Market Studies Indicate UC is Ready for Takeoff

 

"Against the backdrop of significant enterprise spending reductions on all kinds of products, the unified communication market is holding up remarkably well," notes Matthias Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics Research.

 

Infonetics estimates that shipments of communicator clients increased nearly1,000 percent between the first half of 2008 and the first half of 2009, reaching 5.4 million, with revenue nearly tripling. It attributes that grow primarily to bundling of communicator clients with core telephony system sales. And while the company reports that worldwide revenue from unified messaging platforms and communicator software clients is expected to drop by 4 percent in 2009, it notes that's a pretty good showing considering the decrease in overall enterprise telephony spending during the same period.

 

The company goes on to forecast that, as the economy recovers and communications spending again ramps up, UC has the potential to top $1 billion by 2013. Meanwhile, a new ABI Research report indicates the unified communications market will rise to nearly $4.2 billion in 2014, up from just $302 million in 2008. Wainhouse Research is even more bullish, expressing its expectation that the UC industry will hit $30 billion by 2014.

 

Infonetics notes that Avaya in the first half of last year captured the No. 1 position for communicator licenses, this following what the research firm says was an aggressive One X upgrade promotion. The company's latest report ranks Microsoft and Cisco as the most widely deployed UC suppliers, and AT&T and Cisco as the leading VoIP equipment and services providers.

 

However, Machowinski of Infonetics says that just what UC suppliers ultimately will be the winners and the losers in the UC space remains to be seen, noting that businesses seem to be open to considering relatively new suppliers for unified communications, including the likes of Google and Skype. The same study talks about how cost, complexity and network capabilities are the leading barriers of UC deployment, which is probably why the cloud-based unified communications providers have been able to get a foot in the door.

 

"...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," says Wainhouse Research analyst Brent Kelly. UC