User Groups (Centrex or PBX)

As the market has become more competitive and vendors have become more careful with their money, the major associations for telecommunications users, such as the International Communications Association (ICA) in the United States and the Canadian Business Telecommunications Alliance (CBTA) in Canada, have faded away, with the result that their Centrex special interest groups have been lost as well. This trend is unfortunate, because accessible user groups can be valuable forums in which to share experiences with other users and information with vendors and customers. Two user groups remain specifically for Centrex customers in North America.

The National Centrex Users Group (NCUG), which is somewhat misnamed, as it has one Canadian director and a number of members from outside the United States, provides Centrex users with a platform to deal with product development, product delivery, and regulation issues. NCUG has good relationships with service providers and switch manufacturers, and provides free membership for end users and associate members. The NCUG operates a 3-day conference in the United States in late March of each year; it also publishers a quarterly newsletter.

Nortel Networks has now consolidated its separate Canadian and American user organizations into one DMS-Centrex users' group, to provide a forum for all those customers whose Centrex service is delivered from Nortel-made COs. Meetings of the predecessors to this Nortel group were lively events in the 1980s when digital Centrex was first introduced, but they did not see significant activity in the past decade, as third generation Centrex remained quite stable.

With the arrival of IP-Centrex, combined with the likely growth in the number of service providers and customers, the value of user groups is expected to be much greater over the next few years.