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World Unified Communications Markets
Frost & Sullivan, Dec 2007, Pages: 75
This study discusses the challenges, drivers, restraints and trends in the world unified communications application and service markets. It provides a competitive analysis and competitor profiles. Further, it offers market sizing and forecasts of both unit shipments and revenues.
Research Overview
This market insight from Frost & Sullivan titled, World Unified Communications Markets, discusses the state of the unified communications market in terms of drivers, restraints and trends. It provides a perspective on the market's growth potential and a competitive landscape analysis.
Market Overview
Unified Communications appear to be everywhere these days, as vendors of all stripes take advantage of the moniker to make their products current and, they hope, worthy of an IT manager’s hard-won budget. Although talk of unified communications (UC) has been around for several years, 2007 has been a turning point for the market, as major players like Cisco, IBM Lotus and Microsoft strengthened their offerings, bolstered critical partnerships, and started spending significant dollars on sales and marketing in the space. But 2007 was also a year of confusion in the market, as vendors struggled to define the term 'unified communications' in a consistent and meaningful way. As more companies touted their products as 'UC,' it became less clear what, exactly, UC really is. This study takes a narrow but therefore very practical definition of the term as its foundation, and Frost & Sullivan believes the market must support such a narrow definition of UC applications to stay relevant.
Regardless of how one defines UC, there can be no doubt the need for the technology is here. Several business and IT-related trends are contributing to this, but the largest is the growth of the virtual workplace, in which an increasing number of employees work in a location that’s different from that of their co-workers, managers and reports. These employees must continue to communicate and collaborate, but they have the challenge of having to do so over the telephone and the Internet, rather than in person—and they require technology to help them do so. Also impacting the need for UC tools: the need to support global business; the desire to cut back on travel, for budgetary and productivity reasons; the spread of IP (specifically, voice over IP) in the enterprise; and the need to cut cycle times around production and decision making.
During 2006 and the first half of 2007, the North American unified communications market was so nascent as to be virtually non-existent, weighing in at well under $10 million. However, this emerging market is likely to experience healthy growth rates over the next several years, spurred by improved and more feature-rich technology, declining price points, and increasing awareness of the need for UC tools in the enterprise. But the market faces one significant challenge: defining the technology’s return-on-investment for wary IT buyers who demand a clear ROI metric before investing in new technology.
In summary, in a short period of time the newly emerging unified communications market revolutionized the communications industry, for both messaging/productivity software vendors and telephony players. While it remains to be seen how this technology will shape and support the way North American companies conduct business, the growing interest in UC is accelerating awareness and gaining momentum as the technology continues to mature. Frost & Sullivan anticipates that the need to support an increasingly global and virtual workforce in today’s business world will significantly drive the demand for unified communications in 2008 and beyond.
Technologies
The following technology is covered in this research:
Unified Communications (UC): UC applications are an integrated set of voice, data and video communications, all of which leverage PC- and telephony-based presence information. UC applications are meant to simplify communications for the end user by making it easy to 'click to communicate.' These UC dashboards are expected to serve as the default communications application for knowledge workers of the future, much as e-mail serves that role today. A UC application must contain the following capabilities (although IT may elect to turn them on or off as needed):
- PC-based presence (online or offline)
- Telephony presence (on the phone or available for a call)
- Point-to-point voice calling
- Chat (i.e., instant messaging)
- Audio conferencing
- Web collaboration (application, file, and desktop sharing)
- PC-based video
- Find-me/Follow-me capabilities (for call routing)
A unified communications application may include the following:
- Unified messaging
- Social networking capabilities
- Wikis/blogs
- Mobile client
- APIs for easy integration with other applications
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