Combined IP PBX and IP phone markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region grew to almost $3.5bn in 2011, according a report by International Data Corporation (IDC).
According to the report, the IP PBX and IP phone market in Central and Eastern Europe grew 35.5% year on year, led by strong growth in Russia, while the Western European market as a whole grew only 7.3%.
For the vendors, the growth however was unevenly distributed in the region, according to IDC.
Among the five leading vendors, Cisco and Siemens expanded their market share in the EMEA region on year on year basis, while the three other vendors reported flat growth or recorded slight decline in results.
Though there were differences between regions and vendors in EMEA region, technology-wise the industry showed more convergence, the report added.
In order to differentiate themselves; vendors offer advanced product features such as virtualisation, support for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, videoconferencing capabilities, integrated end-user experience across platforms and devices, and the capability to deliver functionalities from hosted or public cloud solutions.
IDC senior analyst and the report author Michael Vorisek said the recent trends emphasise the fundamental transformation of the IP PBX business, which has been under way for some time now.
"An increasing number of IP PBXs are being installed as part of unified communications and collaboration [UC&C] deployments," Vorisek said.
"In fact, none of the major players in this market would define themselves as IP PBX vendors any longer; instead, they would all position their products in the UC&C space."
"Vendors’ strategic choices for IP PBX architecture, endpoints, and technology alliances are thus increasingly being defined by their overall UC&C strategies, which in turn will more frequently influence the success or failure IP PBX offerings."
