Avaya sees accelerating IP telephony market

Avaya, a global leader in business communications solutions and services, yesterday expressed its confidence that Europe will represent a high growth market for enterprise IP telephony and outlined its strategy to further drive this developing market. At the same time, Avaya announced two new IP telephony implementations in Germany and The Netherlands. The company said the contrasting wins demonstrate the success of its strategy, which enables businesses to adopt the new applications-rich technology at a pace that suits them, while offering the reliability, functionality, security and quality associated with traditional PBX systems.

During the third quarter of 2000, Avaya saw its IP telephony shipments grow by 136 percent, which is well above the market growth rate (source: Phillips Infotech).

Avaya`s IP strategy is based upon an evolutionary and revolutionary approach, providing businesses with the option to either enhance their existing Avaya PBX with IP telephony, or deploy state-of-the-art, pure IP solutions. The former effectively enables businesses to leverage their existing investment whilst enjoying the benefits of IP.

Patrick Lelorieux, Avaya`s president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, commented: "The successful launch in Europe of our Enterprise Class IP Solutions portfolio, known as ECLIPS, has sparked a lot of interest among companies of all sizes. We are now seeing this interest being converted into real orders. This bodes well for the future. We believe that we will emerge as leaders in the enterprise IP telephony market due to our ability to provide feature rich IP applications and proven heritage in mission critical voice systems."

"The ability of our ECLIPS range to provide unsurpassed reliability and to support applications such as unified communications, video conferencing and the automatic bridging of digital and analogue calls to mobile phones, highlights the importance of functionality. But where IP comes into its own is by enabling companies to work differently and smarter, such as remote workers using softphones on their lap tops to make calls, or a business extending its customer contact centres to smaller branch offices, or updating company directories across remote sites. Only IP can offer this."

IDC has forecast that the enterprise market for converged PBXs in Europe was worth $50 million in 2000 and is expected to exceed $350 million by 2004.

Based on a variety of publicly available data, Avaya estimates that worldwide, LAN-based IP telephony will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 70% through to 2005, with IP enhanced PBXs growing at rates topping 90% over the same period.

"Despite encouraging growth rates, no two installations are alike. But one common factor is the absolute need for highly-reliable, fully functional voice communications. We`ve come to the market saying that the levels of downtime commonly associated with data networks are simply not acceptable in the world of telephony, regardless whether it`s over IP of not," said Lelorieux. Avaya`s approach to IP was illustrated at CeBIT with the announcement of an entirely new LAN-based IP telephony system for German system integrator, MasterBit, and a contract to scale up and enhance an existing voice communications infrastructure by introducing IP functionality for Dutch company, LAN-Alyst.

"In Europe, we are seeing large companies with legacy systems moving to IP but they tend to be pursuing a more phased approach, opting for a migratory path, whereas SMEs are more willing to take the `big bang` approach provided the functionality and applications are assured," Lelorieux concluded.