Wainhouse (News - Alert) Research predicts that the unified communications or “UC” industry will grow to $30 billion worth of annual revenue by 2013. That includes all revenue from sales of products and services ranging from business phone systems to conferencing to messsaging servers and software.

 

While the market will actually experience negative compound annual growth on the product side, it will see robust positive growth in the services sector.

 

Wainhouse anticipates that UC services revenues will eclipse those of traditional conferencing services by 2013 or 2014. In principle, it is hard to disagree. Since UC services might be taken to include hosted VoIP services, all manner of Web-assisted conferencing and video conferencing and hosted messaging, and since 'Web-enabled' conferencing services are beginning to displace 'traditional' audio conferencing, it simply makes sense that UC revenues will be bigger than today's audio conferencing business.  

 

 

Whether all that is good news or not depends on one's perspective, and the definitions one wishes to use.

 

Wainhouse has forecast the entire 'collaboration and conferencing' business will hit about $7 billion in annual revenue in 2013, up from about $6 billion in 2009.

 

A perhaps reasonable forecast for 2013 hosted voice revenue might suggest a market somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion, while hosted messaging might represent something similar. Are those encouraging or discouraging numbers?

 

Put another way, if someone told you that the hosted IP telephony services business would one day be as big as the legacy 'Centrex' business, would you be happy? Perhaps there are about 10 million traditional Centrex lines still in service in the U.S. market, down from a decade ago.

 

Is that an interesting enough market for an entire industry to have chased? Veterans will say 'no.'

 

We might some day be saying the same thing about unified communications, which might turn out to be useful attributes of modern communications, but altogether representing a market far smaller than anybody had predicted.

 

Still, if one is a leader in any of the specialized UC niches, $7 billion worth of annual revenue could be juicy, indeed.

 

'In the premises-based UC solutions market, we expect to see declining revenues for PBXs, audio bridges, and unified messaging solutions,' says Brent Kelly (News - Alert), Wainhouse Research senior analyst.

 

Revenues will grow for presence and instant messaging servers, Web conferencing servers, team workspaces, video endpoints and infrastructure,' says Kelly. 'We expect managed and hosted UC services to grow tremendously,' he says.

 

For premises-based providers, the telephony market will rebound but the growth is constricted by a reduction in prices per user, and lingering uncertainty in the global economy. Team workspaces and on-premises Web conferencing servers are expected to see double digit growth.

 

Video providers are predicted to see a 17 percent growth over the forecast period.