3Com, one of the leaders in the crowded SMB telephony market is re-uping its effort in this area:
“As a segment if you look at Web-managed switches, etc., we, according to analysts, have about a 12-percent market share, which puts us in the top three,” Masri said. “What we have done since I joined last year is to assign a vice president leader to the SMB space, and the other activity that we are undertaking is to take advantage and leverage all of the 120 engineers in H3C [Technologies, 3Com’s China-based subsidiary] who are also working in that segment and combine the forces together so we as an entity have a stronger push in that market segment.”
This is just as much a channel plan as a product plan. Where 3Com has been successful is working with it’s channel partners with networking products and tie the voice products together. 3Com are better placed than others in this space because of it’s strong channel. However this end of the market is extremely crowded with some very good offerings including Mitel, Shoretel, Nortel, NEC, Asterisk, Cisco, Linksys, Avaya etc etc. There is no clear leader that jumps out that has a really fresh view of the problem so we need to wait and see.
