Communications and Technology Industry Research

A recently released study from Exact Ventures shows that the IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert)--IMS--market almost tripled in the year-over-year sense, thanks to one critical venture. But as the study further shows, that wasn't the only development to keep an eye on for 2012...and beyond.

The critical venture that fueled such impressive growth in the IMS market was the recent development of VoLTE--Voice over LTE (News - Alert)--systems throughout North America, with one of the biggest pushes coming from just one company, Alcatel-Lucent. They weren't the only company looking to make a push in this market, with companies like Nokia Siemens and Ericsson (News - Alert) also getting involved. But the IMS core market saw some huge gains as a result, even though it's still a comparatively small market in absolute terms.

The increasing transition to VoLTE capability is also bringing along positive gains for the session border controller markets and the voice application server markets as well. The session border controller market saw gains of 15 percent on a year-to-year basis, while the voice application server market saw a 39 percent gain.

The reports weren't all about gain, either, as they detailed losses in legacy softswitch and media gateway markets as IMS markets started gaining ground and displacing these formerly primary markets. A falloff in voice traffic growth, as well as some price declines overall, made this market softer still.

While these are all still in their comparative infancies as markets, the available information suggests that the lot of them will continue to grow as more and more companies turn to a larger presence in VoLTE and similar measures. Some estimates, like those provided by Greg Collins, founder and principal analyst of Exact Ventures, suggest that the market will take at least a decade to reach its full potential.

Change is the watchword of the day in the sector, and the continuing rollouts in VoLTE, as well as the general expansion of mobile providers' LTE capabilities, suggests that continued growth will likely be a factor in the market for some time to come.