CORE NEWS FACTS

• In March 2008, Aberdeen Group surveyed 159 organizations to identify best practices for managing Voice-over-IP performance.
• Three key performance criteria were used to distinguish best-in-class companies: 1) average improvement in VoIP service quality; 2) average improvement in VoIP service availability; 3) improvements in ability to troubleshoot issues with VoIP performance in a timely manner.
• Best-in-class organizations reported 93% improvement in VoIP service quality; 95 percent average improvement in VoIP service availability; all improved their ability to troubleshoot VoIP performance issues expeditiously.

"Benchmarking VoIP Performance Management," a new benchmark report by Aberdeen Group found that as compared to Laggards, Best-in-Class organizations are nearly four times more likely to reduce call failure rate. Aberdeen's research also revealed that on average, 48% of end-points have been IP enabled with 39% of organizations reporting that 75% or more of their end-points have been IP enabled.

Organizations have already spent an average of $1.6 million for VoIP deployments, and in order to get optimal return on these investments they need to ensure that they have the right tools in place for managing VoIP performance. Best-in-Class organizations are nearly twice as likely as all other organizations to have the ability to asses the impact of other business applications on VoIP performance. The report also shows that Best-in-Class organizations are twice as likely as Laggards to deploy tools for troubleshooting call failures. This contributed to Best-in-Class organizations being five times more likely to reduce the number of end-user complaints due to issues with VoIP performance as compared to Laggards.

College graduates beginning their careers this spring will find the job market offering a range of unique and highly-rewarding employment opportunities, according to industry research firm IBISWorld. IBISWorld released its top 10 industry picks offering the fastest growing number of jobs and growth in wages. But to find these jobs, graduates will need to do their research.

"Rather than targeting the traditionally popular or "sexy" industries, jobseekers should investigate the industries forecast for strong employment growth, and get ahead of the pack by targeting companies in those sectors now," said George Van Horn, a senior analyst with IBISWorld. "Research really is the key. Last year's top performing industries could be next year's slow movers, so knowledge is certainly power in today's fiercely competitive and ever changing job market. We believe there are 10 stand-out industries that every graduate should investigate this year with VoIP on top of the list."

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Global - Analysis - The Future of Voice (Fixed, Mobile, VoIP) to their offering.

Despite retaining their role as cash cows for incumbent operators, fixed and mobile voice services are progressively being overtaken by broadband. Increasingly, operators will need to take a holistic view of the market, necessitating a total review of this 100-year-old product. For various reasons, fixed-line operators have not introduced significant new products, services or cost-saving technologies in the same way that mobile operators have. There is certainly room for new premium voice services, based on more intuitive navigation, CD sound quality and interactivity between handset and TV. Fixed-line voice will probably be with us forever, but will become a subset of broadband, instead of the other way around. Broadband will combine voice and data, providing the opportunity to open up a number of triple play markets. High mobile charges are also an interesting target for VoIP over wireless broadband. This report includes BuddeComm’s analysis of the future of voice, with a focus on fixed, mobile and VoIP.

Although VoIP may be on its way to widespread adoption, research indicates that many US businesses haven’t yet taken steps to increase security for VoIP systems, reports In-Stat. As businesses extend their IP telephony deployments to locations beyond the LAN, securing the VoIP infrastructure will become increasingly important, the high-tech market research firm says.

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• Over 80% of survey respondents have deployed some type of VoIP solution in their companies.
• Between 2007 and 2010, 168 million IP PBX lines will be shipped into the business premises.
• Usage of collaboration and conferencing products that leverage VoIP is increasing.

IBISWorld released its list of industries with strong growth forecasts expected for 2008. VoIP is first of the top 10 industries which IBISWorld predicts to do well in 2008 and is forecasted to grow by 24.3 percent this year. Those in corn farming, foam product manufacturing, web search portal, and biotechnology fields, won’t be far behind.

VoIP Leads The Way

Subscriber growth will drive revenue in the VoIP sector, with numbers expected to rise by 21.2 percent this year to 16.6 million, while the number of establishments will jump by a significant 44.5 percent to 2,190 nationwide.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of "USA - VoIP Market - Analysis, Statistics & Forecasts” to their offering.

Until 2004 Vonage was the main provider of residential VoIP. In 2005 the lead was secured by the powerful cable TV companies and thus VoIP entered the mainstream telephony market. In 2006 the world’s largest VoIP provider, Skype, with over 100 million subscribers, was acquired by eBay and began to make stronger inroads into the US VoIP market. The 12 months to June 2006 also witnessed the entry of Microsoft and Apple and internet giants Google, Yahoo and AOL into the VoIP market. Thus VoIP is quickly becoming one of the most competitive sectors in the telcos market. Threatened with major revenue and customer losses, the wireline telcos are picking up the pace of their fibre network investments. Moreover, mega-mergers amongst the telcos, such as between AT&T and SBC in 2005, followed in March 2006 by AT&T’s proposed acquisition of BellSouth, threatens the long-term future of VoIP competition, bringing issues such as net neutrality and the need for open networks into sharper focus. In the long term, niche VoIP players such as Vonage may not survive unless they diversify into new services in the developing internet economy.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 2008 Latin America - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Central America to their offering.

