VoIP Blog

12 Countries in 12 months but common Themes

Matthew Townend — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:42:08 +0000

This year has been very busy for illume, and has lead us to travelling to 12 countries including interesting places such as Nigeria, Palestine and South Korea. Interestingly whether we have been working in the UK or more far fetched countries we have seen the following common themes:

Mobile Operators transitioning in to broader ICT services

For a few years mobile operators focussed their strategy around fixed mobile substitution, however now its is very rare to find a pure play mobile operator. Mobile operators are looking to drive converged fixed & mobile and broader ICT strategies, normally with a focus on Hosted services.

SIP Trunking attacks incumbents revenue

Every where we go from Africa/Middle East to mainland Europe we see a focus on SIP trunking. Depending on the regulatrory and competitive position the implementation and focus changes. For instance in South Africa fixed poring has only just started to be implemented so the focus had been on outbound termination only.

Role of SBCs in Enterprise and SIP Trunking changing

As I talk to SBC manufacturers and Service providers I hear that large enterprises are often demanding to use SBCs within their enterprise network to provide increase security and interopobility of their networks.

VPN grows in importance as Quality essential on converged networks

As applications converge over IP and many of these become Cloud (hosted) the requirements for QOS over the wan becomes ever more important. This year we have worked with a large number of service provider looking at establising new services in these areas.

Mobile Data growth leads mobile operators to rethink content strategy

This year we did projects in Asia, which demonstrated the phenomenal growth that mobile data and mobile video can drive on the mobile operators network. We saw growth rates of over 800% in Data usage on already developed networks. This growth will drive the requirement for Mobile operators to better understand user behaviour and also explore Content Delivery Network technology and relationships with content owners.

Hosted VOIP/Cloud Services

The market for hosted VoIP and UC services still continues to grow strongly, however we have found a number of providers still under estimate the operational capabilities and requirements needed to launch what are often complex services.

2012 – The Year Ahead

2012 will be an important year for illume, in the next week or so we will announce a merger with one of our partner companies which will give us a lot more global and local capability. Alongside this we will announce a broader research portfolio which will cover a number of the themes above.

Generally although the market conditions are still likely to be tough for us all, there are certainly areas of growth which we all can exploit in the coming year. Speed of innovation and ability to execute however will be key.

I would like to thank everybody who has worked with us, purchased reasearch or just shared their thoughts with us this year. I wish everybody a Happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Matt Townend

MD illume Consulting

Hosted VoIP market reach 747,000 users

Matthew Townend — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:21:04 +0000

Today illume announces the launch of its Hosted VoIP forecast & report 2011-2015. In the report we comment on the current state of the market that reached 747,000 users at end of June this year and reflect on the growth we are likely to see in the coming years and the drivers for that growth.

We also comment on how the service provider and supplier market is changing with the emergence of an integration and managed service player who are helping new market entrants short cut the time to market, with companies such as Hipcom, The Voice Factory, Siphon Networks all firmly positioning themselves in that market position, an example of this being The Voice Factory’s deal with Griffin announced last week.

The report can be purchased from www.illumeconsulting.co.uk or for details drop an email to info@illumeconsulting.co.uk

Griffin enters VoIP market with “The Voice Factory”

Matthew Townend — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:49:43 +0000

Yesterday Griffin announced that it was entering the VoIP market in 2012 with a series of hosted and trunking services. I guess there was two particularly interesting elements to this announcement were; firstly they like many recent entrants have chosen to work with a third party to get to the market quickly, in this case “The Voice Factory” & secondly why they said they were entering the market. What particularly stuck out to me was when Andrew Dickinson Griffin MD said :

“Most importantly, in one of the fastest growing areas of the market – MPLS, many of the tenders we see ask about the availability of cloud services.”

I guess some people may say Griffin were pretty late to the party with most of their competitors offering service, or others could say just in time as the market is taking off! I guess only time will tell.

It will be interesting to see whatwill happen with all the whitelabel providers popping up in the market, with Hipcom, Siphon, Sipcom & now “The Voice factory” amongst others its getting pretty crowded!

Ofcom Comms report soundbites and Surprises

Matthew Townend — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:02:17 +0000

As usual I have been reading the Ofcom communications report which was published in August. This is a great source of data, two points particularly stood out:

- Decline in Fixed Business Voice revenues slowed
- ISDN 30 channels continued to decline strongly

Ourselves like many analysts have predicted strong decline in fixed voice revenues, as they are substituted by mobile and cheaper services like Skype. However in 2010 the decline slowed to only 2% year on year from previous years of 5% & higher.

ISDN 30 channels dropped by 300,000 to 2.7m reflecting the significant impact SIP trunking is having on the traditional ISDN market. This decline is reflected in the SIP trunking market report we recentally published. at www.illumeconsulting.co.uk

IP Trunking market grows to 331,000

Matthew Townend — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:09:45 +0000

In the first 6 months until end of June we have seen continued strong growth in the IP/SIP Trunking market with a figure of 331,00 trunks as of 30th of June, a 43% growth in the first 6 months of the year. Although slightly behind our forecast from the beginning of the year the trend seem to be bucking equivalent trends in PBX market. illume will publish a new forecast in the next week and update its annual report which is available from www.illumeconsulting.co.uk.

