NGN spending pulls back, though hopeful spots remain

Worldwide macroeconomic conditions were blamed by both Cisco and Sonus.

“The environment has changed dramatically in the last two months, with the financial crisis in September and the economic crisis becoming more apparent on a global basis in October,” Cisco CEO John Chambers told analysts in his company’s earnings call.

Yet rather than an all-out IP spending pullback, service provider budget-tightening – at least for now – seems “more patchy than that,” said John Lazar, president and COO of VoIP vendor Metaswitch, in an interview earlier this week.

Acme Packet CEO Ory painted a similar picture, noting new opportunities in wireless, WiMAX and enterprise for his company’s products. While large-scale IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) deployments continue to be slow – a common industry theme for a while now – Acme Packet is seeing more opportunistic deployments, such as tier-one carriers buying access SBCs to create SIP-based IP interconnects directly to enterprise IP networks. “That really intrigues us because that’s a very different architecture mindset than IMS,” Ory said.