ZTE Corporation announced that it has been ranked as the Number 2 IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) vendor by market share.

According to a report by industry analyst firm iLocus, ZTE had strong capabilities in wireless and terminals, and has also shown leadership with wireline IMS during 2009 and in the first half of 2010. The company’s market share of wireline IMS during the first half of 2010 reached 22.3%, helping it secure second place.

The report, "Global IMS Market 2010", found the global IMS market showed a strong increase with a total of 207.9 million IMS subscriber lines sold across both wireline and wireless networks by the end of the first half of 2010. Of this total, wireline IMS line shipments had grown from 8 million in 2005 to 29.6 million in 2009. During the first half of 2010, an estimated 18.8 million IMS subscriber lines were shipped for deployment in wireline networks worldwide.

The report also ranked ZTE second in terms of overall performance. The following factors were used as the main criteria by iLocus when it ranked the vendors:

ccording to the report, the main driver that will bring IMS to the wireless market is LTE. It is now universally accepted that IMS-based solution is the key solution for VoLTE (Voice over LTE) service deployment, in which ZTE is leading in terms of R&D.

Another major factor for ZTE’s ranking is that it is currently the only vendor with a commercial version of mAGCF (Mobile Access Gateway Control Function) product ready for deployment in the market. mAGCF, the mobile version of fixed AGCF, is important from an operator’s perspective due to the heavy investment which has gone into mobile Softswitch technology.

"Fixed AGCF is mature now while mobile AGCF is yet to mature. Only ZTE has released a commercial mAGCF product," said Mr. Jahangir Raina, the Principal Analyst and President of iLocus.

"Customer success is our success. ZTE is always providing innovative IMS solutions and services for our global customers and wants to help them achieve many milestones. These include successfully establishing the world’s first ICS call, the commercial launch of the industry’s first IMS-based HD video conferencing system, and helping a European operator implement a large-scale traditional fixed-network transformation," said Mr. Wang Xiaoqiang, Vice President of ZTE's Core Network Products.