Vegastream Assets purchased by Sangoma

Matthew Townend — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:31:41 +0000

Vegastream has long been one of the pioneers in the VoIP Gateway business, on the 22nd of August its assets were purchased out of administration by Sangoma for around £0.9million. Vegastream always had a reputation for good technical solutions but had been hampered by ongoing manufacturing/supply issues that had hampered their development. It appears that Sangoma may have got a bargain interms of the technology but will have to go some way to build the trust of channels again. Interestingly i often get asked by Gateway manufacturers about the UK market as compared to other markets their has been a limited up take of gateways with providers often prefering to nativeley test various PBXs. However with the increase growth in the number of SIP trunking vendors, and price presure on Gateway devices we may see a growth in the market. Also we have seen other Gateway operators like One Access offering an ever broadening set of services to their customers rather than a pure gateway approach. I am sad to see Vegastream being sold, as they have certainly been one of the pioneers of the market in the UK.

Alastair Mills & team back in Market

Matthew Townend — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:48:47 +0000

Alistar Mills (ex Ceo of Spiritel) has returned to the market with the backing of Penta & a £60m fund after a short bit of Gardening leave. The intial purchases of Network Flow, UK Solutions & Protel announced today give the new group both a managed network, advance hosting and communications capability which will set them up well to address the new converged world. illume have had a long relationship with Alistair & the core ex team of Spiritel and were luckily to provide some advice during these purchases and we were particularly impressed by these businesses and teams, and wish the new team the best of luck in the coming year. As in our recent article about Mitels strategy the combination manged network, advanced hostign and comms experience are going to be important ingrediant for success in the new market.

Mitel – Strategy Discussion

Matthew Townend — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:21:44 +0000

Yesterday i had the pleasure of meeting Mitels Graham Bevington who now heads up international markets for Mitel. Graham was giving me an update on their strategy particularly on their hosted capability.
I was really impressed a couple of years ago when Mitel were the first traditional PBX manufacturer to realise that they were going to be in the software business, and they would not be making all their money from selling proprietary hardware in the future.
Graham highlighted that they had been gaining traction for their Multinstance MICD & VMware hosted offerings amongst both carriers and IT & voices solution providers. These solutions enable enterprise to have their own instance of a software based pbx managed either within a VMware environment or within a Mitels MICD environment. These services are particularly attractive to medium and large enterprises who want the ability to integrate applications with their own instances, rather than multi-tenanted environments which will not allow this level of per customer customisation.
Also in a wider discussion about the industry it was interesting to discuss the future of distribution when we move into more of an online world. As was widely reported Mitel pulled out of traditional distribution a few years ago. However in the future they may indeed be engaging with “Network” based distributor’s, these companies like Gamma would provide the hosting and carrier environment which reseller could then host customers virtual instances in. So where traditional distributor’s capabilities were based around logistics and channel management, the logistics in the future will be around hosting and carrier capability. So maybe we will see Niman’s purchase a data centre ?.
We also discussed that basic call control capability was now going to be offered on different server environments, and the real battle was going to be engaged around UC applications. All in all an interesting chat and I think if Mitel can execute they certainly will be well set amongst their peers.

Mobile VoIP/UC due to Explode

Matthew Townend — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:26:37 +0000

illume consulting has been having an amazingly interesting start to 2011 travelling to some of the most interesting markets in the world including; Palestine, Malaysia, Nigeria, Trinidad and most recently South Korea. South Korea maybe an example of what we are likely to see in Uk and other European Markets!. The explosion of mobile data is quite amazing, with growth rates that would make most network planner quake in their boots. One of the interesting dynamics in this market is the recent growth in MVoIP/UC applications, the handset market in South Korea is dominated by Samsung Android devices and we have seen the development of both straight MVoIP applications but also integrated Video/Social Networking & chat applications, the growth of these service has been particularly prominent in the last 6 months. These services include Kakaotalk, Tango & Hithere amongst others. Tango is a video calling applications, Kakaotalk is more of a chat based service & Hithere integration with messaging. With the increasing use of Apple Facetime these OTT video and chat services will be an interesting challenge to the existing mobile operators. VoIP operators who are looking at integration with mobile networks,y may want to look at these applications for a steer towards what capability they could offer in the future. Interestingly in pretty much all the above markets their is a significant move towards hosted VoIP based enterprise funtionality, we look forward to seeing how the Uk VoIP market is developing when we gather our latest figures at the end of June.

Convergence Summit – Microsoft Lync

Matthew Townend — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:00:01 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking and attending the Convergence Summit North in Manchester, it was a good event as usual staged by Miles, Ian & team at MPL. Unfortunately I was only able to stay for the first day, but managed to take in a talk from Malcolm Bullock from Microsoft. Malcolm presented an interesting update on Microsoft Lync, what was particularly interesting was the advances they had made in PBX capability, that they had now built into the product. Indeed the presentation left me with the feeing that Microsoft was starting to take on the PBX community directly, and the previous story of various partnership with the likes of Nortel are not as strategic as was previously the case with OCS. Indeed when asked Michael highlighted that the service now was a 100% viable PBX solution. Indeed when Michael showed us what devices had been tested with Lync compared with OCS there is a marked difference, i guess if I was a PBX vendor I would not rush out to partner with Microsoft. The product appeared to still be targeted at the Mid to large enterprise customer similar to OCS, but apparently the cost has been reduced by a reduction in the amount of equipment required and improvements in the product. It will be interesting if Microsoft start denting the traditional PBX market.