The Carrier VoiP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) market increased in Q4 of 2012 – as predicted – after three years of declines, according to a recent report.
Infonetics Research (News - Alert) said the turnaround is mostly a result of improved IMS sales.
"As we predicted, after three years of annual declines, the carrier VoIP and IMS equipment market turned the corner in 2012, growing nine percent over the previous year due to strong IMS sales," Diane Myers, an analyst for VoIP, UC (unified communications) and IMS at Infonetics Research, said in a statement. "It's still early days for IMS equipment and applications for LTE (News - Alert), but a handful of operators are placing orders that are positively impacting revenue."
More detailed analysis beyond the current report will be released by the firm on March 4. But Infonetics predicts more good news is ahead. "This is a taste of what's to come over the next few years as wireless operators step into voice over LTE (VoLTE) and RCS begins to roll out across multiple regions," Myers adds.
In addition, the report said that VoIP and IMS equipment was over $800 million in Q4 2012. The best categories were IMS, voice application servers and softswitches, the report said.
Also, IMS equipment sales were over 40 percent of total VoIP and IMS revenue during 2012. There were drops in legacy softswitch and trunk media gateways. Some operators opted to replace older softswitches with new ones instead of using IMS.
The report also found that for all of 2012 the Caribbean and Latin America region saw the most increase among the regions covered, with a 37 percent increase. Huawei was first in VoIP and IMS market share, with some one-fifth of the global market. Alcatel-Lucent was in second place replacing GENBAND (News - Alert). Among the vendors highlighted in the report for 2012 revenue growth were: Alcatel-Lucent, BroadSoft, Ericsson, Huawei, Mavenir, Nokia Siemens Networks, and ZTE (News - Alert).
An earlier November report from Infonetics saw that the global VoIP and IMS market was carried by growth in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions, TMCnet reported.
“It’s safe to be optimistic about the future,” TMCnet added.
Edited by Brooke Neuman