The sub 50 extension market gets a shake up

ICON is forecasting a shake up in the sub 50 extension market over the next few months as it rolls out the recently released version 2 of its Wave IP IP-PBX and re-launchs it at a price point which is hard to beat.  Mark Shane commented

“In a period of price increases and belt tightening this goes against the trend in the market.  We don’t know any other vendor who has taken the bold step of cutting dealer prices”

Wave IP competes in the sub 50 extension market and on a feature by feature comparison basis there are very few IP-PBX solutions in this market which offer an out of the box UC solution.   Vendors are offering solutions which are positioned as full UC solutions but many of the features which make the IP-PBX a useful solution for the business come at an additional cost. 

The trend to VoIP is well established and vendor’s product lines reflect this.  However, in the case of UC and collaboration these trends are still in the early stages and many vendors have not built these features into their product as standard issue.  Vertical Communications has always been a pace setter in terms of offering complete solutions and in the case of UC and collaboration it is still the market leader in terms of providing these as standard in its Wave IP IP-PBX solution. Mark commented

“The release of Wave 2.0 at the back end of 2010 was expected to boost sales for our Channel Partners in 2011.  Now with the price point revised to compete directly with the popular solutions in the sub 50 extension market we are planning for a busy time in 2011.”

Wave 2.0 packs even more UC features into the Wave IP box including synchronisation with Outlook, mobile extensions, instant messaging, integrated softphone and personal status.  These really do push the Wave IP solution to the top of the pile as far as features go and with the relaunch at the new price point ICON expects to see increasing sales of this powerful IP-PBX solution.