Having established a very firm foothold on the world public telecomunications equipment market, L M Ericsson Telefon AB is making a big pitch to repeat the trick in the private communications world, and is so pleased with its new Business Communications System 150 small business PABX that it took people from all over Europe to Brussels to see it yesterday. The product was jointly developed with the Swedish PTT, Televerket, and has had it on its home market for a year, selling 1,000 systems in that time. Key features of the machine are an integrated text and voice messaging system, so that not only can you page people by broadcasting your spoken message to all the terminal phones, but you can also store spoken messages for later retrieval, and you can write people little notes to their extension, which come up on a two-line strip display on the phone. The phones support two lines, so that speech and data can run concurrently, and there is a mini Qwerty keyboard for composing messages. Definitely what the well-equipped small business is likely to want, the thing takes up to 150 extensions and 40 exchange lines, but the average is only 25 extensions and just four lines. The thing will be launched next month in Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Mexico and Australia; approval is being sought for the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Norway and Portugal, but it is not likely to reach these shores until mid 1990 – and ain’t going to the US at all. Ericsson aims to stress spoken business communications, and to grow at four times the rate of the market.
