Plantronics 2007 Annual Report Download - page 8

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4 P l a n t r o n i c s
• Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (“DECT™”) 6.0 is a technology that optimizes
audio quality, lowers interference with other wireless devices, and is digitally encrypted for
maximum call security.
• DSP is a technology that delivers acoustic protection and optimal sound quality through
noise reduction, echo cancellation, and other algorithms to improve both transmit and receive
quality.
Markets
Our ACG products are designed to meet the needs of specific markets and applications such as office
(ranging from enterprise to home office), contact centers, mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs,
computer and gaming, residential and other specialty applications. These markets and applications are
increasingly overlapping as workstyles and lifestyles change, and people use devices for multiple
applications such as communication, music, and video entertainment. Plantronics serves these markets
through our following product groups:
Office and Contact Center
The office market comprises our largest revenue stream with a broad range of communications headsets,
including high-end, ergonomically designed headsets, amplifiers, and telephone systems. Growth in this
market comes from two main factors:
• the advent of wireless solutions and the freedom they allow; and
• a growing awareness of the benefits of headsets.
We believe the contact center market is our second largest revenue stream and most mature market. We
believe that the long-term outlook for the contact center is one of modest growth. We expect that contact
centers will increasingly adopt VoIP technology to help improve productivity and reduce costs. We
develop headsets specifically tailored to VoIP applications, and, as VoIP adoption increases, we believe
that we will continue to lead in new product performance.
Mobile
Mobile represents our largest unit volume market and provides a significant opportunity for growth,
especially now that we have largely completed the transition from corded to Bluetooth products for mobile
phone applications. Use of headsets is growing worldwide, particularly due to continued Bluetooth
technology adoption and hands-free legislation for cell phones. As headsets become more mainstream,
users are becoming more fashion conscious and style has become as important as functionality and
technology. Our mobile headsets merge technological innovations with style.
Entertainment and Computer Audio
Entertainment and Computer Audio headsets, whether they are used for interactive on-line gaming or
switching between music and phone calls for multi-functional devices, represent an emerging market
opportunity for us.
We believe that a number of fundamental factors are likely to increase our customers’ need for PC-
compatible headsets in the future, including the convergence of telephony and entertainment, internet
multimedia applications such as streaming audio and video, VoIP, gaming, and video conferencing. As
devices providing these user needs converge, our headsets may need to be PC-compatible, cell phone
compatible, MP3 compatible or various combinations of these. We are monitoring our product roadmap
to meet these potential future customer requirements.