telephony. And is only
number 2 by .16%. Statistically a dead heat against Nortel in the worldwide
market. That's a fairly solid statistic for comparison. Customers are
voting with their pocketbooks. They're picking Cisco. Specifically in your
question though you asked about IPT market share. Again this will vary but
if you look at IP systems and not IP lines as explained above the analysts
show Cisco at about 52% and the next closest at around 16% I believe.
Finally, I like the idea of a common look and feel for all users. The nice
thing about having a unified solution available for both large and small
sites is that users at a very small remote branch can have the same features
as the users at the large site. Traditionally small remote sites had key
systems and large sites had PBXs. These systems had different features and
capabilities. Heck they even used different cards and phones even if they
were from the same manufacture.
I hope that by explaining why I believe Cisco has the correct products and
approaches to the telephony market in the way I did doesn't seem overly
biased but a lot of research and study has brought me to this conclusion.
Study being the key ingredient in this group.
Good luck on your own research. Let us know your conclusions. Its always
great to hear the results of another persons journey to enlightenment.
Joe
CCIE #5917
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Andre Scalco
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 4:20 PM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: +++OUT OF TOPIC++++Who "owns" the IPT Market?
Hello,
I would like to have your feedback about the IPT market. I know that this is
a Cisco oriented web site but I hope you can leave our passion for the San
Jose giant out of this thread.
Cisco has a key role on the IP Telephony market however when trying to sell
IPT solutions to big customer I see a lot of resistance. I'm not talking
about the "old" telephony guys looking for job security but from the big
wigs that sign checks. The resistance is due to the fact that is financially
speaking difficult for them migrate their current telephony solution like
Avaya, Nortel, Lucent to "IP" without have to thrown away what they
currently have.
So I guess my question is what's the currently marketshare Cisco has in this
IPT Industry and if there's a leader in IPT who that is?
Danke,
Andre
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