Unified Communications Products and Services Market to Grow to $48.7B by 2012

(Business News & Technology News, 30 Nov 2007)

In-Stat and Wainhouse Research have combined their high-tech market research and data to create the first-of-their-kind unified communications products and services forecasts. As the worldwide supply chain for labor, goods, and services has been flattened, accelerated, and globally dispersed, companies of all types and sizes are acknowledging the competitive need to streamline the flow of knowledge and information worker expertise throughout the organization. Unified communications provide a framework for doing so. A unified communications system includes elements of presence, instant messaging, IP telephony, audio conferencing, web conferencing or data collaboration, unified messaging (a common message store for voicemail, email, and faxes), mobility, and/or video conferencing, all accessible through a single client interface or within an embedded application interface.

Recent research by In-Stat and Wainhouse Research found the following:
- Many of the largest vendor corporations in the world have entered the unified communications market and look to it for significant future revenues.
- The entire unified communications products and services market will be $22.6 billion in 2007, growing to $48.7 billion by 2012.
- Compound annual growth rate over the forecast period will be 13.7%.

"Approximately one year ago, we approached several vendors with the idea of creating a unified communications forecast," said Dr. E. Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research. "Interest was universal. In the combined Unified Communications Product and Services Forecasts, we converged In-Stat's IP telephony and messaging expertise with the deep conferencing and collaboration know-how Wainhouse Research is recognized for. The result is a rationalized forecast that estimates the size of the component technologies market segments that go into unified communications as well as an estimation of how much of each component will be sold as part of a unified communications solution over the life of the forecast."

Because of the size and diversity of the unified communications marketplace, this huge forecast has been divided into two documents: the Unified Communications Products Forecast and the Unified Communications Services Forecast.

The UC Products Forecast includes the following premise-based components:

- Presence and instant messaging systems sold to enterprises and service providers (including mobile UC clients)
- Enterprise telephony (PBXs—IP and TDM)
- Audio conferencing bridges sold to enterprises and service providers
- Web collaboration servers sold to enterprises and service providers
- Team workspaces
- Unified messaging (premise-based)
- Videoconferencing (bridges, group endpoints, telepresence systems, and desktop collaboration endpoints with video)

The UC Services Forecast includes the following service elements:

- Hosted telephony (IP Centrex and broadband VoIP services)
- Audio conferencing
- Web collaboration
- Videoconferencing bridging

"The way in which individuals communicate and collaborate in the business setting has changed dramatically in the last few years, but we are just on the cusp of even more dramatic change. Employees will increasingly have intuitive tools that allow them to control communications and presence, while expanding their access to critical information," says David Lemelin, In-Stat analyst. "Companies of all types and sizes acknowledge the competitive need to streamline the flow of knowledge and subject matter expertise within the organization, including distributed and mobile workers."

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