The lowdown on enterprise telephony is more of a low-up, with pure IP PBX systems sales growth of 3 percent in the first quarter of 2007, up 76 percent from last quarter, according to Infonetics Research. In the meantime, traditional TDM PBX system sales feebly lifted its head, after five quarters running of losses, showing a flash of life in a declining picture, marked by a sorry medical chart at the foot of its bed — negative 45 percent over the last five years.

You can see which way the wind is blowing, but where exactly is the take-off for IP PBX? The launch of Microsoft’s unified communications product — Office Communicator 2007 — a spate of vendor consolidation with Inter-Tel and Mitel and Avaya as the players, and ShoreTel’s imminent IPO are the focus of current interest in the industry’s upswing.

I asked Infonetics Research Analyst Mathias Machowinski to expand on the report’s findings.

Voxilla.com: Why aren’t buyers abandoning their PBX’s for a pure unified system?

Machowinski: Just inertia. Change takes time. I think if companies will adopt OCS, they’ll keep their PBX system in place and layer OCS on top of that. It’s not like they are perfect matches for each other’s features. If a company needs some of the nice features OCS offers like presence, messaging, collaboration tools, then they’ll go there.

Voxilla.com: What kind of impact will vendor consolidation and the Avaya acquisition have?

Machowinski: Well, first with consolidation, like with Mitel and Inter-Tel, there will be fewer competitors in a very crowded market. Then, the acquisition of a public company like Avaya by a couple of private equity firms changes the landscape. Too much cutthroat competition isn’t good, because the market is at the end of the competition picture where having so many companies isn’t good for the customers and isn’t too great for the companies either. In this crowded a field, mergers like this will produce stronger more efficient companies. We’re far far from the point where you have to worry about companies becoming monopolistic behemoths.

Voxilla.com: What does ShoreTel’s IPO mean in terms of IP PBX sales?

Machowinski: This is the reverse dynamic, where ShoreTel, a private company, will be going public. Being private in its early days let Shoretel focus on developing its product without a lot of interference, and develop a strong product which was good for them. But now they’re ready to go public. The access to capital will let them expand more. So far, they’ve focused on the North American market, but this move will let them grow their distribution overseas.

Voxilla.com: In the mass of information your report gives, what most interests or surprises you?

Machowinski: That the TDM market grew at all. And that the IP phone market is growing so slowly, especially on the softphone side. I expected that to sell more strongly, especially because manufacturers can sell additional phones, almost double, for every desk phone. Not all employees need that softphone, but still many could use it. That’s where I expected more action.

Highlights from Infonetics PBX Report:

• Overall enterprise telephony revenue is on track for another year of double-digit growth.
• In 1Q07, worldwide total PBX/KTS system sales inched up 1% sequentially, and are up 8% from a year ago in 1Q06.
• The overall market will total $11.9 billion in 2010.
• Hybrid PBX systems represent 63% of all PBX/KTS system line shipments worldwide in 1Q07, and will increase to 72% by 2010.
• The enterprise telephony market was flat in North America in 1Q07, weak in Europe, and strong in Asia Pacific.
• Avaya is the market share leader for worldwide IP PBX revenue in 1Q07, followed closely by Cisco and Siemens.
• Cisco maintains a strong lead in IP deskphone and IP softphone sales, accounting for almost half the units shipped worldwide in 1Q07.

Find more data and a .jpg chart at the Infonetics Research press portal in the Enterprise Voice & Data section at http://www.info.infonetics.com.

By year end Blackberry users will have a new WiFi-enabled dual-mode device. Here.

This week Avaya debuts a new SIP-based PBX system for distributed businesses featuring low-cost VoIP phones. Here.

Network World has a cautionary tale today about how Argonne Labs ended up replacing its green field VoIP implementation with a TDM system because of problems with the Cisco handsets. Author Paul Desmond offers a detailed case study. Here.

SMBs give Packet8’s Virtual Office hosted PBX #1 rating, according to telecom research firm AMI Partners. More.

