VoIP Equipment Market Poised To Soar

The VoIP-equipment market encountered a brief hiccup in the first quarter of this year, with product revenue dipping 13 percent, to $294 million, as the market moved into a trial mode, a new study of the Internet-phone market reported.

Infonetics Research said the VoIP market is moving from trial mode to commercial deployment, and it expects product deliveries to soar to $446 million by the first quarter of 2005.

"The market stumbled this quarter, as we expected, because it came off such great heights from the previous quarter due mostly to a surge of year-end budget clearing," said Infonetics' directing analyst, Kevin Mitchell, in a statement. "But the trend is still moving towards IP, the market is still above 3Q03 levels, and we still project massive investments in Next-Gen voice equipment between 2004 and 2007."

Another Infonetics analyst, Matthias Machowinski, noted that there has been a surge in server subscriber license VoIP shipments--an indication that the technology is rapidly gaining acceptance in the marketplace.

In a report on IP PBXes, Machowinski predicted that that market will, likewise, boom, and he expects it to top $900 million by 2007. The Infonetics survey reported that Cisco Systems is the worldwide IP PBX market leader.