Cisco forecasts IP handset sales surge

Cisco has forecast ongoing increases in sales of IP handsets.

Fernando Mousinho, director of product management in Cisco’s Unified Communications Technology Group, took to the company’s blog to reveal that the company “could not have imagined that orders would increase by more than 30 percent this past quarter.”

“I will keep building great IP phones,” he added, “Because customers keep telling us the value they deliver is important to them. More than that, customers keep buying them in growing numbers.”

Mousinho attributed that surge in part to security concerns.

“Newer hardware is required to support stronger cryptography with TLS1.2 and AES-256 SRTP,” he wrote. Over the last year, we have seen several organizations place orders of over 50,000 phones to be compliant with the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS).”

The executive may be a little optimistic: the PCI delayed changeover to TLS from June 2016 to June 2018, so those big orders could well be an artefact of that deadline.

Mousinho also took aim at softphones, labelling them as a frequent source of frustration.

He also said that customers see value in new collaboration features appearing in new IP handsets, including “smartphone integration, accessibility enablement, click-to-call from Jabber, WiFi support, and many more.” The exec was also full of praise for Cisco’s cloud comms services, and the value-add they bring when linked to its IP handsets.

He did not, however, mention Cisco’s weeks-long WebEx wipeout and its impact on those cloud services.

Source: crn

Industry: Unified communication news