Several vendors in the past months have released products in market segments they hadn't tapped before. Mitel, 3Com and ShoreTel look to move mid-market while keeping their SMB focus.

Cisco, among others, gears up to tap the SMB. Vendors including Alcatel-Lucent and Siemens that have had presence in most market segments have announced new and differentiated products compared to previous products they offered.

In addition to new product releases from mainstream vendors, the market continues to be courted by new entrants who bring with them highly differentiated products and disruptive technologies.

All this leaves the traditional channel spoilt for choice. In the setting, where more vendors with ever more products attract the same or similar number of channels addressing the same market, channel management has become very challenging.

The search of new channels is taking vendors to new markets. For instance, Swyx, a small German vendor works primarily with IT channels. IT channels have been attracting a fair bit of attention from business telephony vendors. It has become more pronounced since Microsoft and now IBM released software products in the Unified Communication space. 3Com's courtship with IBM's System-i is known to yield initial results two years on.

This perhaps will open another channel for the business telephony vendors. Service providers including British Telecom who have been resellers of KTS, PBX and phones are looking for new streams of revenue. This marries quite nicely with the increasing number of enterprise' growing preference to outsource, or at least to share the risks (such as technology obsolescence) associated with their use of ICT.

The evolution of technology to support packet based multi-media communication and the trend of virtualisation places service providers and system integrators as potential preferred channel partners for an increasing number of buying organisations.

To summarise, channel activities will play a much greater role. Vendors will be looking to develop channel beyond traditional distribution. Channel recruitment and management will attract far greater attention from senior management in an increasing number of vendor organisations.

Shomik Banerjee, Industry Analyst, Enterprise Communications, Frost & Sullivan
email: shomik.banerjee@frost.com
http://enterprisecommunication.blogspot.com