Many foreign suppliers from Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Siemens, to Alcatel-Lucent and others have struggled with the Japanese market for telephone systems (PBX). It is much the same story for Korea, but of course the local players have varied. For Japan, Cisco has tried with little visible success to market it’s UC-500 product for small offices. Although many installers have become ‘Cisco certified’, there are little sales to match the efforts. The market continues to gravitate back towards the local brands, especially that of NEC. Of course there are the Panasonics, Iwatsu, Fujitsu, and various other brands but it is NEC who still owns the market share according to the most recent surveys.
Comparing a phone system (AKA PBX or IPT) from abroad to local systems gives you a considerable variable in cost. For Avaya or Cisco, equipment for a 30 person office with installation could easily use up a 5-6 million yen budget. An NEC system would likely come in closer to 3-4 million Yen installed. Although the Japanese brands are cheaper, they still have feature limitations especially when compared with western legacy brands for voice services.
In Japan, we have seen the rise of people providing hosted PBX services. AINEO is famous for installation and maintenance of systems from NEC, NorTel, Cisco, Avaya, and (from 2009) ShoreTel. For a small office these systems could be too expensive for a small office budget.
From 2008, AINEO put our time and effort behind messaging and web in the building of the cloud services. In the meantime in Tokyo, we’ve seen startup companies rise up pushing Cisco IPT, the open source Asterisk platform, and even some hybrid hosted IPT. We found the Cisco people way over-priced and unstable, the Asterisk people have a voice quality issues, and the local hybrid systems not really taking off. The idea is good because people want more features such as
-Easier to use conferencing
-Integration with your desktop computer
-Vmail coming in as email attachments
-Contact center reporting, queuing, as well as responses via phone, web, and messaging
Well, as AINEO has been in voice services (PBX) longer than any of the other providers with over 6000 installed terminals, we see the need for simple, high-quality but cost effective and reliable systems, we have decided to add AINEO Secure IPT to our AINEO Secure Cloud service.
We have built the service on ShoreTel technology and have found it extremely high quality, cost effective, and brilliantly simple.
We are doing better testing now in offices around the Kanto plain in Ginza, Nihonbashi, Akabane, and outside Tokyo. It is great to see our systems work as one big reliable system.
Be watching our AINEO Secure blog as we share more through the beta testing. If you would like to trial the service, please contact our product development team. More to come!
Thanks for using AINEO Secure hosting services!