The worldwide carrier voice over Internet protocol equipment market was down by 28 percent, while the IP multimedia subsystem equipment market was up by 142 percent in 2009, according to market research firm, Infonetics Research's fourth quarter 2009 ‘Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers‘ and ‘IMS Equipment and Subscribers' market share and forecast reports.

 

The carrier VoIP equipment report tracks Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), AudioCodes, BroadSoft, Dialogic, Cisco, Comverse, Ericsson, GENBAND, Huawei, Iperia, Italtel, MERA, Metaswitch Networks, Movius, NextPoint, Nokia Siemens (News - Alert), Nortel, Personeta, RadiSys Convedia, Sonus, Sylantro, Tekelec, Thomson Cirpack, Ubiquity, UTStarcom, Veraz, Verso, Xener and others.

 

Even though the carrier VoIP equipment market was down by 28 percent in 2009, it was holding steady in the fourth quarter, led by very strong sales of session border controllers, said Diane Myers, directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research (News - Alert).

 

Infonetics’ quarterly service provider VoIP report, which provided worldwide as well as regional market share, market size, forecasts through 2014, indicated that the service provider VoIP equipment market dropped to $2.48 billion worldwide from 2008 to 2009. This is due to the fact that there was a considerable decline in TDM-related equipment deployment, particularly traditional trunk media gateways and softswitches.

 

However, the service provider VoIP equipment revenue was up slightly in 4Q09, at 2.7 percent over 3Q09. This facilitated in relative stability that had already started in 2Q09. During this period, four vendors, namely Metaswitch, Acme Packet, Radisys and BroadSoft, stood out for growing revenue in 2009 in the fields of trunk media gateways and softswitches, session border controllers, media servers, and voice application servers respectively.

 

Infonetics’ quarterly IMS report, which provided worldwide as well as regional market share, market size, forecasts through 2014, indicated that the global IMS equipment vendor revenue totaled $426 million USD in 2009 and is anticipated to grow to $1.44 billion in 2014. In 4Q09, the revenue from IMS equipment for mobile networks exceeded that of IMS equipment for fixed-line networks. Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks (News - Alert) were the two companies that posted strong IMS equipment results during the fourth quarter of 2009.

 

In addition, the quarterly IMS report indicates that IMS is guaranteed to get its biggest driver from LTE deployments starting in 2012 with key operators and vendors forming the OneVoice initiative and transferring the initiative to the GSMA (News - Alert) in February 2010.

 

Myers added, “The shining star in 4Q09 for IMS sales were deployments for mobile networks, particularly purchases for Rich Communication Suite, video, LTE trials and enhanced mobile IM and presence services. The IMS market will continue to be lumpy on a quarterly basis, but we expect continued positive momentum from new deployments from North American cable operators, Class 5 replacement projects in EMEA and VoLTE to contribute to strong annual growth for at least the next five years.”