By Daniel Santa Cruz

PBXs were able to post their first gain in four quarters despite challenging enterprise telephony market conditions.

So says Infonetics Research in its third quarter Enterprise Unified Communications and Voice Equipment report.

“It’s been a rough year for enterprise telephony, as demand remains flat to down and pricing continues to drop. Global PBX revenue grew five percent sequentially in the third quarter of 2013, but it wasn’t enough to pull the market into positive territory from a year ago,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics. “Businesses worldwide remain conservative in their telephony spending, relying instead on existing solutions. There are pockets of growth, but they’re too modest to lift the overall market this year from last year.”

The global enterprise PBX market, including TDM, hybrid and pure IP, totaled $1.9 billion in the third quarter, up 5 percent from the prior quarter, but down 8 percent from 3Q12. Sales of unified communications (UC) applications grew 5 percent in the past year.

North America was the only region which failed to post a quarterly gain in PBX revenue, although nowhere was the a year-over-year increase.

Infonetics says Cisco is No. 1 in PBX/KTS revenue for the ninth straight quarter, followed by Avaya. Unified communications market leader Microsoft expanded its share, ending the quarter with almost half (49 percent) worldwide revenue share of the UC application segment.