TMCnet recently asked some of the leading lights in the industry for their thoughts about 2011 and what’s in store for the year ahead.

Here’s what Eli Katz, CEO of XConnect (News - Alert), had to say.

What was your company’s greatest achievement in 2011?

Katz: XConnect continues to grow its customer base for our core national and international registry-based federation services, with increasing acceptance of the XConnect model within the industry. 2011 has seen the start of the video revolution, in which video starts to become easier to use and deploy and will form an integral, natural, expected part of future communications. During 2011, XConnect launched the Video Interconnect Exchange (VIE), a federation service aimed at enabling efficient, cost-effective inter-provider video telephony to support our customers as they develop video services.

What are your business’s goals for 2012?

Katz: XConnect expects to continue our rapid growth in our core federation products, and expects to open a number of new national federation services within targeted markets. We also anticipate significant growth in the inter-service provider video telephony space, and XConnect will be building on phase 1 of our Video Interconnect Exchange with the support for more complex interworking scenarios enabling service providers to access a wider video community. We also forecast growth and demand in the unified communications space, with a move toward the requirement for cross-platform, cross-vendor UC to enable true UC interworking and collaboration between enterprises. XConnect ENUM registry and multimedia interconnect hub services are ideally positioned to help resolve the challenges of cross-vendor and cross-platform interworking and interoperability of enterprise UC systems.

How would you describe your outlook for business and the economy at large heading into 2012?

Katz: VoIP, while already a mature technology in some markets and operators, is still growing as more traditional operators accelerate their migration from TDM networks and emerging markets deploy VoIP technology to meet their customer demand. This can be particularly seen within the mobile environment, with the move to LTE (News - Alert) now allowing richer VoIP services (such as video and HD voice) to be supported, in addition to the obvious bandwidth benefits. At the same time, the growth of available bandwidth (whether fixed or mobile) will further accelerate the growth of the over-the-top providers, such as Skype, Google (News - Alert) and Apple, that can seriously challenge the traditional telco and mobile players. While the general economy may suppress this growth to some extent (maybe most affected would the enterprise sector, which may be reluctant to upgrade or replace its traditional services), much of the service provider development is justified on either a cost-saving basis (next-generation networks are cheaper to operate than the old TDM networks), or is key to retaining existing revenues. We believe we are ideally positioned to benefit from this mass migration, and expect growth from both new operators and new services such as video.

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