IP Phone Growth in ‘Huge Spike’

The sale of IP phones went through the roof over the last year, and especially in the second quarter, with shipments growing 53 percent over the last year and 23.8 percent from the first to the second quarter, according to report just released by Synergy Research Group.

The research report, which looked at the worldwide market for enterprise IP telephony equipment, pegged growth for the entire market at 30.4 percent year-to-year and 13.7 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2006.

Worldwide revenue for enterprise IP telephony, which includes LAN telephony, pure IP telephony, the converged market and IP phones, approached $1.2 billion.

“This quarter was a huge spike just in itself,” said SRG co-analyst Ryan Olsen in Reno, Nev.

“Last year we had a pretty good spike later in the year, but this absolutely just jumped out. It’s an extremely great quarter for IP phones both sequentially and year over year.”

To read more about IP telephony market growth, click here.

SRG believes that growth in gross domestic product in the United States contributed to the spike to some extent.

Olsen speculated that enterprise users are beginning to believe it when vendors say that IP telephony provides a competitive advantage to enterprises that embrace it.

“To a certain extent it’s possible that enterprises are starting to realize this as well. We’ll see if this is a trend [in coming quarters],” he said.

Despite the GDP growth in the United States, the Asia-Pacific region grew faster than the United States as well as EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Enterprise IP telephony sales in APAC grew 39 percent in the quarter, while the United States grew at 31 percent and EMEA at 25 percent.

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