• There is a growing, readily available market left over by hundreds of legacy players who have been unable to make the move to IP and are fading away.

These vendors, whose livelihood has been supplying legacy PBX and key systems within their local markets, will fade over the next 3-5 years, leaving a huge market share readily available for the provider with the right product. -- These companies could not develop a viable IP-PBX product line to replace their legacy system although they have tried for so many years.

• Highly fragmented market of players trying to address IP but who can only address a certain segment, lack applications or lack a complete product line; there are no other companies with a platform to dominate the worldwide SMB IP Telephony market.

Most of the players address and focus on a niche market. With fierce competition and the complexity of the technology required in today's crowded IP Telephony market, the size of small niche market is not enough to sustain them and allow them to develop all the necessary components to meet even the niche market they serve. Others are trying to force fit a costly Large Enterprise product but can’t price it to dominate the global market - - China is the fastest growing market for VOIP and are highly price sensitive.

• The SMB is ready to move rapidly from legacy to IP PBX.

By 2010, analysts predict that over 50% of both Small and Medium businesses (SMB) will have replaced their legacy phone systems with IP-PBX and associated software products. According to Gartner, an independent research firm, the IP-PBX market (not including phones) was estimated to have been $3.9 billion in 2006 and is expected to grow to $7.9 billion by 2010. Other estimates are even higher.

• Large companies with high-cost organization infrastructure and multiple product lines that require multiple R&D, Sales, Support and Marketing groups, are priced too high for much of the SMB.
• Of the mid-range players, some are trying to build VOIP solutions on the Asterisk open source software, others understand some piece of the larger picture and find themselves with hardware but no applications, applications but no scalable hardware, or product lines that serve only limited portions of the market. Others have attempted to assemble the required expertise and product through merger and acquisition. Very few of them has yet successfully homegrown or integrated this level of expertise into a complete product line.
• The third class of players is the collection of small and local vendors who, although they are well-known within their local markets, do not have the resources or expertise to move from their legacy PSTN to the VOIP world. These vendors will fade over the next 3-5 years, leaving a huge market share readily available for the provider with the right product.

• Right combination of products that work seamlessly to provide a complete solution, preferably a scalable product line with a single architecture that could interface to legacy telephony interface as well as VoIP, has a simplified “one-stop” user interface, and are based upon mature (reliable and feature complete) technology,
• Infrastructure to cost-effectively develop, manufacture and support the product,
• The product could be sold to entire SMB market, not just a portion of it, including  China, Japan and rest of the world,
• The product must reach not only the “box-moving” market but also value added application segment including the emerging call center market in China and Japan,
• The product could be sold through existing and new channels,
• The product must be easy to use,
• The product must be easily and affordably supported and implemented.

TeleSynergy’s breakthrough “One Box - One Architecture” AboveEdge SIP-based IP-PBX Telephony Appliance addresses the limitations of legacy, server-centric and hybrid PBX systems.  It represents a leap in technology that will expedite the mass deployment of IP Telephony for all sizes of small and medium businesses.

AboveEdge embeds significant IP and is based on our Simplexes distributed PBXFlow Call Application Generator software and the optimized Distributed Processing Model (DPM) software/hardware platform.  AboveEdge offers:

• A single, scalable hardware/software architecture and platform addresses the needs of the entire SMB (3-1000 phones per AbovEdge™ package.) to provide leverage across the channels/sub-markets and suppliers. The PC-based and open source suppliers simply can’t scale in this way.
• An architecture that fully exploits the promise of SIP and the ability to separate the signaling and media streams.  We have an architecture that balances the flexibility and scalability of an IP (soft)-switch-based platform, with the efficiency of legacy (circuit)-switch-based platform, when "circuit-switching" is appropriate.
• A "stackable" system architecture in which multiple appliances interoperate seamlessly to meet design requirements ranging from small to large sites; from single to multiple or telecommuter sites; from pure IP to IP integrated with legacy phone systems, PBX, or PSTN, from VOIP gateway to full-fledged IP-PBX – solve the "product mix" issue.
• Distributed processing effects efficient utilization of CPU / network processor power.
• Support for legacy analog phones for the China market.
• Any combination of features our fifteen-year deep library of telephony applications, ranging from call management applications to advanced call centers.
• Our PBXflow Call Application Generator for rapid development of new applications and integration with 3rd party service-oriented, presence or web-based collaborative applications.
• A natural model for built-in redundancy and failover.
• Single or distributed points of management, depending on customer desire.  A single user interface across the entire "product mix."