The Hindu Business Line : Cisco bullish on Indian IP phone biz

BUOYED by a tremendous growth in contact centre space in the country, IT major Cisco has shipped over 50,000 IP phones in India (used in Internet telephony) and is bullish about the market.

"In India, we have been successful in IP telephony business largely due to the spurt in contact centres," Mr Gordon Astles, President, Asia Pacific of Cisco Systems said.

According to a company spokesperson in India, Cisco has shipped four million IP phones globally, while over 50,000 IP phones have been shipped into the country. "Cisco's position as a leading IP telephony vendor in the country is driven by the large-scale adoption of its IP-PBX solutions by Indian enterprises, as well as the adoption of IP-based solutions by Indian IT Services & IT-enabled Services organisations," the spokesperson said.

Some of the key customers for Cisco in this space are Nirvana, V-Customer, Manjushree Infotech, Phoenix, Nirvana and Transworks, Wipro, and Infosys. A significant deployment for the company has been an order by SBI, involving connection of over 4200 branches, in excess of 6,000 IP phones.

Cisco's performance comes in the backdrop of an upbeat market forecast by research firm IDC, which estimates that the IP telephony market would touch $60 million mark this year as compared to $30 million last year.

IDC expects IP telephony to finally gain traction in the enterprise market in Asia-Pacific in 2004. "With the promise of ubiquitous access, a single PBX system for the entire enterprise, long distance call savings, remote access convenience, feature-rich intelligent IP PBXs solutions, are now coming to the fore. Cost savings still present the main attraction to most enterprises both in terms of actual voice communications, and efficiencies of access and management," it said.

Noting that the market for enterprise IP telephony had been slow to take off owing to concerns about maturity of the technology and general economic slowdown, IDC said that cautious IT spending in 2002 and 2003 had forced many enterprises to defer their IP PBX deployments.

"Now that awareness levels are reaching a critical tipping point for adoption, IDC anticipates strong growth in the market for 2004, which will also be fuelled by aggressive vendor positioning and a proliferation of IP PBX product offerings," it said.