Hosted/Managed Unified Communications to Outstrip Traditional Solutions by 2014: Wainhouse Research

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor

Hosted and managed services in Information and Communications Technology or "ICT" sector have grown significantly over the past few years. Unified communications is one the fastest growing managed services area. Market analysts predict that hosted and managed unified communications services will outstrip the traditional conferencing services market in revenue within the next few years.

"Though hosted and managed unified communications are emerging markets, every conferencing service provider of any size and almost all of the network service providers are offering unified communications services in one form or another."

The above is the latest finding published by Wainhouse Research  in their reports that analyze the growth of the hosted and managed unified communications and conferencing services markets in Europe.

The reports, titled '2010 European CSP Market Forecast & Provider Reviews' and 'European Hosted/Managed Unified Communications (News - Alert) Services Forecast,' outline the growth areas for companies offering these services, as well as the total market revenue they could make through these services.

The reports also analyze the average selling prices expected for audio conferencing, Web conferencing, video bridging, and hosted unified communications solutions over the next five years.

According to Wainhouse (News - Alert) Research, the combined conferencing services and hosted/managed unified communications services will achieve over $4 billion in revenue by the end of 2014, surpassing the revenue collected from traditional services.

The '2010 European CSP (News - Alert) Market Forecast & Provider Reviews' provides service offering and strategy reviews for 38 European conferencing service providers including AT&T, Cisco WebEx, Citrix, InterCall, KPN, Orange Business Services, BT Conferencing, Deutsche Telecom, PGi, Telia Sonera, Telenor (News - Alert), and Telefonica.

The report also delivers market sizing, average selling prices, and expected revenues for 12 geographic markets including the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

The 'European Hosted/Managed Unified Communications Services Forecast' looks at both incumbent and Pan European service providers entering the emerging hosted and managed unified conferencing and collaboration market.

The report reviews the offerings for 23 companies offering these services including BT Global Services, Orange Business Services, Verizon Business, AT&T, BroadSoft (News - Alert), Interoute, Cisco WebEx, IBM, Microsoft , Siemens, Telefonica, T-Systems, and Vodafone.

In these reports, Wainhouse Research has compared the TCO of hosted UC solutions to premises-based UC solutions from telephony providers over a three-year operating period.

In addition to the two recently released reports, Wainhouse Research has also prepared a report estimating the addressable market size for conferencing services in 12 local European markets; this data is invaluable to CSPs and other service providers in determining where to best focus resources for the greatest opportunity, officials at Wainhouse Research said.

Earlier in January, Wainhouse Research announced the results of a study on real-time learning tools market. The research found that interactive whiteboard market for educational and training purpose would total approximately $880 million in 2009, and will grow to almost $2 billion by the end of 2014. Read more details here. 

(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/conferencing/articles/87225-hostedmanaged-unified-communications-outstrip-traditional-solutions-2014-wainhou.htm)