Particularly for small businesses, 2006 brought forth an explosion of choice in the voice over IP market, as a flood of companies introduced IP PBX services and appliances, particularly from networking companies targeted toward the low end of the market and startups building and developing upon the recent advances in open source telephony software.
As with all things, eWEEK Labs expects to see a corresponding retraction in the market, likely towards the end of 2007.
Judging on our initial looks at the PBX, phones and media gateways from consumer-grade networking companies like D-Link, we expect these type of offerings to be among the first to disappear from the marketplace.
We also expect to see many casualties from around the Asterisk community, as only a few companies, like Fonality, which offers a hybrid-hosted version of Asterisk and is the proud new keeper of the TrixBox distribution and community and Digium itself, have distinguished themselves prominently at this point in time.