IP Centrex about to blow

Small and medium-sized enterprises will drive the IP Centrex and hosted PBX market to $1.3 billion by 2009 according to a new report by In-Stat this week, but that’s nothing compared to the growth of broadband voice over IP.

The SME market has been accelerating quickly for several years, the report said, driven by cost savings, enhanced features including mobility and integrated messaging options, ease of use, convergence and remote system access via the Web.

An In-Stat survey recently of 1000 randomly selected business telecom decision-makers indicated that more than 30% of SMEs have at least experimented with IP Centrex and hosted PBX solutions. Among those SMEs, which range in size from 10 to 300 end users, those in the 25-to-60-user range are the most actively evaluating the technology.

Shipments for IP PBX lines will exceed traditional PBX for the first time this year, according to an earlier report from In-Stat in August. The total PBX market will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 6.6% through 2009, but through 2009, server-based IP PBX shipments will grow from 9.5 million lines to 28.1 million, representing over 91% of total PBX shipments.

While growth is significant for this market, in contrast, In-Stat issued a report three weeks ago that said VoIP services will grow by $1 billion per year in Asia alone through 2009 to more than $10 billion.

Most of that revenue, 85.4% in 2004, is from long-distance calling that is carried over an IP backbone, but originates from both pure IP access and traditional PSTN.