Business VoIP Featured Article

Unified Communications Market Doing Well Despite Recession

January 15, 2010

By Anuradha Shukla, Business VoIP Contributor

The current recession has pushed a number of companies to cut costs and, as a result, growth in various sectors has suffered. The unified communications or “UC” market is however, still holding up remarkably well despite an unstable economy, according to the latest research from Infonetics.

 
Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics Research's directing analyst for enterprise voice and data, said that the growth in the unified communications market should not be surprising because these tools are designed to allow users to communicate and collaborate more effectively.
 
“But the provider landscape is far from being set in stone; organizations are going beyond their traditional communication suppliers and considering offerings from the likes of Skype and Google, making this an interesting market to follow in coming years,' Machowinski said.
 
New research from Infonetics shows that shipments of communicator clients grew almost 1,000 percent between the first half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. These shipments hit an impressive 5.4 million mainly due to aggressive bundling of communicator clients with core telephony system sales.
 
Infonetics also expects the IP contact center and unified communication markets to return to strong double-digit annual growth once the world's economies are back on track.
 
While research has identified cost, complexity, and network capabilities as the main barriers to deploying unified communication, consumer preferences are changing and the focus on UC is becoming stronger as the possibility to integrate cell phones, IM, video, and conferencing become possible.
 
 

Anuradha Shukla is a contributing editor for virtual-pbx. To read more of Anuradha’s article, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi

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