November 06, 2006
Radicati Group Predicts 47 Million Unified Communications Mailboxes by 2010
By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
Businesspeople today are driven to find new ways to work more efficiently, and often they turn to unified communications (UC) technologies to do just that.
In fact, according to a new study out this week from Radicati Group, the number of deployed UC mailboxes is slated to grow from 18 million this year (representing $559 million worldwide in revenues) to more than 47 million by 2010 ($1.2 billion in revenues).
Radicati Group also noted in its report that the largest percentage of on-premises, UC mailboxes are deployed in North America (47 percent), followed by Europe (37 percent).
“The growth of the UC market continues to be driven by the need of employees to more efficiently communicate with each other, as well as the desire to manage a variety of communication devices and applications in a cohesive manner,” Radicati Group said in a statement.
This projection probably comes as little surprise, given the busy lives that businesspeople lead and the increased usage in recent years of both IP-based tools like e-mail (about 1.4 billion active e-mail accounts now exist worldwide, Radicati Group reported recently), and mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs).
New technologies are adopted for a variety of reasons, such as when the costs involved in making the leap—both in terms of time and money—pay off with increased efficiency or the ability to be more competitive in a cutthroat marketplace.
A recent study by In-Stat, for example, found that the high-speed data applications enabled by 3G
handsets are most popular in the U.S. among business travelers who spend $300 or more each month on wireless services.
handsets are most popular in the U.S. among business travelers who spend $300 or more each month on wireless services.But just what is “unified communications”? In a November, 2006 Internet Telephony Magazine article, Tony Rybczynski of Nortel and Greg Saint James of Microsoft (News - Alert) define UC as: “the unification of presence, real-time communications (IM, telephony, video, and application sharing) and near-real-time communications (email, voicemail, short message services) into a single user experience.”
In the context of Radicati Group’s study, UC refers more specifically to mailboxes that send, receive and store both e-mail and voicemail messages.
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Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.
