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What a difference a quarter makes… Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM) in January blew through fourth quarter earnings estimates, saw its stock bump better than 9 percent and rode the excitement that surrounded its RealPresence product line to record results.

Not so in the first quarter of 2012. The company has come back to Earth with a thud, posting net income of $15 million or 8 cents per share, down from $34 million, or 19 cents per share, last year, a 56 percent drop and its first decline since 2010.

And, said CEO Andy Miller, the company isn’t too optimistic about the second quarter. Polycom said it expects to earn between 20 and 22 cents per share on revenue of $367 million to $377 million. Wall Street was looking for a forecast of 25 cents per share and $387.3 million in revenue.

Miller said Polycom’s first quarter woes stemmed from slower than expected sales in Asia and North America; APAC sales were up 7.3 percent, sales in the America’s edges up 1.7 percent and EMEA revenues rose 16 percent.

“We saw government spending in several key geographies including China, Australia, India and in U.S. federal civilian come in lower than expected. This was combined with an already slow growth rate in North America,” Miller said, adding that he believed the industry is “in the midst of the company and industry transition from point products to solution selling. This mindset shift affects both our customers and our sales force.”

Customers, he said, considered more UC centric strategies versus point product or endpoint-only deployments.

“We believe this transition has many positive benefits for our company over the longer term that clearly created softness in Q1,” he said.

As to the over-exuberant sales projections for the first quarter, Miller said Polycom was “too optimistic.”

“Hindsight is 20-20 and we got ahead of ourselves, and our Q4 to Q1 had a larger sequential decline that we had planned for,” he said. “We overestimated the positive effect of Q4 year-end deal closure rates and we underestimated the work required to effectively ramp the North America sales team.”

Polycom cut its first quarter revenue outlook April 5, prompting shares to decline to $13.46 April 11. The stock closed at $12.89 Friday.

For more:
– see this release
– see this Seeking Alpha earnings call transcript

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Swedish telecom service provide TeliaSonera is taking a step that other European operators–as well as some of their U.S. counterparts–have been loathe to because of concerns about net neutrality interpretations. The company, today said it would start charging for VoIP calls, including those made across the Skype platform, in an effort to “start exploring new business models.”

Not only will it charge for the services, TeliaSonera said that it plans to charge more for VoIP than it does for other data.

The telco said it will bump prices in Sweden and in its Spanish market, too, in an effort to recoup revenues lost as the free services increasingly encroach on voice and SMS revenues.

“We have been in the forefront stating that while prices for voice will continue to come down there must be a stronger correlation between usage and pricing of data,” the company wrote in its interim report. “We have been early in introducing tiered pricing of data, lower costs for data roaming and recently openly communicated that we will start to charge for mobile VoIP.”

VoIP and Skype have sometimes faced a tough go in Europe as some operators have looked for ways to make it less appealing to consumers.

In March, A Europen telecom regulator accused telecom companies of routinely using traffic management rules to interfere with VoIP traffic as well as peer-2-peer file sharing.

Data from some 400 European operators–250 fixed and 150 mobile–shows blocking of VoIP calls, especially on mobile networks, is common, according to a study from the Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC).

For more:
– see this article

Related articles:
Skype tops 40M concurrent users for new record
$12M ad campaign planned to raise awareness of Skype’s other features
Study: European operators regularly block VoIP traffic

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U.K.-based VoIP service provider Telappliant rolled out a new hosted VoIP service aimed at small and medium sized businesses.

The new entry-level VoIPOffice Hosted Lite is targeted at businesses with up to 20 employees, includes up to five extensions, which can be expanded to 20, and can handle up to five concurrent calls.

The service also includes call queuing, an assignable ring group, voicemail delivered to an email inbox and an Interactive Virtual Receptionist (IVR).

Telappliant said the service, which can be enabled within 24 hours, gives small businesses the ability to scale up operations as and when their business grows.

VoIPOffice Hosted Lite, which is currently available only in the United Kingdom, costs $40 per month.

For more:
– see this release

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Telesphere launches new cloud-based collaboration solution
U.K. agency rings 1 million daily VoIP calls

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SIP trunking adoption is continuing to push the Enterprise Session Border Controller (eSBC) market, according to new research, appealing to the demand from enterprises for security, interoperability and network border traversal.

Infonetics Research said SIP trunks grew 88 percent in 2011 over the previous year and added that the increase is fueling eSBC sales so much that it now forecasts will reach $527 million globally in 2016.

“The market for enterprise session border controllers jumped 60 percent in 2011 and will grow significantly over the coming years as the adoption of SIP trunking continues to expand,” said Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics. “The enterprise SBC market is a sweet spot in the enterprise market because they fill a growing need for security, interoperability and network border traversal.”

The largest eSBC market remains in North America, Infonetics said, though its majority share is likely to shrink as other regions increase SIP trunking adoption, Myers said. Acme Packet (Nasdaq: APKT) and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) were the top two vendors in the space, chased by competitors Adtran (Nasdaq: ADTN), AudioCodes, Avaya, Dialogic (Nasdaq: DLGC) and Edgewater, among others.

For more:
– see this release

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SIP Forum looks to accelerate interoperability of SIP trunking specs

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Microsoft’s Windows Phone officially has its own non-beta version of Skype, but early reviews say the version is still playing catch up with the versions available for the iPhone and Android devices. A big hindrance? You have to have Skype running in the foreground of the phone to make or receive a call. You can, however, search for contacts and make calls to landlines. Microsoft bought Skype last year for $8.5 billion and is still developing plans for how to use it across its software ecosystem. Article

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