Does Microsoft’s partner-friendly unified communications mean the leopard has changed his spots? Not so says TelecomTV’s Andrew Beutmueller. Here.

We’ve been hearing about broadband over powerline. How about power over broadband? Power over Ethernet would solve the problem of finding enough outlets for all those Internet-connected gizmos. Here.

In her column the other day Paula Bernier of New Telephony posed the question, “What’s Really New in VoIP?” That was my thought exactly after trolling through recent “news.”

Skype has a new Internet video service. It brings validation to the net as a platform for video, but it’s news because it’s Skype.

In the race to zero, FuturePhone is offering free VoIP calls to 50 countries until 2010. SunRocket’s offering once cent a minute calls to Asia. Nice if you have overseas relatives.

Yet another service is offering WiFi VoIP calls on cell phones. VoIP Service Blog has an item about using your Nintendo DS for VoIP calls. Nimbuzz is offering a new IM service on mobile phones.

And despite oceans of ink spilled on the Apple iPhone, nobody has actually used or even touched one.

About the juiciest news lately was Talkplus’ ShadowNumber calling service, designed to accommodate your secret life — the one your spouse doesn’t know about. Now, maybe I’m a cynic, but I confess to being skeptical that grownups are shocked, shocked that VoIP is being put in the service of illicit liaisons.

Five years ago, of course, all of this would be headline news. Today it’s not even novelty.

But just because new breakthroughs aren’t bursting on the scene daily, doesn’t mean that there aren’t significant developments in telephony. Take for example, GotVMail of Weston, MA. The start-up company has skyrocketed to 35,000 customers of its small business virtual phone system in three years using analog telephony technology.

It’s an interesting mix of marketing with old and new technology.

Tellingly, the company doesn’t call its service a hosted PBX, which it closely resembles. GotVMail isn’t about making phone calls. It’s about having a professional “voice” when customers call regardless of what you’re using to answer the call. The company’s tag line is “Give your small business a big company sound.”

It’s a good example of understanding what customers get from any product isn’t the elegance of the technology — too often lost in the high tech world. It’s the value they get in terms of doing business smarter, cheaper or better. In other words, more profitably.

The value in this case is having a reliable “big company” phone system that sounds professional, routes calls to the right person, and lets people stay connected on the road. Hence, the choice of analog technology.

“Calls go over the PSTN to our data center which is full of tried and true analog technology,” explains David Powers GotVMail’s VP of Communications and self-described chief cook and bottle washer. “In the telecom business part of what customers are buying into is an expectation that when you pick up the phone anywhere you have a dial tone.”

The company’s business grew from founders Siamak Taghaddos’ and David Hauser’s own experiences with phone systems in startup companies.

“All of these [problems] had to do with putting network infrastructure in place,” explains Powers. “Both found out what it’s like being a small entrepreneur trying to get an issue resolved with a Verizon. It’s like the Lily Tomlin joke, ‘we don’t have to, we’re the phone company.’”

GotVMail is not just delivering phone service. It’s delivering a phone service uniquely tailored to small and home-based businesses.

“We see ourselves as entrepreneurs serving entrepreneurs,” Powers continues. “We tell people if there’s a more cost-effective way of doing business with us. When was the last time Verizon called you and said, ‘Let me save you money?’”

The guiding principal of GotVMail’s design is that small businesses have “infinitely finite resources,” explains Power. “The platform is built from the ground up for small business. We weren’t an enterprise telecom company going down market.

“We don’t want them to have to buy anything except our service,” he continues. “So what we set out to do is make our technology talk to anything — landlines, cell phones, PDAs, smart phones. We’re technology-agnostic.”

Why not a VoIP system? “I like what VoIP does for me, but I don’t want to spend $189 for every phone,” answers Powers.

GotVMail’s service looks to be a competitor for Grand Central. In fact GotVMail is seeing a lot of transferred numbers coming from the service, Powers reports. But while Grand Central is a solution for the individual, GotVMail is a solution for business.

Being in GotVMail’s target demographic myself as a one-person office, I decided to try out the service myself.

