Over the next five years, providers of session border controllers can expect annual growth of about 20 percent a year in terms of revenue, says Greg Collins, Exactventures principal. Sales of devices to enterprises might be growing a bit faster than that, says Collins.
In terms of sessions, service providers are seeing growth of about 35 percent, where enterprises are seeing growth of about 25 percent. Of the total U.S. market of about $485 million in sales, service providers will repreent about 66 percent, Collins says.
SIP trunking is driving much of the growth, especially in the enterprise portion of the market, he says. But service providers also are increasing spending to support growing adoption of IP Multimedia Subsystem in the core of the network.
Higher-density devices also are more important in the service provider segment of the market, in part because that provides service providers better flexibility and scale. Also, though initially SBCs were needed to secure VoIP traffic, video and multimedia support is becoming a more-important issue as well.
In the small business and medium-sized business market, though in the past there has been divided opinion about “requiring” use of SBCs, the trend is towards using SBCs, as more people are concerned about security, and SBCs help businesses protect themselves from hacking, says Collins.