Disruptive Telephony

Just out on WebWire today, research firm iLocus indicated that 2.23 million IP-only PBX lines were sold in the second quarter of 2007, apparently generating revenues of over $208 million.  Cisco was the market leader and then, according to the news release, Mitel (my employer) was the leader of the non-Cisco shipments.  Mitel apparently had 42% market share (of non-Cisco shipments, I presume), followed by 3Com, ShoreTel and Inter-Tel (now part of Mitel).

Now the point of this news release is obviously to entice people to buy iLocus' research report, but I do find the data rather curious.  Mostly due to the fact that there is no mention of Avaya and Nortel, two of the other major competitors in the IP-PBX space.  Now perhaps this is due to this statement:

"iLocus has discontinued coverage of shipments related to legacy PBX upgrades or the hybrid systems. We focus on only the pure IP PBX shipments in the enterprise VoIP equipment quarterly tracking service."

I don't know.  I do just find it curious.  (Not that I'm complaining, mind you.)  In any event, this research is now out there and available to purchase.

It would be interesting to know how this 2.23 million licenses relates to the overall number of "lines" sold in the last quarter.  How many total IP and TDM lines were sold, and therefore what percentage of overall lines does this 2.23 million represent.  And is 2.23 million an increase or decrease over last quarter?  I want to see trends, charts... and I suppose in order to that I'd probably need to buy the report, eh?