Eric Krapf, Editor, BCR | www.bcr.com | October 5, 2007
NBX is one of the venerable names in enterprise voice over IP (VOIP), or
at least as venerable as a name can be in an industry that's just a
decade old. NBX and Selsius Systems were the first two companies to
build IP-PBXs, and each got acquired by a bigger player--Selsius by
Cisco, and NBX by 3Com. Cisco erased the Selsius name, but
3Com kept NBX as the name for its initial IP-PBX product.
Since that time, NBX was overshadowed in 3Com's world by the company's
VCX softswitch, which like many enterprise IP-PBX systems actually began
life as a carrier-focused product. Whereas NBX focuses on the
sub-100-station market, VCX can scale to 20,000 end stations.
Now 3Com is nudging NBX even further to the side, though the company
says it's by no means end-of-lifing the product. But 3Com announced this
week that it's expanding VCX's reach down into the 30-200-station market
with two new versions of the product, called VCX Connect 100 and VCX
Connect 200, serving the eponymous number of seats. And at the
sub-30-seat end, 3Com is private-labeling its own version of Digium's
open source Asterisk IP-PBX.
In other words, the plain-vanilla IP-PBX, which aspired to be little
more than a replacement for a TDM system, may finally be starting to
peter out.
3Com's Mike Leo is quick to say that, "NBX is still there," and that
"not in the near future" will it be end-of-lifed. "Some of our partners
have very large [NBX] bases, and they wanted to know the platform would
be around." Approximately 35,000 NBX systems have been sold worldwide,
and there are "a ton of NBX 100s still out there," Leo said.
But the emphasis among buyers is clearly shifting toward what you can do
with a VOIP platform, besides just replicating a TDM PBX's
functionality. Citing research from IDC's Nora Freedman, Mike Leo noted
that the leading driver for VOIP acquisition today is business
application enablement, and as one of the few systems that's been SIP
from the get-go, VCX has a natural play there.
3Com may not be among the heaviest hitters in enterprise VOIP market
share, but this latest announcement shows off a lot of the leading-edge
trends in the marketplace: The importance of SIP; the pursuit of the
small-medium market via product capabilities--including
survivability--that in the past have been more associated with the
bigger customers. And the partnership for Asterisk also echoes a deal
that Nortel announced earlier this year, when Nortel OEMed SIPFoundry
open source code to create a new blade that, ironically, Nortel will
sell into IBM System i mid-range servers.
I say "ironically," because 3Com was the company that pioneered the VOIP
blade for System i; 3Com's IBM deal goes back a year. Now not only do
you have the Nortel deal, but Inter-Tel people have hinted to me that,
as their company merges with Mitel, their all-SIP 7000 system could turn
into such a blade-on-a-server iteration, though they wouldn't discuss
any potential server partners.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I wrote about 3Com without touching on last
week's private-equity buyout of 3Com by Bain Capital Partners, with
Huawei taking a minority stake. This was yet another situation where a
rumored consolidation failed to materialize, and instead we saw a
private-equity buyout--in the earlier case of Avaya, as with 3Com,
Nortel was the purported acquirer.
So maybe we're not going to see that much blockbuster consolidation.
After all, there's really little for any acquirer to buy that's
different from what they already have. It'd just be a market-share buy,
and at least some of the acquired company's market share would probably
bleed away as its customers decided they didn't want the hassle and
uncertainty of product line rationalizations, and opted instead for
another primary vendor altogether. Private equity buyouts may mean
transitions for the company and their customers as well, but successful
acquisitions tend to center on adding new technology or talent, as NEC
did when it acquired Sphere. But that may prove to be the exception.
What do you think? I'm interested in your comments, but please don't
just hit the reply button to comment: I'd probably never receive your
message that way. Instead, contact me directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review |
