CPE Spending Up in EMEA

READING, U.K. -- Following a period of low and negative growth the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) enterprise telephony market has returned to positive territory, with year-on-year growth in Q3 of 4.7%, according to the latest Canalys research. The analyst firm also estimates that worldwide, the market grew 4.3% over the same period.

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In EMEA Siemens remains the market leader ahead of Alcatel, but it was third-placed Nortel and fifth-placed Avaya that showed the highest growth. Ericsson in fourth, lost ground among the market leaders. Hybrid-IP systems, which offer customers investment protection for legacy equipment plus a migration path to an IP-based telephony environment, have dominated the EMEA market for some time, but continued to grow as a proportion in Q3, to around 70% of all line shipments.

Alessandra Fitzpatrick, Canalys director and senior analyst, observed that the pure-IP segment, though still in its very early stages, is also growing at a tremendous rate. "While pure-IP still represents just over 3% of all lines shipped, this is growing at over 60% year-on-year. It is true that the vast majority of lines shipped on hybrid systems are not IP-enabled today, but the fact that the capability is there lying dormant will make it difficult for companies such as Cisco to make inroads into the established vendors' existing customer base. In greenfield sites the barrier to those offering a pure-IP solution is of course much lower."

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Canalys research indicates that Cisco, though still some way from appearing on the leader board in EMEA, is growing at a healthy rate, with shipments up more than 150% on the same quarter one year ago. Worldwide, Canalys estimates Cisco's share of the market to be just over 4% already, and almost twice this in North America.

"The introduction of Cisco's CallManager Express provides it with an offering for smaller and branch offices. This broadening of its telephony solutions range into the sub-100 line segment will help Cisco continue to gain momentum, and we expect this to have an effect from Q1 next year," Fitzpatrick added.

Canalys estimates that sub-100 line systems accounted for over two-fifths of all enterprise telephony line shipments in Q3 2003.

Canalys.com Ltd.