SBC market heats up in Q2, attracts new vendors

Competition in what has become a hot session border control (SBC) market grew fiercer in the second quarter of 2011, according to new research, with Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) entering the market and quickly nabbing a 4 percent share.

Overall, said Dell'Oro Group, "carrier IP telephony" market revenues grew 10 percent in the second quarter, compared with the previous quarter, but were flat on a year-to-year basis.

But, said the researcher in its Carrier IP Telephony Report, declines in media gateway and softswitch revenues offset the high growth experienced by the voice application server (VAS) and SBC markets.

VAS revenues in the second quarter were up more than 15 percent. Dell'Oro said the growth was due, in large part, to service providers' increased deployment of hosted business services.

But the SBC market showed the biggest bump, with nearly 40 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. That growth, said Dell'Oro, has attracted new vendors, like Alcatel-Lucent, to the sector.

Genband, which this week won a price reduction for bankrupt telephone equipment maker Nortel's CVAS business (see related story), maintained its revenue share lead in the wireline voice core market, while Ericsson remained No. 1 in wireless voice core.

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