The push toward hosted, cloud-based applications and services has made a significant impact on the communications space. Unified communications (UC) have matured substantially through the hosted model, enabling flexibility, scalability and cost savings previously out of reach for most businesses.
UC solutions have been around a long time, but have only recently begun to evolve into collaborative, diverse offerings. The advent of real-time communications (RTC) and advances in VoIP quality and availability have also helped propel UC into mainstream business use. According to Grand View Research, the total global UC market will reach a whopping $143.49 billion by 2024, fueled by a need for real-time communications and collaboration solutions.
Businesses are also expanding globally and the trend toward several small offices, coupled with the uptake of bring your own device (BYOD) and mobility, is also fueling UC growth. Grand View estimates hosted solutions comprised nearly 40 percent of UC market revenues last year, and the research firm forecasts hosted offerings will surpass premise-based systems by 2024.
Unifed Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is rapidly gaining popularity and traction thanks to the flexibility and cost savings it affords. Particularly when it comes to SMBs or geographically dispersed companies, investing capital in on-premises, legacy infrastructure simply doesn’t make sense. UCaaS negates the need for services, PBXs and physical phone infrastructure, putting the burden on the service provider to handle management and maintenance.
Markets and Markets values the UCaaS market at $17.35 billion and predicts it will reach $28.69 billion by 2021. The research firm attributes that growth to the low cost of ownership as well as BYOD and mobility, increased demand by SMBs and the need to integrate all communication services on a single platform.
The UC market has been shaped by a number of technology trends and will continue to evolve as the cloud and hosted services gain popularity. As competition ramps up, businesses can expect to see innovative new services and functionality with greater ease of use, all at an attractive price point.
Edited by Alicia Young