Enterprise Communications Featured Article

The hosted PBX (News - Alert) and unified communications (UC) services markets are seeing positive changes and improved revenues in every major geographic region. Experts at Infonetics Research, an international market research and consulting firm, predict that the market will reach $12 billion in 2018, with 62.6 million seats in service.  

Infonetics (News - Alert) expects this growth to continue over the next 5 years. Infonetics study is made available via “Business Cloud VoIP and UC Services" market size and forecasts report.

"While sales of premises-based PBX systems have been stagnant to declining over the past few years, the market for cloud services continues to expand with businesses worldwide seeking out hosted alternatives," Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research (News - Alert) said in a statement.

"Hosted services seats grew more than 20 percent worldwide in 2013," Myers added.

The report says revenue for the hosted PBX and UC markets is on track to grow 13 percent this year. It might be even bigger if there weren’t challenges for business considering hosted solutions, such as the wide variety of options available and inconsistent billing structures across the industry.

Hosted VoIP services are seeing broad adoption among all sizes of businesses, Infonetics says. Interest among large enterprises in particular is escalating.

The report further says that the competitive landscape for business services is highly fragmented, with an increasing number of PBX and unified communications vendors, enterprise agents, system integrators and resellers expanding into the market, along with traditional service providers. The biggest challenge for businesses, according to Infonetics, is evaluating the right hosted solutions as there are wide varieties of options available and inconsistent billing structures across the industry.

Vendors are pitching hosted PBX and UC services alongside SIP trunking as more multi-site businesses need hybrid solutions, noted the researcher.

Infonetics’ Annual Business Cloud VoIP and UC Services report provides worldwide and regional market size, forecasts through 2018, analysis, and trends for hosted PBX and unified communications telephony and applications revenue, seats, and ARPU. The report includes a Hosted PBX/UC Tracker highlighting deployments by region, service provider, and vendor platform.

It also highlights key contributors to this market which include 8X8, AT&T, Avaya, BT, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Cox, IntelePeer, Korea Telecom (News - Alert), Masergy, Mitel, Orange, RingCentral, Samsung Networks, ShoreTel, Sprint, Star2Star, TDS, Telecom Argentina, Telenor, Telstra, Telus, Verizon, Vodafone, Vonage, Windstream (News - Alert), XO, and many others.