IP telephony continues to grow despite--not because--of hype building around unified communications (UC) solutions. IDC's latest study says that 30.9 million IP telephony lines shipped in 2007.

Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens were the leading vendors in the IP PBX market, based upon results for end-user revenue in 2007. In the IP PBX market, Cisco has gained the most market share while Alcatel-Lucent lost the most as compared to 2006. Other vendors had "nominal" changes in market share year over year.

Cisco also maintained its dominance as the leading vendor of IP phones, both in terms of hardware desktop sets shipped and end-user revenue. Again, Alcatel-Lucent was the biggest loser. 

IDC research says potential threats to the IP PBX market include desktop collaborative environments, open source IP PBX and hosted VoIP solutions with UC mobility solutions the primary threat to desktop IP phones. The firm recommends IP PBX vendors get tight with Microsoft and IBM as well as build a software developer ecosystem for apps development on their platforms.  IP phone vendors are advised to watch how UC software clients affect the importance of the desktop phone and look at how they can incorporate/integrated with videoconferencing and telepresence capabilities.

For more:
- IDC's findings on IP Telephony and UC hype [1]

Related articles:
Marketing mudding VoIP and UC [1]; getting creative
UC Confuses SMBs [1]