After a sluggish second quarter in 2007, enterprise telephony equipment manufacturers saw an 11 percent jump in worldwide sales in 3Q07 to reach $2.6 billion, according to a recent study.

Revenue and shipments increased across the telephony board in all enterprise telephony categories tracked by Infonetics Research (News - Alert). The rate of growth in the TDM segment actually outpaced that of the IP PBX

segment in 3Q07, according to Infonetics latest Enterprise Telephony report.

“The Big Three (Avaya, Cisco (News - Alert), and Nortel) had excellent quarters, all growing well into the double digits,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research.

Worldwide sales of service provider next-gen voice equipment are up 5 percent in 3Q07 from 2Q07 to $956.4 million, says Infonetics Research in its "Service Provider VoIP and IMS

Equipment and Subscribers" report.

“The bump this quarter was partially due to seasonal factors, as the third quarter tends to be strong, but also because of increased demand across the board, even in the TDM

segment. Overall, 2007 is on track for high single-digit growth over 2006.”

In fact, year-over-year, the next-gen voice market is up 15 percent, the report shows.

The third quarter was marked by strong gains in softswitch, session border controller (SBC

), and media server sales, driven by increasing demand for voice over broadband. The SBC segment's 1-year growth rate (3Q06 to 3Q07) is in the very high double digits, the report said.

Other report highlights include the service provider next-gen voice equipment market is forecast to more than double between 2006 and 2010, when it will reach $6.9 billion worldwide and the number of worldwide residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers will grow to nearly 172 million in 2010, led by the Asia Pacific region.

In addition, worldwide media gateway manufacturer revenue is down 4 percent in 3Q07 over 2Q07. Nortel (News - Alert) took back the lead in worldwide softswitch revenue market share, pushing Nokia Siemens to 2nd; Huawei remains in 3rd.

Infonetics’ PBX (News - Alert) report tracks TDM PBX/KTS systems, IP

PBX systems with hybrid and pure IP splits, IP PBX by system size, VoIP gateways, and IP deskphones and softphones. The report tracks 3Com (News - Alert), AudioCodes, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Dialogic, Ericsson, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, Quintum, Samsung, ShoreTel, Siemens, Tadiran, Toshiba, and others.

Tim Gray is a Web Editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To see more of his articles, please visit Tim Gray’s columnist page.

Business VoIP

The World's Largest Communications And Technology Community