Recently, during my visit to Indian Telecom 2009 exhibition, I have met many people working in PABX industry in India for last 20 years or so. Interaction with them has been very informative for me.
Coral SBDX on-premise PABX
Almost everybody was anonymous that, on premise EPABX will not vanish from Indian market for many years to come. According to many people, as long as Indian railways and PSUs do not opt for hosted PBX solutions, it is difficult for hosted PBX to grab substantial market share in Indian PBX market. Presently, Indian Railways, government offices and various government enterprises constitute the majority users of PABX in India. They constitute all high cost PABX market share in India.
They also informed that, analog PBX upto 48 lines ( extensions) with four to eight trunk lines ( Call Office/Central Office lines) constitute almost 50% of the market share. This was an eye opener for me, but I was not surprised. Normally, which ever hotel I stay, I try to have a glance at the PABX installed at their front office and I always found them to be using smaller PBX. If some one visits budget hotels, one would always find the PABX installed near their reception area. Hotel owners majorly install at reception area as they need connectivity from PABX to their hotel software on PC to record calls made by guests from rooms. I think ( after hearing from them), this market segment constitute the 50% of total PABX market share in India and they are going to stay!
One reason for lack of penetration of hosted PBX in India, I have not seen any Telecom company, who is marketing hosted PBX aggressively till date. Even, big telecom service providers like Reliance, Airtel etc. are not pushing hosted PBX solutions.
And government prohibiting interconnection of regular PSTN lines with VoIP network may be another hindrance of growth of hosted PBX service in India. This may be one reason why newly founded tech savvy small business houses would not opt for hosted PBX.
One major factor or reason for choosing Hosted PBX over on premise PABX is supposed to be the ease of installation and low cost. But that may not be true in India as it does not have huge internet users as well as already installed computer networks. Many smaller offices still work with stand alone PCs and using pen drive or USB drive to transfer few required files. Selling hosted PBX in this office would be surely more difficult than selling PABX machine.
With many homegrown companies manufacturing smaller PABX with configuration like 2-4, 2-8, 4-8, 4-16, 4-32, where left side number denotes number of trunk lines and right side number denotes number of extension lines, has ensured that the cost of PABX is very competitive and low in India. One may buy small 16 lines extension with 3 analog trunk lines at less than $200 or so. This may prove to be cheaper than using same number of lines in a hosted PBX. Of course, they may not get the value added services like CTI integration, IVR, voicemail etc.
So, according to me, on premise PABX will not vanish from Indian market anytime soon and it is a difficult market for hosted PBX as on today.
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