The overall enterprise voice solutions market size in India for FY 2002–03 was estimated at Rs 820 crore. PBX remains the dominant contributor to the voice solutions market with an estimated business of Rs 450 crore, which was the same as in the previous year. The KTS market is estimated at Rs 50 crore. The rest was shared by IP-PBX, wireless PBX (DECT) and other call center components. The year 2002–03 saw Tata Telecom emerging as the dominant player, edging past Siemens and recording a revenue of Rs 244 crore, which formed 75 percent of the company’s total sales last year. As a strategy, the company increased its focus on services, which formed a major chunk of its revenues.

Most of the players benefited from the call center boom. This can be gauged from the fact that Tata Telecom did a business of Rs 86.21 crore by supplying to call centers alone with orders worth Rs 23.10 from Dell International Services and Rs 14.24 crore from Reliance.

The fiscal also saw the completion of a deal between Alcatel and the local management of Alcatel’s networking business in India called ABS India. The company, which sells OmniPCX Office for small and medium businesses (SMBs) and OmniPCX 4400 for large operations, managed to do a business of Rs 50 crore. On the other hand, Nortel, another leading player in the enterprise voice market, recently created an enterprise business group focusing on product development and sale of traditional and IP voice gear besides offering integration solutions. Hinduja decided to deploy Nortel’s enterprise call center solutions to its BPO unit in Bangalore with about 600 seats. South Indian Bank also chose to deploy Nortel Networks’ converged IP solution to connect 150 branches in India. Cisco deployed its IPCC solutions at Transworks, Accenture, and Phonix and did a business of around Rs 15 crore.

Siemens’ enterprise networks division (ICN-EN) launched HiPath 3000, a next-generation EPABX/KTS, as the company did some good business. While orders grew by 25 percent and revenues were up 24 percent over the previous year, profits improved substantially. Apart from HiPath 3000, ICN-EN launched several new offerings such as the HiPath Procenter, a call-center suite, and Optipoint 500—a next-generation Workpoints family. ICN-EN also forged alliances with Talisma in the call-center segment and with Avhan to offer call-center CRM solutions to be integrated into the Siemens Procenter call-center suite.

Nortel Networks, whose product lines Meridien I and Succesion CSE 1000 platform suffered some erosion in their acceptance, launched Succession CSE MX server with IP telephony features. Release 2 of Succession 1000 with increased functionality did manage to get some acceptability. The march towards IP-enablement gained momentum with a number of call centers and some corporates going for IP-enabled voice solutions. According to Frost & Sullivan, the market for IP-PBX will grow from its present 2.7 percent of the total PBX market revenues to almost 84.4 percent in 2007. The Asia-Pacific market, according to the same report for IP-PBX, will be worth $1.55 billion by 2007. NEC, recognizing the importance of IP, and the lead taken by Avaya and Nortel, launched its IP-PBX known as the NEAX 2000 Internet Protocol Server (IPS).