You sign up on the website with a credit card. You can transfer an existing number, get a new number or request a ‘vanity” number. Alas, 1-800-CAR-OLYN was not available. So I went with an assigned 877 number.

Calling plans start at $10 plus per-minute charges that range from $0.048 to $0.074. You get 10 to 20 extensions with each plan and can add new extensions in groups of five for $10 a month. The average GotVMail customer pays $30 to $40 a month total, reports Powers.

The service comes with a slew of built-in PBX features like extension transfer, after hours calling mode, and music-on-hold. Additional features like dial-by-name and information extensions are also available at a $5 to $10 charge. You can forward calls to up to six different numbers.

GotVMail has an online manual that steps you through setting up your account. Account and extension management can be done through a Web browser or the phone. The Web interface is simple and intuitive and has a nice flow tree that shows you where you are in the process.

Using the phone keypad to configure an extension is, well, no more complicated than any other telephone system. And with GotVMail’s clear diagrams and spoken instructions to help you along, at least you don’t have to squint over mouse type in a printed instruction book.

I can attest to the fact that the system is well designed for its targeted audience of small and home-based businesses like eBay “power sellers.” From start to finish, setting up my account took 19 minutes, including time for a do-over after making a mistake.

Now, if you married GotVMail with ShadowNumbers…

If I only had one word to describe the state of electronic communications today, the word I would choose is “thrash.” Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

“In computer science, thrash is…used to describe a degenerate situation on a computer where increasing resources are used to do a decreasing amount of work.”

Sound familiar?

Talkster President and COO James Wanless had this insight in an airport while he was juggling a laptop and a mobile phone and trying to communicate on both devices.

“There wasn’t a really good way to do this,” he says. What was needed, “was a means to consolidate all the forms of communication used every day, on a device being used every day, in a way that can be brought under the umbrella of the IT department.”

That unifying device is, unsurprisingly, the mobile phone. And Wanless’ solution is Talkster, an Toronto, Ontario-based spin-off of IVR and SMS messaging company Software I.T. Inc.

Talkster

When Talkster’s new service is fully realized sometime next year, it will connect mobile phones to landlines, VoIP networks, corporate PBXs, and Voice over Instant Messaging networks. In short, the service will connect with anything that can carry voice even if it doesn’t have a phone number.

But Talkster does things differently than you might expect. Calls are conventional mobile phone calls, not VoIP calls. And you don’t need any special client software on the phone. The only requirement is a Web browser application on the phone. You don’t even need a special data service.

Instead of connecting the call through the mobile network and carrying it as a VoIP call over the data network as many services do, Talkster connects the call over an IP network but uses the mobile network to carry the call. This design is based on what’s already out there working.

“There are billions of cell phones and everyone knows how to use them and how they’re billed,” Wanless explains.

Talkster ’s enterprise-friendly architecture sets it apart from other applications that bring IM and VoIP to the cell phone.

Skip the analyst-babble about Web 2.0 and Web Services. Here’s the skinny: Talkster separates the service from the network. This makes it easy for organizations to integrate Talkster services into existing voice systems, network controls, IT policies and billing systems.

“You can take the service layer and put it on your network,” Wanless explains. “It allows you to bring cell phone into that world.”

Presence-awareness is an essential component of the Talkster approach. Follow-me and simultaneous ring features don’t really meet that need, according to Wanless, because they don’t tell you if the person you’re trying to reach is available at any of those places.

In the future, Wanless sees presence becoming as essential on the phone as it is to IM. “Presence is going to grow because many devices are starting to transmit that.”

Talkster uses the contact-centric approach of IM applications. “You choose the contact name and connect where the person is,” Wanless explains. Talkster’s menu shows you who’s available and where they can be reached. You can also ask Talkster to connect and call you back, similar to services like Jajah.

Talkster is offering a free beta test of its service for calls to MSN, Google Talk and Gizmo Project instant messaging services. You can sign up on the company’s website. The company plans to debut its enterprise mobility service in 2007.

“A lot of new things are coming in 2007 that will really show how we’re positioning ourselves as a company,” Wanless adds.