There’s some new good news for service providers, courtesy of a well-known research company. Market forecasts from Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) say that IP telephone and unified communications and collaboration (UCC) services are not only good economic solutions, but that the market overall is anticipated to reach nearly $10 billion in the next six years.
Driving the market is the ever-expanding remote workforce, the evolution of VoIP, and cloud adoption and migration. In order to stay relevant, businesses are moving toward IP and other services to make things, well, work better, and to offer better services to the people that work for them.
"The need for communications infrastructure consolidation and IT operation optimization will fuel adoption in larger organizations with a significant number of remote and mobile employees," said Frost & Sullivan UC Program Director Elka Popova, in a statement. "Hosted communication solutions based on multi-instance platforms, in particular, will gain traction in larger distributed organizations due to the greater security and more flexible customization they provide."
While VoIP is one of those technologies that gets a lot of press and market forecasts, it’s easy to say that it’s a technology that has managed to stay relevant. As far as technology goes, VoIP’s age is important to note: a lot of technologies tend to fizzle out over a period of time. VoIP has managed to evolve with the Internet, improving and helping businesses keep their bills down and communication efficient. Not many technologies have done the same. Market forecasts as such that predict good things for a technology that has been around the block a few times is impressive, to say the least.
The growing adoption of VoIP makes it easier for companies to employ more features in their phone systems. The increasing recognition of a need for efficiency with lower costs within an organization is an influence that's helping to drive the acceptance of VoIP in the business world. With hosted technologies and now VoIP as a mobile option, service providers are finding more areas for growth, an industry imperative.
"Hosted communications providers must deliver greater value to their customers through enhanced functionality, compelling services bundles, and more competitive pricing," said Popova. "Providing mobility and integration with third-party apps will further strengthen the business case for hosted and cloud solutions."