Communications Provider Feature: SIP Sees Market Shifting to Unified Communications

A recent report from In-Stat (News - Alert) found that two trends are poised to enhance the richness of unified communications.

This is good news for communication providers that offer SIP trunking. The technology is nicely-placed as a cost-saving mechanism and will ultimately enable interconnection of unified communications islands, 'thus enriching communications across suppliers, business partners, and customers,' according to In-Stat.  

The report, 'Global Unified Communications (News - Alert) Emerges from the Cloud,' finds also that the wireless industry’s evolution toward higher data rates is 'enabling the extension of unified communications to smartphones and other wireless data devices.'

This echoes a 2009 review, which confirmed that SIP trunking is indeed on the rise:

'With enterprise buyers looking to lower expenses,” according to a 2009 Infonetics Research (News - Alert) survey, “experts agree that making the move to SIP makes good economic sense.'

The SIP trunk 'essentially lets enterprises use VoIP with their PBX (News - Alert) systems,' the article says, explaining that 'SIP is a standard by which the trunk operates. So a SIP trunking device acts as a translator between an enterprise’s legacy phone system and its Internet connection.' 

David Lemelin, In-Stat analyst, wrote that the market is 'shifting to unified communications as a cloud service. Infrastructure providers, like Avaya, Cisco (News - Alert), BroadSoft, and Microsoft are working closely with hosted VoIP service providers to enable this shift.”

In-Stat's research, in fact, found that unified communications service revenue will rise to reach more than $17 billion by 2013, and the product side of unified communications is continuing to grow as well: 'Revenue will grow nearly three-fold between 2009 and 2013.'

As part of the research In-Stat conducted a survey, where respondents ranked 'collaboration (file sharing) while in conference' as the application of most importance.