Nortel Networks, which has spent much of the year selling
off portions of its business, regained its position at the top of a
resurgent voice over IP market in the second quarter, according to analyst firm
Dell’Oro Group.
According to a Dell’Oro Group report issued Sept. 9, Nortel stood atop a
VOIP market that saw a 7 percent jump in revenue—to $737 million—from the first
quarter, fueled in large part by service providers’ drive to refresh equipment
and license inventories.
Those providers also bought infrastructure designed to meet the short-term
needs of their customers, the analyst firm said.
“Although the weak economy and lack of confidence in business conditions
have severely reduced spending on network modernization projects,
subscriber-facing equipment has seen only a modest negative impact, and
business voice-over-broadband licenses on both softswitches and voice
application servers remain a bright spot,” Dell’Oro Group analyst Greg Collins
said in a statement.
License shipments for softswitches jumped 33 percent in the second quarter,
while business voice or IP Centrex license shipments on voice application
servers grew 85 percent, Collins said.
Nortel, which entered into bankruptcy earlier this year and has been working
to sell off parts of its business—including its CDMA (Code Division Multiple
Access) wireless business and LTE (Long Term Evolution) technologies—at the
same time has been building up its unified communications offerings.
Also gaining ground in the VOIP market were smaller vendors, such as
AudioCodes, MetaSwitch and Veraz. An advantage they had was not being exposed
to large network upgrade projects that may have been hindered by the global
recession.
Some of the larger vendors that were exposed to such projects, including
Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei, lost share, according to Dell’Oro Group.
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