Phone Systems Featured Article

Massive advances in communications infrastructure throughout the U.S. are driving growth in the Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC) and VoIP markets respectively. On the VoIP side, solution leaders themselves have effectively increased adoption in both the corporate and consumer sectors, which has in turn driven overall network and cloud-based infrastructure growth.

That infrastructure is driving the pace of advances in both of these markets should come as no surprise, since both UC and VoIP are most commonly implemented as services riding on the strength of the network beneath them. According to a new report from Technavio, the U.S. UC Market for SMBs is expected to realize a healthy 13.82 percent CAGR through 2019, based largely on customer demand for better communications systems.

As part of this phenomenon, VoIP services are gaining attrition as well, driven once again by customer demand for better and more innovative communications solutions. Future Market Insights believes the global market is growing because of major technology advancements, which have lead to infrastructure build outs and a stronger foundation in general for both VoIP and UC solutions. The firm showed that corporate consumers spent more than $43 billion on global VoIP services in 2012, and that number is expected to reach more than $86 billion by 2020, doubling revenues.

“The evolution of satellite, wireless and terrestrial transmission system arenas is also boosting the growth of the commercial sector,” said Faisal Ghaus, vice president of Technavio, in discussing how infrastructure enhancements are driving the evolution of business communication systems. “A cloud-based UC system helps enhance communication among employees, improves productivity and reduces costs.”

Those are just some of the benefits of adoption, and the same can be said for VoIP services and solutions, which are closely tied to UC systems. The steady transition from circuit-switched to packet-switched networks has also obviously benefited the VoIP industry, with service providers pushing 3G and 4G for a whole host of applications and services.

Ultimately, changes in network and service provider infrastructure are driving growth in the VoIP and larger UC solutions markets. And those changes are a direct result of business demand for better and more cost effective communication solutions. Customers are now in a position of power and can dictate what they want in a communications solution, and service providers are proving they can deliver the goods by upgrading and changing network and cloud-based infrastructure to meet those demands.