Market intelligence from Infonetics (News - Alert) Research forecasts good stuff for the UC market in the coming years.
According to the research firm’s most recent report, VoIP services revenue will hit $88 billion by 2018. Conversely, in 2013, Infonetics reported that the global market for VoIP services brought in $68 billion in revenue, an 8 percent gain over 2012.
"Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide," Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research (News - Alert), said in a statement. "Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest upmarket as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market.”
VoIP has become pretty conventional as far as communications technology goes, and it has cloud telephony, hosted UC and SIP trunking to thank for that status shift.
A little SIP 101: a SIP trunk is the use of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert) (News - Alert)) to set up communications over the Internet between a customer location and an Internet telephony service provider (ITSP), which transfers the SIP calls to the PSTN. Thanks to SIP trunking, voice and data are no longer separate connections, all calls are considered local and PSTN gateways are no longer necessary.
VoIP enables a range of applications not previously made available, such as the multimedia contact center and integrated Web and audio conferencing. Converged applications such as UC can take advantage of IP and enable companies to not only increase revenue and decrease costs, but enhance productivity and improve customer service.
For business VoIP providers, having the most features means being able to appeal to a more widespread group of individuals and businesses, thus resulting in more revenue and customers.
VoIP and UC services offer many features that SMBs don't routinely obtain with traditional phone service, including simultaneous ring, do not disturb, virtual phone numbers, and more. Focusing on the forecasted trends ensure business VoIP providers will gain success in customer satisfaction.
Edited by Alisen Downey