Just before the close of 2008, BroadSoft announced it had acquired Sylantro Systems, its next-strongest competitor offering VoIP and multimedia application. The move makes BroadSoft the undisputed market leader supplying stand-alone VoIP application servers. Financial terms were not disclosed. The Sylantro acquisition follows BroadSoft's acquisition of Genband's M6 platform earlier in 2008.

Check out Network World's slide show of 2008's hottest tech M&A deals

However, BroadSoft’s market dominance of the stand-alone device market doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have competition; it will compete with other companies like Nortel, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Sonus that also offer other infrastructure elements needed in a large-scale hosted VoIP deployment.

We suppose it was inevitable for some consolidation to occur over the years in this market. We recall an industry trade show back in 2000 (when we first started this newsletter) when the Softswitch Forum had about 200 members all devoted to building and promoting the softswitch market. With a more recent count, we might be able to identify fewer than a half-dozen original forum members still involved with softswitch technology or its evolutionary successors.

We note that the need for functionality of the softswitch hasn’t gone away -- and neither has the argument about hosted vs. premises-based features. But BroadSoft’s acquisition of its last formidable competitor suggests that the standalone VoIP appliance market has certainly reached maturity, and that BroadSoft has won the war for the market.

We should also note that Broadsoft will continue to offer technical and sales support for the acquired portfolios but has yet to announce how or if it will integrate or add any features or functionality across products.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.