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[Matan Barth is the author of a series of posts about media relay. The first part described relaying media. The current part explains how major PBX vendors handle the relay media dilemma.]

In Part 1 of this series I described the media-relay dilemma. This time I want to share a few thoughts about how vendors should approach this dilemma.

Enterprise PBX vendors realize that a PBX is more than a sophisticated enterprise switching server — it’s an enterprise communication solution. Understanding this, these vendors offer their customers a set of solutions with their PBX components and features, such as: VoiceMail, Media GW, Call Center, and most importantly: hardware phones.

This is the classic PBX business model.

(Note: The traditional PBX offering has already been challenged by Microsoft Office Communicator Server (OCS) and IBM Lotus sametime, which enlarge the offering with organizational presence and IM, and put a SW phone on the desktop.)

By supplying hardware phones and other peripherals like the ones described above, the vendor makes two important gains:

1. The vendor increases its revenues by selling more money’s worth of hardware.
2. The vendor provides a complete, in-house solution that ties the customer to it, leaving the customer the options to eventually purchase more hardware and maintenance from the vendor or replace the whole system (an option the customer probably will not choose).

A vendor that uses this classic PBX business model will find the media relay option very efficient in many ways:

No need for transcoding and no interoperability issues, since all phones are supplied by the vendor and support the same media capabilities. Feature implementation could be proprietary and protocol and implementation are internal matters. This enables low-cost feature implementation and a nice feature set for the customer.

Full solutions provided by one vendor are the dominant solution in the market. However,  markets and business models change.

Some of the main changes occurring in the enterprise telecommunications market are:

• Hosted PBX (*explanation below)
• Introduction of Microsoft OCS and IBM sametime platforms
• Open source PBX solutions, such as Asterisk
• Customers looking for open solutions that don’t cause lock-ins to PBX phone brands

In addition, small PBX vendors may partner with client vendors to increase their offering.

So the competition and the demand for openness support going towards standardization, and the dominant VoIP standard today is SIP. SIP is a client-oriented protocol that puts much of the logic in clients. Therefore, it makes more sense to design an open PBX platform using the peer-to-peer model.

Is this where the market is going? Eventually, yes!

When will it happen? Nobody knows!

Will the companies choosing the peer-to-peer model succeed more than the others? No guarantees!

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* Hosted PBX: The hosted PBX solution, provides major support to enterprise IT managers in the PBX management domain. The PBX is managed and installed by the hosted PBX provider; the customer does not need to install hardware on his premises. In addition, vendor payments are on a monthly/yearly basis, and the PBX service does not require major hardware expenses before being able to start using the product. The peer-to-peer model supports the Hosted PBX trend for the following reasons:

1. Sending the media over the network to the remote PBX is not efficient in terms of network resources.
2. Customers with existing hardware-phone install bases can purchase the PBX service from the Hosted PBX supplier and stay with their current install bases.