Infonetics Research (News - Alert) recently issued a report — Service Provider VoIP and IMS Equipment and Subscribers — that shows that, in 2Q08, some softness materialized in an otherwise healthy service provider VoIP equipment market. The overall worldwide market is down four percent according to the report, led by double-digit percentage declines in the session border controller (SBC) and softswitch segments.
Still, Infonetics maintains that the carrier VoIP equipment market is expected to bounce back in the second half of 2008 ending the year on a positive note.
According to Stephane Teral (News - Alert), principal analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics, “The five-year outlook looks good as well, as demand for VoIP networking gear continues unabated, driven by a long term migration from circuit switched to packet telephony.”
I asked Pat Lennon, vice president of marketing at Tadiran (News - Alert) Telecom his thoughts about the recent report.
According to Lennon, “The majority of Tadiran Telecom products are sold into customer premise applications, although we are starting to see more cross-over into the service provider side. Customers are demanding the same ease-of-use and feature-richness of what customer premise has taught them over the years. I suspect that the adoption of plain vanilla hosted solutions might be suffering for it.”
Also it appears that Tadiran is bucking any negative trend at this time.
Said Lennon, “The trend toward VoIP has not slowed for Tadiran. As a percentage of sales, our VoIP endpoints and VoIP mobility applications are growing steadily.”
Tadiran last year announced that they had won several deals ahead of the Olympic Games, which recently concluded in Beijing, China. The deals called for Tadiran to provide the communications systems for the transportation for the Beijing Olympics including the Beijing Subway Lines 4 and 5, the Airport Express subway line, and the Beijing Airport Command Center. Tadiran won the contracts against competition from several other providers such as Siemens, Alcatel, Feihong, Cisco (News - Alert) Systems, Ericsson and Harris. The deals were carried out via KTT, Tadiran’s subsidiary in China.
Lennon spoke of the company’s experience of having deployed products as part of the telecom infrastructure for the Olympics.
“We are proud to have been chosen for such key installations as the new subway lines and the command center in the new airport in Beijing,” he stated. “Our sales continue to be strong in mission critical and hardened applications. Our product’s reputation for reliability is key in these high profile applications.”
Greg Galitzine is editorial director for TMC’s (News - Alert) IP Communications suite of products, including TMCnet.com. To read more of Greg’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Greg Galitzine