Unified Communications to Rise 50 Percent to $30 Billion by 2013: Report

Thanks to growing interest in the Unified Communications (News - Alert) space, the UC market is projected to reach $30 billion by 2013, according to two new reports from Wainhouse (News - Alert) Research.

 

The research found that because of the complexity of premises-based UC solutions, UC service providers should expect rapid growth in the industry. Wainhouse Research predicted that UC services revenue, which is smaller than product revenue today, will likely eclipse traditional conferencing services by 2013 or 2014.

 

While the market will experience a declining compound annual growth on the UC product side, positive gains in the services sector will offset the decline.

 

For premises-based providers, the telephony market is expected to rebound, but growth will be constricted by a reduction in prices per user, as well as uncertainty about the global economy. Meanwhile, team workspaces and on-premises Web conferencing servers are projected to grow by double digits, while video providers will see a 17 percent growth over the forecast period, Wainhouse Research said.

 

The findings come from two separate Wainhouse UC market studies, one focusing on products and one on services.

 

“In the premises-based UC solutions market, we expect to see declining revenues for PBXs, audio bridges, and unified messaging solutions,” Brent Kelly (News - Alert), senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, said in a statement. “However, these will be offset by increasing revenues in presence/IM servers, Web conferencing servers, team workspaces, and video endpoints and infrastructure. In addition, we are seeing significant interest and now some large deployments in the UC services market, and we expect managed/hosted UC services to grow tremendously.”

 

Wainhouse Research’s Worldwide Unified Communications Products Forecast and Worldwide Unified Communications Services Forecast feature a five-year forecast and a discussion of industry trends broken down by UC product or service component. Further details about the research are available here.