After three years of annual declines, the carrier VoIP and IMS equipment market turned the corner in 2012, growing 9 percent over the previous year due to strong IMS sales, according to Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research.
“It’s still early days for IMS equipment and applications for LTE, but a handful of operators are placing orders that are positively impacting revenue,” she says. “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.”
According to Infonetics’ findings, global sales of carrier VoIP and IMS equipment topped $800 million in 4Q12, thanks to a strong core of IMS, voice application servers, and softswitches. IMS equipment sales made up just over 40% of total VoIP and IMS revenue in 2012, offsetting overall declines in legacy softswitch and trunk media gateways.
Though softswitches continue to decline on an annual basis, some operators are replacing early generation softswitches with new ones, opting not to switch to IMS, says Infonetics.
For the full year, the Caribbean and Latin America region (CALA) posted the strongest growth of all regions, spiking 37 percent.
