The worldwide VoIP and IMS equipment market is jumping, with sales to service providers up 4% sequentially and 26% year over year. The market is expected to more than double between 2005 and 2009, from $2.5 billion to $5.8 billion, according to Infonetics Research.
VoIP is driving the market, with the number of worldwide residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers nearly doubling from 2005 to 2006 to over 47 million, Infonetics said.
If anyone was worried about it – and with an industry recession still fresh in mind, who wouldn’t be cautious? – the trends suggest the growth in the market is sustainable, lacking the earmarks of a bubble.
“The service provider next-gen voice market is robust and healthy, with none of the extravagance that led to the telecom crash of 2000-2002, pointing to a sustainable investment cycle,” said Infonetics Research principal analyst Stéphane Téral. “All segments but softswitches showed gains in the third quarter.”
Nortel recaptured the lead in the $2.8 billion media gateway and softswitch market, according to Infonetics. Cisco Systems is making inroads into the media gateway market and is now second in the media gateway/softswitch market. Sonus remains strong. Acme Packet leads in the session border controller (SBC) segment, RadiSys is the worldwide leader for media servers, and Broadsoft leads in voice application servers.
Meanwhile, in the Enterprise Telephony Market, the top IP PBX vendors are, in order: Siemens, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, and Alcatel. Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, and NEC lead in North America; and Siemens is in first place in EMEA, followed by Alcatel. In Asia Pacific, NEC is first, followed by Avaya.