TechPulse 360

Voice over IP telephones were suppose to remake the world of the business phone.

Market cold, but not frozen, says John Combs

The cost of calling was to drop precipitously and advanced features, such as conference calling, call forwarding and the universal message box, were to be widely available for no added fee.

Now nearly a decade after major marketing efforts swelled behind the Internet-protocol phones, the market for voice over IP shows how technology often evolves at a steady pace instead of breakneck speed.

This year for the first time, 50 percent of the phone systems going in are pure VOIP instead of hybrids mixing traditional equipment with the latest IP gear, says John Combs, CEO of the equipment maker ShoreTel.

This cross over should continue in 2009, said Combs. Companies with the purely digital equipment, such as ShoreTel and Cisco Systems, should be the beneficiaries.

“People just don’t move that fast,” says Combs, reflecting on the market momentum. “It’s an evolution.”

On a separate topic, Combs says the present economic downturn has turned his customers more cautious – as it has customers in most other technology markets.

“The temperature outside is very cold (but) is not frozen,” he said during a Thursday afternoon interview.

Customers planning to replace old equipment or build facilities with new phone systems are “casting the net wider,” he said, by looking more closely at offerings from other vendors and taking longer to make decisions.