FY '06-07 saw Indian enterprises looking at communication as a strategic investment. While large enterprises invested in advanced communication solutions, a new section of potential adopters emerged in the SME segment owing to the buoyant economy and globalization.

Communication is an integral part of business processes, and last Fiscal saw the communications industry undergoing a paradigm shift. The deployment of pure IP and the converged multi-service communication systems began last year. These converged systems give a capability to provide legacy connectivity like PCM-TDM and IP as well. Standards and interoperability issues were dealt with.

According to VOICE&DATA estimates, the voice solutions market stood at Rs 1,413 crores growing at 27.8% in FY '06-07. The IP-PBX took the lion's share of 50% and TDM PBX reduced to 30% of the total market, and other technologies such as KTS contributed 20%

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS
With VoIP becoming popular, companies are realizing the benefits of IP telephony beyond the cost reduction factor. IP enables merging of voice and data in a single network, thereby providing an enhanced communication experience, which is imperative for any competitive organization.

VOICE&DATA estimates that, unlike FY '05-06, 2006-07 saw the highest growth in the IP-PBX segment, with many organizations investing in high-end IP solutions. Many managers looked at voice solutions as a way to help them reduce rising administrative expenses, extend business reach, boost productivity, and realize measurable returns on their infrastructure investments.

The market is just starting to ramp up as broadband connections accelerate. Enterprises and telcos are starting to realize the vast advantages of VoIP and are beginning to intensively deploy VoIP solutions. From TDM, India is moving to VoIP-enabled solutions, while the legacy PBXs are moving to digital analog connections.

However, the adoption of IP telephony in India is on the express lane to prosperity and growth. This was the consequence of a chain of events. The withdrawal of the TRAI regulation, which imposed restrictions on using IP telephony by enterprises led to enterprises looking positively at IP telephone deployments. This caused the service provider market to evolve.

Due to rising broadband penetration, a huge market is opening up and the importance is on cost savings. In India, VoIP telephony can be used for making phone calls from a PC to a phone abroad, from a PC to another PC within and outside India, and between SIP/ H.323 devices globally. The advantages of using this technology are apparent. Besides the freedom it provides, wireless VoIP phone systems also allow organizations to combine communications to include phone, email, and text messaging, allowing them to work together as one system. This efficiency is a time saver, as well as a money saver. Organizations will find that they can avoid lengthy contracts with phone companies in favor of wiring systems that give the businesses more options.

PBX has moved from a simple TDM switch to a converged IP platform supporting standard TDM, ISDN, ATM and IP connectivity on a single platform. Today, enterprises are looking for 'real time communication' that is integrated with the IT infrastructure and business support systems. Some of the dominant technologies in the enterprise communication arena are VoIP, IP trunking, and IP distributed architecture. The trend is also shifting towards adding mobility features like GSM gateways and information mobility on the basic PBX platform.

Hybrid solutions have also seen growth especially in those cases where the organization is shifting to an IP solution for the first time. Cost has been the main driver for hybrid solutions. This is because the cost of deploying pure IP-PBX is high, and so users prefer go with hybrid solutions.

Thus, FY '06-07 saw IP-PBX eating into the share of traditional PBX systems. The traditional PBX market is shrinking by 10% y-o-y and IP- PBX is growing by about 20% y-o-y. Growth in IP-PBX shipments has been over 30%. However, due to restrictions on terminating computer-originating calls over a PSTN network, the growth of VoIP has been restricted. Low PSTN tariffs too have discouraged PSTN operators from investing significantly in the VoIP carrier equipment.

According to VOICE&DATA estimates, Avaya Globalconnect emerged as the top voice solution vendor with 28.3% market share and revenues at Rs 400 crore. The second is Cisco with revenues worth Rs 250 crore followed by Siemens with Rs 226 crore. The highest growth since FY '05-06 was that of Cisco's, which grew around 82.5% in FY '06-07 with a market share of 17.7%. Coral Telecom also registered a growth of 19.5% with revenues touching Rs 49 crore. Among others, Matrix registered revenues of Rs 11.38 crore while D-Link clocked Rs 2.3 crore.