A pivotal moment for on-premise PBXs
NEC Corporation, a giant in the telecommunications industry, has recently announced a significant shift in its business strategy, signalling the end of an era for on-premise telephone systems. This decision reflects the company’s response to the evolving market demands, as more organisations globally transition towards cloud-based services as part of their digital transformation efforts.
NEC’s move away from the premises-based (PBX) business outside of Japan marks a pivotal change, considering its historical stature as a leading provider of PBX and key systems.
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The timeline
The timeline for this transition is clear: no new orders will be accepted after December 31, 2024, with the final shipments of products related to accepted orders to be completed by March 31, 2025.
Furthermore, NEC will cease providing hardware and software support services beyond March 31, 2026, except for existing contractual obligations. This strategic withdrawal is not isolated; it follows similar exits by other manufacturers like Toshiba and Panasonic, underscoring a broader industry trend away from traditional landline systems towards more advanced, integrated communication technologies.
Action required
For Hotels relying on NEC’s on-premise systems, this announcement serves as a critical prompt to plan for a transition to modern VoIP systems, which offer not only enhanced capabilities but also potential cost savings.
There is of course more, whilst the death of the on-premise PBX (and on-premise many things) will be ongoing for a while yet, hotels are left with some potentially difficult decisions to make, like; in an era of hacking and huge fines and with no security updates beyond the end of 2025 – do they replace before that date, as many hundreds of hotels have already decided to do or ‘risk it’ and face the insurance implications? Remembering of course that there is a risk when simply connected to the PSTN and that is increased when you add IP end points and SIP trunks, which of course, most systems will require as the PSTN is switched off across the world.
Hardware support will initially not be a problem with many spares and resellers happy to supply and repair for some time to come. We should however, spare a thought for the great people at NEC and their partners, who will be adversely affected by this decision, and we wish them the very best.
The Fourteen IP solution
So, what to do? At Fourteen IP we have invested in our own carrier grade telephony platforms that are hosted in the UK, EU and USA. These are secure, kept up to date, are scanned for security issues constantly and delivers 99.99999% up time – more reliable than an on-premise PBX. Our Evolution Voice™ hotel cloud telephony platform is approved by major hotel brands and deployed in 24 countries by hotels large and small, branded and unbranded.
We have designed some commercial and technical solutions to help hotels make the move away from NEC and our team would be happy to discuss those with you.
Future-proofing
What if this happens again with Evolution Voice? It’s a fair question in the circumstances. Evolution Voice is built on SIP an industry standard which simply means that you can keep what you have and move to another platform should the need arise. Evolution Voice powers over 330,000 guest rooms in 24 countries and has been powering hotel communications since 2016 is hosted in secure carrier grade data centres across the world and is approved by many leading hotel chains.
