A spokesperson told Comms Business Magazine:
“Nortel are the leader in Enterprise telephony based on ports shipped for the entire year of 2005. This ranking is consistent across Synergy Research Group, Dell’Oro Group and Infonetics Research. The fact that Nortel are also the clear leader in the global carrier VoIP market is also apparent across the analyst house reports, and this fact further supports this global VoIP leadership position.
Nortel feel that number of ports shipped is a clearer representation of market leadership than revenue figures which are calculated by the individual analyst houses based on shipment figures provided by the manufacturers.
Cisco's claim is based on revenues, and includes not only the telephony switching equipment, but also the phones, VoIP gateways, routers, Ethernet switches, servers, and many other devices CallManager and the Cisco data networks require to handle mission critical applications. As manufactures only report their shipment of ports figures to analysts, it is up to the interpretation of the analyst to derive the revenue numbers, and that is why the ranking is not consistent across the different houses. Some analysts seem to be more generous with their revenue interpretations than others.
Finally, Synergy Research Group include data routers in their revenue calculations, but Infonetics do not. That is why Avaya were ranked first in the Infonetics revenue report.”
Essentially this is the point Comms Business Magazine made; everyone has a different spin on what to count and what is most important. In this case Nortel prefer number of ports shipped.
Cisco? Avaya? Your preferences please…