As Ferro points out, the original value proposition of the PBX is losing its appeal.

The PBX, or Private Branch eXhange, was designed to save a company money. It allowed employees to call other desks in a company without routing the call through the telecom provider’s network. The PBX also made people more productive by allowing them to communicate and collaborate more freely.

Nowadays, how often do you pick up your deskphone and call someone else in your office? Wouldn’t you rather send them an email or an IM or open up a video chat with them?

Heck, I don’t even give out my office number anymore. I hand my Google Voice number and set it to ring wherever I am (office, home, iPhone). The only “value” I get from my PBX is voicemail. And I’d prefer to receive voicemails in my email inbox rather than dial into the PBX.

Ferro points out that the future of the PBX is as a presence server. Rather than routing phone calls, the presence server will tell users whether people are available for a conversation and how you can reach them (email, IM, phone, etc). The server will also hold all your message, regardless of the medium.

Most vendors clearly see that this is on the horizon. See Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber, Microsoft’s Office Communications Server strategy and IBM’s Sametime strategy.

In my view, it’s not a question of if the PBX will go away, but when. Any shift away from the PBX paradigm will lead to a broader and deeper dependence on mobile phones. And mobile phones are still relatively expensive in the United States. I spend four or five hours a day on the phone. If I did all that on my iPhone, I’d blow up my minutes.

So this would require not just a big technological shift, but also a philosophical shift for business leaders. Most enterprises still adhere to the strategic deployment of mobile devices. They hand BlackBerrys to sales teams and top executives and leave the rest of the company tied to their desks.

A world without PBXes would require a big shift in thinking, and this will take time. Have you ever tried to convince the CFO that you need to give the mail room manager an iPhone?

Sometimes when I”m talking to vendors, I sense that unified communications is whatever they can convince you to buy. “Here, install our IP PBX and you’ll be on the cutting edge of unified communications?”

Oh really? How about a presence engine? How about a desktop client that combines voice, video, messaging and everything else that I need to stay in touch with the members of my team who are scattered all over the country?”

Yesterday I was talking to Shane Yu, the head of Avaya’s unified communications consulting practice and one thing he said really stuck with me. A lot of IT organizations treat a UC initiative as a science project. They just buy a piece of it and put some users on it and see what happens. If that’s your approach, how do you measure success? Gee, people like it. It works. That will make you popular among the cubicles, but executives won’t be impressed when you bring that message into their offices. They want to know why the company needs to change the way it communicates.

This conversation dovetailed nicely with my plans for a new series that I’m writing for SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.  I’m calling the it simply “Success with Unified Communications.” Not particularly catchy, but it’s to the point. Each story in this series will look at a key step in a unified communications deployment and explore how to execute it. I’m going to look at everything, from vendor selection to design & build. I’ll explore how to assemble the right team to run your UC project and what management software you should have in place to deliver good quality of service and experience. I’ll also explore what you need to do in order to stay ahead of the curve and to make sure your UC deployment ages gracefully.

Part One of this series hit the wire today: The Technology Needs Assessment. I hope you find it helpful.

A quick perusal of the CudaTel site tells me that these PBX boxes start at $1999 with no per-user license costs. I assume that is for the baseline model, which can support an unlimited number of extensions, but with a limit of 10 concurrent calls and up to two conference calls. The 1U box has 50 GB of voicemail capacity. I highest-end box, whose price I don’t see listed, can support up to 250 concurrent calls, 50 conference calls and 200 GB of voicemail storage. Clearly this is aimed at small businesses and midsized companies that are on the smaller side.

It looks like CudaTel will be reselling Snom and Polycom phones with this PBX as well as Polycom and LifeSize conference phones.

It’s an intersting entry into the market for Barracuda, which is known for its network security appliances. As IDC Research Director Abner Germanow posed in Tweet today, how will Barracuda’s channel sell this? Do you want to buy your PBX from a a security VAR or reseller?