Software: Equipment sales to top $1T through 2018; SDN, NFV sales to hit $5B by 2020

–Telecommunication software equipment remains a hot seller, with a new report from Infonetics Research claiming the market was on track to grow each year through 2018, with 2015 cited as being set for especially strong growth. The research firm noted this growth was on tap despite what it claims to be “massive network upheavals due to the evolution of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technology.”
Infonetics reported that worldwide sales of telecom and “datacom” equipment and software increased 3% in 2013 to $183 billion, with a cumulative $1 trillion expected to be spent by service providers and enterprises between 2014 and 2018. That growth is set to be led by the Asia-Pacific region, with Infonetics forecasting 6% year-over-year growth in that region, compared with an expected 4.5% year-over-year growth for North America.
As for market share leaders in terms of global revenues, Infonetics reported that in the overall market, Cisco Systems remained on top, followed by Huawei, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE. Across the enterprise space, Cisco was also tops, followed “distantly by tightly bunched” Avaya, Brocade, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper.
“Looking at just the service provider equipment space, we’re seeing a shakeup in vendor market share, with Huawei leapfrogging longtime No. 1 Ericsson to take the top spot in 2013,” explained Michael Howard, co-founder of Infonetics and co-author of the report. “While Huawei’s been doing well in a number of regions, China’s economy is a key factor keeping Huawei’s growth so strong.”
–Keeping with the report theme, SNS Research estimates that by 2020, NFV and SDN investments across the radio access network market will account for $5 billion in sales, with investments focused on cloud-RAN deployments. The firm said those deployments were “based around the idea of replacing traditional base station nodes with a centralized baseband processing pool serving a number of distributed radio access nodes.”
Overall, SNS Research said that carriers are looking at increasing their software spend as a way to reduce their total cost of ownership, “targeting integration across a multitude of areas including [RAN, mobile core, OSS/BSS, backhaul and CPE/home environment.”
–Telecom software provider Apigee announced that European-based operator Orange had selected its digital platform to support application programming interfaces for Orange Partners, which is Orange’s “business hub for developers, partners and start-ups programs.”
Apigee said its platform will help provide a “smooth and seamless journey” for Orange’s partners and application developers across the telecom operator’s ecosystem.
“We wanted to highlight and provide access to our portfolio of APIs and enhance our ecosystem’s developer journey through a simple self-service solution, and Apigee is the backbone technology that enables this,” explained Thierry Souche, SVP at Orange Labs Products and Services.
Software is becoming an increasingly important part of telecommunication networks and deployments as both wired and wireless carriers look to add functionality to operations while increasing simplicity and reducing costs. RCR Wireless News is keeping an eye on recent developments through its weekly “Software” wrap up.
Make sure to check out the latest in telecom related software news at RCR Wireless News’ dedicated software page. Also, if you have telecom software news to share, please send it along to: dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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