In the April edition of our VoIP roundup, we talk about the news that all snom phones are safe from the Heartbleed bug, VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) forecasted $88 billion revenue and finally give an overview of what happened at this years UC Summit.
Snom handsets not affected by Heartbleed
With the Heartbleed bug creating widespread panic on the internet last month, VoIP phone developers’ snom announced via their blog that their 3xx, 7xx and 8xx series of VoIP phones had not been affected by the OpenSSL security breach.
The Heartbleed bug originated in version 1.0.1 of the OpenSSL open-source project, released on April 19th 2012. A developers mistake led to a security hole opening up in web servers protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. Once compromised an attacker could eavesdrop on communications, steal data and impersonate services and users without leaving a trace.
A patch for the vulnerability was release on the 7th of April 2014, with up to 17 percent (approx half a million) of the secure web servers on the internet vulnerable to the attack websites and hardware manufacturers around the world have been busy applying the fix and securing their systems.
VoIP and UC market to reach $88 billion revenue by 2018
A report by market research firm Infonetics Research has forecast a staggering increase in revenue up to $88 billion for the VoIP and UC services market by 2018, stating “Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream”.
The 2014 VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report stated that globally, the residential and business VoIP market grew 8% in 2013 to $68 billion, with SIP trunking playing a major role growing 50% in the same year, albeit largely driven by North America.
The sale of hosted PBX and Unified Communications services increased by 13% in 2013 over 2012 due to the rising demand for enterprise cloud-based services. Global residential VoIP users reached 212 million in 2013, an 8% increase over the previous year, further reinstating the fact that VoIP has gone way beyond its early days and become a mainstream solution.
UC Summit 2014 took place in California
The annual UC Summit was held on April 27-30 in La Jolla, California. The invitation-only event attracted the worlds’ thought-leading vendors, solution integrators and consultants to talk about the Unified Communications industry current situation and the directions to take to move forward.
Sponsors at this years event included a wide variety of organisations, such as HP, Mitel, NEC and Microsoft. There were clear and insightful presentations by speakers from product line management, product marketing and CTO roles, their presentations displaying their individual plans on fixing the issues in the UC marketplace.
The key subjects of the UC Summit’s presentations were User Experience (UX), Cloud and Hybrid and Vertical Markets, and within all of them there was a focus on the idea that there were to be big changes in the way the UC industry works.