The Central American countries are Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, all of which are small countries with generally low GDP per capita but with considerable scope for development in all telecom sectors. This annual report offers a wealth of information on the trends and developments in fixed-line telephony, mobile telephony, Internet, broadband, digital TV, and converging media including VoIP and IPTV developments. Subjects include:

InfoCom estimates 73% of these residential broadband connections will also support a VoIP subscription meaning 87.8 million VoIP subscriptions, i.e. a household penetration of 50%.

The number of residential broadband connections will reach 121 million in Western Europe, i.e. a growth of 88% over June 2007, and will thus mean a household penetration of 68%. InfoCom estimate 73% of these residential broadband connections will also support a VoIP subscription meaning 87.8 million VoIP subscriptions, i.e. a household penetration of 50%. 87.8 million VoIP subscriptions represent 240% growth over the 25.8 million VoIP subscriptions estimated for June 2007. The results derive from infoCom latest VoIP study on 16 Western European countries.

As VoIP becomes a standard communications system for the global enterprise, industry experts are actually seeing extensive delays around proof-of-concept deployments converting to production. To help determine the causes of this hesitation, NetIQ, an Attachmate business, conducted a survey to measure customers’ adoption of VoIP, attitudes toward initial deployment and sentiments around ongoing management of enterprise VoIP implementations.

Comprising feedback from over 240 VoIP practitioners predominantly located in North America, the representative sample demonstrates a strong focus on the value of assessment and planning prior to deployment. The results, however, indicate that a high number of VoIP implementations exclude monitoring and management tools designed to monitor Quality of Service – the very tools required to meet the sample’s desired system performance objectives.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of “Success Factors for Hosted and Managed VoIP in Europe” to their offering.

"VoIP has become mainstream and customers of all kinds are deploying hosted and managed VoIP services to make their voice networks more flexible and solve their business communications problems. Unified communications are not a priority for many of them.” - Margaret Hopkins

VoIP is now accepted by businesses as the way forward for voice infrastructure; whenever a new system is required, both in-house and hosted VoIP solutions will be considered. While a number of providers, notably BT, have been offering outsourced VoIP services for some time, the market is still getting established and there are a wide variety of providers and an even wider variety of types of offering. Customers range from large multinationals to the smallest start-up. Marketing strategies vary from those that boast the exciting new features of unified communications to those that emphasise a simple message about flexible phone systems.

The Brazilian total telecommunications services market has been growing considerably, with broadband, VoIP, and mobile telephony markets pushing revenues growth. Moreover, the convergence of voice, data, and video is presenting several opportunities for growth and it is expected to drive the telecommunications market, as triple play offers penetrate in lower end users.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan Brazilian Total Telecommunications Services Market, finds that the market earned revenues of $58,266.6 million in 2006 and estimates this to reach $74,280.4 million in 2012. However, mobile telephony services are set to take over telecommunications sector service, as it exceeds fixed telephony in terms

US National Telecom has experienced rapid growth in 2007. And there is no sign that this rapid growth will slow down anytime soon. Various market studies indicate that only 25% of small business customers have converted to using telephone-over-Internet services, which indicates that the largest boom in VoIP telephone services is still to come.

A recent study by Infonetics Research, found that businesses of all sizes are evaluating or planning to deploy VoIP solutions. Yet only 36 percent of large companies, 23 percent of midsize companies and 14 percent of small companies are currently using VoIP technology, according to the companies surveyed in the Infonetics study.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Softswitch RFP to their offering.

Voice over Internet Protocol products in various forms has been available for about a decade. To date, VoIP enjoys a market share of less than 10% of the US residential voice market. For a number of reasons, VoIP growth is about to begin a dramatic, "hockey stick" growth curve. At the forefront of this development is the softswitch. Firstly, legacy time division multiplexing switches such as the Lucent 5ESS or the Nortel DMS series are no longer being sold in any quantity in the US market. The last "fleet" sale of such switches was to the "old" AT&T in 1998. The giants of the telecommunications switch industry (Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent, for example) have long since moved on to promoting their VoIP-oriented softswitches. Secondly, incumbent telcos large and small seek "investment protection" for the billions of dollars of TDM switches in their inventories through various technology band aids. However, the harsh reality is that the majority of US-based TDM switches will have to be replaced in the next 5 years if their service providers are to remain competitive as the telecom world moves to Internet Protocol-based technologies. Finally, the emergence of new IP-base service providers drives demand for all-IP networks utilizing softswitch for voice services.

Worldwide sales of service provider next gen voice equipment are up 5% in 3Q07 from 2Q07 to $956.4 million, says Infonetics Research in its "Service Provider VoIP and IMS Equipment and Subscribers" report.

Year-over-year, the next gen voice market is up 15%, the report shows.

Other report highlights:

• The service provider next gen voice equipment market is forecast to more than double between 2006 and 2010, when it will reach $6.9 billion worldwide
• The number of worldwide residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers will grow to nearly 172 million in 2010, led by the Asia Pacific region
• Worldwide media gateway manufacturer revenue is down 4% in 3Q07 over 2Q07
• Nortel takes back the lead in worldwide softswitch revenue market share, pushing Nokia Siemens to 2nd; Huawei remains in 3rd
• It's a tight race for the lead in the trunk media gateway market, with Sonus edging back into the lead, followed closely by Nortel and Cisco