Moreover, the company has just announced support for HD Voice which in my opinion is fantastic news. You see, VoIP is like the Japanese auto industry. In the beginning people looked at Japanese cars as cheap vehicles but considered their quality to be substandard. In fact the term, "Japanese Junk" was a popular description of these autos.
Over time, the quality of the cars improved to the point where Japanese cars have better quality levels than autos from virtually all other countries.
Similarly, when VoIP first came out, the bandwidth wasn't there to have the best possible quality. Processing power too was lacking. Fast forward a decade or more and VoIP quality is easily on par with the PSTN and now with HD voice and stereo, we will see that the next decade will enjoy fantastic voice quality levels thanks to VoIP and companies like AudioCodes who will supply the infrastructure to other companies to enable them to support HD as well.
Will this news bode well for AudioCodes? My answer is absolutely. It may not add a tremendous amount to earnings overnight though. What I do expect however is slow and steady penetration and as word spreads about improved quality levels, companies will become more familiar with HD voice and start to request it.
In fact in January or so of 2004, the business world started to see VoIP as telephony and circuit switched equipment as legacy. In a few years we could expect HD voice to be telephony and anything else to be legacy.
In addition, I suppose Microsoft and other companies will continue to market improved voice quality. To date, Polycom has been most aggressive in this area by building an HD Voice Global Online Community (GOC) on TMCnet to educate the world about the benefits of this technology. This branding is helping raise awareness and drive increased sales levels and this is good for the entire IP communications ecosystem and for those people who appreciate the better quality of higher fidelity phone calls.
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