Daily News 2005/03/11

Edify and NMS making great breakthrough in voice expandability

Santa Clara of California, and Massachusetts FRAMINGHAM, March 7th, / -PR Newswire/ -- World leading provider of voice solutions Edify Corporation, and provider of high-quality service and high-efficient network techniques/solutions NMS Communications (Nasdaq: NMSS) announced today that they had set a new industrial standard for the expandability of the 480 voice gateway used on single server. With this new grade of expandability, the users can apply and maintain voice solutions for big enterprises in a more economic and efficient way in the open-type call center to reduce greatly the total cost and improve the return on the investment in relevant systems.

PBX/KTS system earning 6 billion USD in 2004

According to the report made by Infonetics Research on the market share and forecast of each quarter of the year, IP PBX is selling quite well. The market share of PBX/KTS (Key telephone system) in the fourth quarter of 2004 was 8% more than that in the third quarter, reaching 1.7 billion USD. The sales in 2004 was 16% more than that in 2003.

The report says that the income from the PBX/KTS system in 2004 has reached 6 billion USD, an increase of 11% than that in 2003 (from 5.5 billion USD to 6.1 billion USD). It is anticipated that by the year 2008, the income will increase to 9.1 billion USD, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10%. Moreover, as Infonetics says, there will be as many as 26 million PBX/KTS lines put into use in the world in 2004, an increase of 19% than that in 2003.

In 2004, the IP PBX accounted for 10% of all the PBX lines delivered. Infonetics anticipates that the number will be doubled in 2008. Leaders on the IP PBX market include: Alcatel (Infonetics regards Alcatel as the No.1 provider in terms of both the market share and usage volume of the mixed and pure IP PBX/KTS)，Nortel, Avaya, Cisco and Mitel.

VoIP telephone service---- Vonage will gain one million subscribers by the end of the year

After providing the Internet-based telephone service "CallVantage", AT&T once said that it will absorb as many as one million subscribers, while recently Vonage, another Internet telephone service operator, claimed at the Internet telephone conference that it would also absorb one million Internet telephone service subscribers.

Vonage has a better change than AT&T to be the first Internet telephone service operator who has one million subscribers. This Internet telephone service is also called VoIP service. It costs 20-30 USD a month in North America, that is, 20 USD less than the traditional telephone service.
At present, AT&T's CallVantange has 7,5000 subscribers.