Global VoIP Keeps Chugging...

Worldwide VoIP service revenue jumped 66 percent to $15.8 billion in 2006 after more than doubling in 2005, and is expected to more than triple by 2010, says Infonetics Research. Worldwide revenue from residential hosted VoIP services jumped 68 percent between 2005 and 2006 while managed IP PBX service revenue grew 45 percent.

Hosted VoIP services continue to outpace managed IP PBX services by far, with residential services fueling the market, but the business segment is also growing, and will continue to, Infonetics says.

“Asia Pacific has been leading the VoIP services scene for a couple of years, with Japan’s SoftBank pioneering the service and taking a strong lead, but the EMEA and North America regions have gained some ground at the expense of Asia in the last two years. The Latin American-Caribbean region is also posting impressive growth and gaining share,” said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics Research and lead author of the report.

The number of worldwide residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers nearly doubled between 2005 and 2006, to 46.5 million, 46 percent of which are in the Asia Pacific region.

About 71 percent of worldwide VoIP service revenue came from residential/SOHO customers in 2006, 29 percent from business customers.

SoftBank is the world's largest VoIP service provider with 18 percent subscriber market share, followed in order by NTT, Vonage, France Télécom, and Time Warner Cable, Infonetics says.

Managed Security Shift: IPSec to SSL

border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5085539964711321346" /> The managed security service market is forecast to more than double between 2006 and
2010, when it will reach $12.1 billion, says Jeff Wilson, Infonetics Research principal analyst. But the composition of sales is changing, with more security being embedded directly into the MPLS infrastructure, says Wilson.
The managed encrypted VPN service market inched up four percent between 2005 and 2006 to $20.5 billion, but is expected to decline in coming years, says Wilson. In 2006, 49 percent of security service revenue comes from managed firewall services, 27 percent from content security and 24 pecent from other security services.

By 2010, SSL VPNs will outpace IPSec VPNs.

“Security and performance are the top driving factors when respondents are trying to decide between IPSec and SSL for VPN use, and user experience is at the bottom of the list. Many IT managers think strong security and a good user experience are mutually exclusive. It’s up to vendors to show this isn’t really the case any more,” says Wilson, principal analyst for VPNs and security at Infonetics Research.

In the managed services space; 35 percent of respondents overall (46 percent of federal government respondents) think it's critical that their provider offer SSL VPN services, says Wilson.

“MPLS services are really starting to steal business away from encrypted VPNs. This is having a significant impact on spending for managed IPSec site-to-site VPNs, especially among large organizations, who are starting to migrate from complex self-managed IPSec VPNs to simpler carrier-managed MPLS services,” Wilson says.