What's next for VoIP vendors?

With BroadSoft's holiday acquisition of rival voice-over-IP platform vendor Sylantro, the battle to provide relatively vanilla VoIP platforms to service providers looks to be done.

BroadSoft swallowed up one of the last independent providers in Sylantro, and it netted a few additional VoIP customers when it acquired the voice platform business of Genband last August. Fellow VoIP pioneer Netcentrex today operates from within Comverse, a company certainly not known for telephony platforms. As BroadSoft expands its horizons, look for it to compete with new rivals with broader reach, such as MetaSwitch and Sonus Networks, analysts said. Could the next step be to roll up specialty IP vendors into even bigger players, such as traditional network equipment-makers or relative telecom newcomers such as Oracle?

For now, “the main thing [the Sylantro acquisition] really demonstrates is that BroadSoft has managed to survive this cycle of major competitors,” said Jon Arnold, analyst with J. Arnold & Associates. “We saw it with Acme Packet in session border controllers, and we're seeing it in media servers, media gateways,” he added, and other areas of the next-generation network market.

The bigger picture is the “ongoing transition to software-based telecom,” said Elisabeth Rainge, analyst with IDC, noting that the BroadSoft/Sylantro combo “closes a key chapter” in that evolution. Now we'll see where the story goes next.