XConnect revenue and usage surged in 2011

LONDON, UK: XConnect, the leader in federation-based IP voice and video interconnection and ENUM-registry services, saw revenue and multimedia network traffic surge in 2011, with demand for video communications services poised to become the next engine of growth and new mobile opportunities on the road map.

“Our continued investment in groundbreaking technology and solutions is paying off with satisfying uptake in XConnect services for one-stop interconnection across networks and platforms,” XConnect CEO Eli Katz said. “We continue to foresee rapid growth as video, high-definition (HD) voice and other next-generation services gain traction as more powerful devices and applications emerge almost daily.”

Katz said key indicators of the company’s growth in 2011 compared with 2010 included:
* An increase of 61 percent in revenue across all services.
* A spike of 85 percent in traffic across the company’s global network.
* A sharp upswing of 78 percent in the number of calls handled.
* An increase in the volume of queries to its global ENUM-based registry to 3 billion, up 78 percent. The world’s largest number directory of its kind, XConnect’s ENUM registry included 2.2 billion numbers at year’s end.

Growth of XConnect’s base of Tier 1 carriers and operators around the world. For instance, XConnect currently serves nine of the top 20 global operators based on revenue. These customers include many of the largest broadband services providers, cable operators and over-the-top providers.

XConnect’s fifth-place ranking on the annual Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100 list of Britain’s fastest-growing technology companies.

Video, mobile growth drivers
Katz said XConnect began capitalizing on the boom in video communications last year in a trend he expects to pick up in 2012. Growth of business videoconferencing traffic is significantly outpacing overall business IP traffic, at a CAGR of 41 percent from 2010-2015, according to Cisco, which has projected a sixfold increase in videoconferencing traffic during that period.

“XConnect is uniquely qualified to address the key challenge emerging with widening adoption of IP-based video services: interconnecting the diverse video ‘islands,’” Katz noted.

In 2011, XConnect launched the Video Interconnection Exchange (VIE), the world’s first neutral federation for video communications. The company has since established strategic alliances with such video ecosystem players as BCS Global and IPV to expand the video community, making video calling as easy as voice calling.

As the recently announced IPV relationship indicates, Katz said XConnect expects to ramp up video activity this year. He sees the company providing increasingly complex interworking to enable previously incompatible video devices to interoperate across multiple platforms.

Focused on continuing to meet growing demands for sophisticated interconnection services this year, XConnect plans to create more national federations with interexchange services partners, such as the one formed last month with Germany’s DE-CIX, Katz said.

In line with the proliferation of mobile communications, XConnect plans to work closely with mobile network operators to integrate ENUM registry capabilities into the GSMA Rich Communications Suite (RCS-e) to enable operators to deliver instant messaging or chat, live video sharing, and file transfer across any device on any network.

In addition, XConnect expects to benefit from growth of the over-the-top market to provide video and VoIP capabilities for social networks.