FMC does not have a bad business case. It is in many ways like VoIP in its early days. VoIP took a bit of time to get established because those service providers who could better promote it felt that VoIP would instead cannibalize their revenues. They only started VoIP at retail level because it was eating away their lunch. And so ‘if someone is going to eat my lunch, it might as well be me’.
We are likely to see something similar with regard to FMC. Big wireless carriers will not push it unless they start losing lines to FMC offerings. These carriers regard FMC as a threat to their traditional revenue streams.
On the enterprise FMC side, for example, if Cisco and Avaya start marketing dual mode phones (typically made by Nokia and others) they are basically working against their desk phone business because people will not require their desk phones any more. It would seem plausible to assume that these companies must be taking a very cautious approach to the market and that could be one of the reasons why the FMC uptake in the enterprise is not great either.
Majority of workers are not road warriors and use their desktop phones. If you talk to PBX companies, they do not make much money on the PBX front. They make money on IP phones. If these phones start getting replaced by the dual mode phones with a FMC soft client on them, it is the Nokias of the world who are going to win and not the Ciscos of the world.
The key thing is that neither a large cellular carrier nor a PBX vendor seems qualified to sell FMC because both of them have something to lose through the FMC business. FMC is a solution that has to be brought to market by a third party that has no vested interest.
