Open Source PBX is 18% of North America Market

By John Malone
Sales of traditional PBXs and key systems have moderated in recent years. Experts attribute this to a variety of factors. Companies, they report, are just keeping their phone systems longer. The wave of Y2K replacements that flooded the market, now almost a decade later, are still in working order. Demand is affected by the economy; enough said. True, these are relevant considerations, but they largely miss the point.

Digium, Polycom, Aastra, Sangoma as well as other vendors inside the Open Source PBX business see what's occurring from a different vantage point, and arguably would dispute the experts. And they would be largely correct. A market shift is underway, and has been since Open Source PBXs arrived.

As Asterisk and other Open Source projects evolved, users have multiplied from geeks only, to early adopters, to the mainstream. That's mainstream and not backwater creek. And we are not just at a tipping point, we are well beyond that. Traditional telephone system manufacturers are now, largely unknowingly, competing for a bigger share of a shrinking market. And growing sales may be increasingly difficult for the largest names in the telephone business unless each takes share from the other. Granted, some traditional companies must see this happening, which may account for Nortel's acquisition of Pingtel and the new Nortel Software Communication System 500. But that is not yet the norm.

Because Open Source PBXs came into being like a garage band, they were somewhere between discounted and booed by most everyone. That was the early days.