Call Accounting Featured Article

Studies Explore UC&C Growth, Drivers, Categories

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

The global market for unified communications and collaboration is poised to reach $62.6 billion by 2022, according to a Global Industry Analysts Inc. report. That, the worldwide business strategy and market intelligence firm suggested, will be driven by organizations’ desires to integrate such business communications capabilities and technologies as cloud sharing, conferencing, email, messaging, and telephone channels into single solutions.

Meanwhile, a statement distributed earlier this month by SAP PR, talks about some of the key drivers of UC&C, the players in this space, the product categories and subcategories, and more.

The global mobile unified communications and collaboration space, according to the release, is being driven in large part by what it terms as mobile UC&C. Mobile UC&C, it says, is particularly interesting and gaining traction in multiple verticals. It goes on to say that small and medium businesses are quickly moving to mobile UC&C, which it notes is more affordable and supports the bring-your-own-device trend.

The release identified Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco Systems (News - Alert), Computer Sciences Corp., HP, IBM, Microsoft, Polycom, and Verizon as among the providers in the UC&C space. It says the UC&C can broadly be divided in service and solution segments. The service’s part, according to the statement, includes consulting service, integration service, implementation service, and maintenance service.

BFSI, energy and utility, healthcare, IT and telecom, manufacturing, public sector, retail, transportation and logistics, it says, are among the key verticals being catered to by the UC&C industry. And gaming, social networking, videoconferencing, and voice calling are among the UC&C application segments, according to the announcement.

Another noteworthy trend in this arena is the convergence of BYOD/mobile devices, the Internet of Things, and unified communications and collaboration. For example, a smart surveillance solution in a businesses’ parking lot could capture a visitor’s license plate or recognize his or her mobile app to identify that customer. That business could then have a digital sign with a targeted message, or an appropriate expert on a digital kiosk, ready to go upon that customer’s entry to its office.