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Growth of Unified Communications Services to Dwarf Products Growth
Unified communications and collaboration is expected to see significant growth delivered as a hosted service according to a new study released by Wainhouse Research. Heavyweights Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM are all investing heavily to create offerings that integrate with their existing unified communications products into a hosted services framework.
Wainhouse Research forecasts this services segment will grow to $13.4 billion by 2013 with a compound annual growth rate of 19%.
The report predicts significant growth through 2013, with market expansion coming from hosted voice providers ($18 million in 2008 to $3.4 billion in 2013) and messaging providers ($1.3 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013) branching into UC offerings. In addition, the audio conferencing services market is expected to see significant minute usage growth, but only small revenue growth due to falling average selling prices while hosted video bridging is not expected to grow in any significant way.
By contrast, the growth rate of UC products is forecast to hover around 1%, hampered by stagnation in the telephony market, according to a companion report.
"The hosted unified communications market is poised for significant growth. We see a convergence among providers offering hosted messaging, hosted voice, and hosted conferencing because enterprises will be asking for a bundled unified services offering. Larger providers in any one of these individual markets will either expand organically or acquire capabilities from smaller companies offering complimentary services. Furthermore, hosted UC services are not just for the small to medium business space. Large companies who now outsource both email and audio/Web conferencing will be looking at adding presence-enabled messaging and conferencing as well as click-to-call and click-to-conference capabilities," states Wainhouse Research Senior Analyst and Partner E. Brent Kelly.
Posted to the site on 9th January 2009