My colleague Rob Arnold recently published Frost & Sullivan’s latest research on the worldwide media gateway market. Clients can download the full report at frost.com. Here are some highlights:
* The gateway market experienced a decline in 2009 due to a number of factors, including the global economic downturn; the maturation of the traditional gateway markets (IP telephony and toll bypass); and the slow take-off of nascent markets such as SIP trunking and advanced IP communications applications. Pent-up demand and new enterprise network configuration designs (via virtualization and centralization) are expected to drive growth in 2010 and beyond.
* Single-purpose, plug-and-play gateways will continue to find an audience. Ease of deployment and management characteristics position single-purpose gateways well for smaller organizations and sites lacking in-house technical staff.
* Multi-purpose appliances are becoming more common as gateway functionality is embedded with other network elements. Multi-purpose gateways' low TCO, due to the inherent deployment, maintenance, management and real-estate efficiencies of a single device, make them appealing to smaller sites and branch offices.
* In 2009, IP telephony and toll bypass accounted for about 80 percent of the total ports shipped, but will decline going forward as demand for gateways used to facilitate SIP trunking and application integration increases.
* Approximately 50 percent of the installed business/enterprise telephony equipment worldwide is still TDM, and interoperability with IP telephony platforms, services and applications is limited. Even as the vast majority of new systems shipped are IP, it will be quite some time before TDM-based CPE voice infrastructure is in the minority. As a result, gateways will continue to play a critical role in networking connectivity.
* In 2011 and beyond, market growth is likely to be driven by mass adoption of IP telephony, branch-office integration, and solid growth rates in the SIP trunking and UC applications markets. Due to market maturity, displacement of TDM equipment, and rapidly improving SIP interoperability among vendors and service providers, annual growth rates for enterprise media gateways are not likely to reach the heights of previous years. Growth rates are likely to peak in 2011 and 2012 and start decelerating towards the end of the forecast period.
* Cisco held a dominant share of the enterprise media gateway market in 2009, with 60 percent of ports shipped and close to 70 percent share of revenues.
* After a slower than anticipated start, VoIP access and SIP trunking services are now gaining traction and are providing TDM and IP telephony customers with significant cost savings by converging access lines and reducing long-distance charges.
