More Signs of a Rebound?More Signs of a Rebound?

ShoreTel and Acme Packet report record quarters.

Earnings season is a bit of non-event in the communications industry, what with so many of the companies having been taken private, and so many of the public companies now vast, sprawling companies like Cisco and HP, for whom communications is just one of many lines of business whose results go into the headline numbers and adjectives. Still, a couple of reports today, one from a pure-play VOIP/UC company and one from a session border controller company, make a strong case that the recovery is real, at least for communications.ShoreTel, the pure-play VOIP/UC company in question, reported its highest quarterly revenue in its history during the quarter ending March 31, $37 million. The company is also projecting that it will swing over from a net loss ($4.5 million) in the March quarter, back to profitability--anticipating $35 to $38 million in revenues for this quarter, ending June 30, against $30 million-$31 million in GAAP operating expenses projected.

Another company reporting record results for the latest quarter was Acme Packet, whose revenue of $51.1 million in the March quarter was up an impressive 65% over the year-ago quarter and was up 24% quarter-over-quarter.

Acme also raised its outlook for the year, boosting projected revenues from the $182-186 million range projected in February, to $204-206 million. Acme now expects revenue to grow 45% year over year in 2010, compared with 30% that was projected in February.

Acme Packet sells session border controllers, which are edge devices connecting diverse networks. They've increasingly been selling SBCs to the enterprise to enable SIP trunk connections.ShoreTel and Acme Packet report record quarters.