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SBC returns carrier VoIP to growth, IMS market up

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CIOL Bureau
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CALIFORNIA, USA: The session border controller (SBC) market is on fire, with worldwide revenue up 27 percent sequentially and up 70 percent from this quarter last year, a signal that IP-to-IP connectivity continues to overtake IP-to-TDM connectivity, finds market research firm Infonetics Research in its second quarter (2Q10) Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers and IMS Equipment and Subscribers market share and forecast reports.

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"SBCs and media servers will be the main growth engines of the carrier VoIP equipment market for 2010,” predicts Diane Myers, directing analyst, service provider VoIP and IMS, Infonetics Research.

Myers adds: “The IMS market also is experiencing strong and healthy growth, driven by the continued adoption of fixed-line VoIP services and key operators in Asia Pacific and EMEA that are beginning their fixed-line network transformation utilizing IMS.”

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The total service provider VoIP equipment market, including trunk media gateways, SBCs, media servers, softswitches, and voice application servers, increased to $564.7 million in 2Q10, up 5.3 percent from the previous quarter.

Worldwide, revenue for every product category except trunk media gateways grew sequentially in 2Q10. Still, all segments but SBCs are down year-over-year (from 2Q09 to 2Q10).

The worldwide IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) equipment market, including IMS core equipment and application servers, jumped 33.5 percent in 2Q10 over 1Q10.

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In 2Q10, Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens Networks recorded solid IMS sales, and Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE posted the largest revenue growth over 1Q10.

The “lumpy” nature of the IMS equipment market--an extremely high quarter followed by a down quarter--is expected to continue for the next six to eight quarters, as large operators place purchase orders in a single quarter and new IMS deals hit sporadically.

Significant drivers for the IMS market over the long-term include Long Term Evolution (LTE) deployments and the push for enhanced mobile services, including mobile instant messaging (IM), video sharing, and Rich Communications Suite (RCS).

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