It may be rough out there in Techlandia but some technologies are still expected to provide growth this year. The latest is IMS.
Infonetics Research says that unlike many other markets during the worldwide economic crisis, the IMS equipment market is expected to triple in 2009 and 2010.
That would continue momentum from last year: Worldwide sales of IMS gear, including home subscriber and CSCF servers, nearly doubled in 2008 over 2007, up 94 percent.
"IMS deployments are growing, led largely by European operators,” said Diane Myers, directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics. “With over 100 service providers worldwide having chosen their IMS vendors, less than half are fully deployed with live traffic. The move to turn-up the remaining deployments, in addition to new deployments, will help fuel the sales for IMS network equipment.
While fixed-line VoIP remains the primary application deployed over IMS now, long-term growth of IMS-based subscribers will be fueled by the availability of integrated, rich media services. These will be an important catalyst that shifts the IMS market from its current fixed-line VoIP-based focus to mobile networks, with the goal of delivering integrated communications with standardized devices.
“Mobile operator migration to IP and adoption of RCS will drive the deployments for IMS during the next four to five years,” said Myers.
While Infonetics said IMS will never completely replace standalone VoIP networks, the IMS equipment market is expected to grow swiftly through 2013, when it will top $2.3 billion.
