Infonetics Research Forecasts UC and VoIP Market to Hit $88 Billion by 2018

The essence of communication is to simplify the process in which people can exchange information and ideas; the more barriers there are the more complicated the process gets, thus defeating its true purpose. The digital age we live in today has many technologies in place that make it possible to communicate with greater ease than ever before, but at the same time it has created barriers because of all the different modes of communication, different media and devices. One solution designed to bring all of these components together and simplify the way we communicate is unified communications (UC).

The need to bring all the communications solutions together into one cohesive unit is responsible for the growth of the UC and VoIP market, which according to the latest report by Infonetics Research is set to grow to $88 billion by 2018.

Contributing factors of the growth in VoIP services is the increased number of subscribers which saw a global rise, and businesses were responsible for the growth in UC and hosted PBX service.

Key metrics in the report include:

• Eight percent growth in global business and residential VoIP services market in 2013 from 2012, to $68 billion
• SIP trunking up by 50 percent in 2013 from 2012, primarily driven by activity in North America
• Sales of hosted PBX and UC services rose 13 percent in 2013 over 2012, and seats grew 35 percent because of the continued demand for enterprise cloud-based services
• Global residential VoIP subscribers totaled 212 million in 2013, up 8 percent year-over-year
• Managed services are benefitting from the continued adoption of IP PBXs:  10 to 20 percent of new IP PBX lines sold are part of a managed service or outsourced contract

"Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide. Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest upmarket as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market," said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research.

The VoIP and UC market are linked together in this report because VoIP delivers many of the communication solutions which UC brings together. 

Edited by Alisen Downey