Study: Avaya, Cisco Lead Charge in Quarterly UC Sales Growth

According to Dell'Oro, IP phone sales grew 10 percent during the quarter, with all major categories of IP phone -- IP conference, IP desk, IP soft and IP WLAN -- contributing to that growth.

Dell'Oro wrote in a research note that third-party IP desk phones are themselves continuing to see strong sales, but the top eight IP desk phone vendors are still the same as the top eight PBX vendors. Alphabetically, those eight are Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel and Siemens.

"The second half of the year is typically stronger for the enterprise voice market, and the third quarter of this year was no exception for the unified communications segment," said Alan Weckel, director at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "Although we expect vendors to experience strong fiscal year-end results in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, we do not expect vendors' fiscal year-ends to be as strong as they were prior to 2008 for quite some time."

Cisco was the category winner for UC/VoIP in Everything Channel's 2009 Annual Report Card. Both Cisco and Avaya have made significant investments in unified communications this year, with Cisco looking to broaden its video and collaboration portfolio and Avaya launching new products around Aura, its virtualized UC platform.

The report on UC growth is one of several segment-specific studies released by Dell'Oro Group for the third quarter. Dell'Oro earlier this week said the service provider edge router market was stable into the third quarter and is predicted to grow in 2010, while optical transport equipment sales declined quarter-to-quarter.

Data center deployments -- a key focus for solution providers and vendors alike -- drove Ethernet switch market growth in the third quarter, with 10 Gigabit Ethernet continuing to catalyze that growth. Cisco and HP continue to lead in Ethernet switches, Dell'Oro said.

One market Dell'Oro pegged as growing substantially during the quarter was PON (passive optical network) equipment. Thanks to sales of optical line terminals and optical networking terminals, Dell'Oro said, sales were up 8 percent sequentially and 6 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Dell'Oro named Huawei as the top vendor in both the EPON (ethernet passive optical network) and GPON (gigabit passive optical network) segments, overtaking former leader Alcatel-Lucent in the latter category.