Sales of service provider VoIP and IMS equipment grew 19% between 2006 and 2007, to over $3.9 billion, the report shows, with all segments in the market posting growth. Some segments, such as IMS core equipment, nearly doubled year-over-year.
"The overall next gen voice equipment market is maturing, as evidenced by single-digit annual sales growth in traditional equipment such as media gateways and softswitches, but other types of equipment, namely session border controllers, media servers, and voice application servers, will generally grow faster for the next five years. As we are starting the fourth year of a global telecom investment cycle and leaning toward a plateau, the overall next gen voice equipment will likely weather a slowdown starting in 2010 or 2011, buoyed by strong IMS core equipment sales," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research.
Other highlights from the report:
- The worldwide service provider VoIP and IMS market is forecast to grow to $8.4 billion in 2011
- The fastest growing segments in 2007 were session border controllers, softswitches, voice application servers, and IMS core equipment
- For the quarter, the overall market is up 18% sequentially, 3Q07 to 4Q07
- Market movers and shakers include Nortel and Nokia Siemens, the
#1 and #2 worldwide revenue leaders in the combined media gateway and softswitch segment; Cisco takes the #3 spot for 4Q07, while Sonus captures the #3 spot for 2007
- There were just under 80 million VoIP subscribers worldwide in 2007, led by the Asia Pacific region.