The Seamless Enterprise

Several research companies just announced forecasts for the Unified Communications (UC) market. Infonetics Research expects the UC market to top $1 billion by 2013, and Wainhouse Research sees the UC industry growing to a healthy $30 billion market in just five years. Should we be surprised? Are enterprises integrating UC into their plans and budgets, despite constraints, and actually deploying UC solutions?

 Ovum says yes. In the latest research, as reported by itwire.com Ovum states that the pace of UC implementation and integration by multinational companies worldwide is increasing significantly despite “fierce budget constraints”.

Telephony World agrees and  reports “against the backdrop of significant enterprise spending reductions on all kinds of products, the unified communication market is holding up remarkably well”.

So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. When you think about it, the very benefits of unified communications center on a more productive and seamless communication experience while lowering costs. It makes the most sense for large companies with distributed employees who collaborate and are constantly in motion. Simply, people can communicate and collaborate more effectively. What’s interesting is that the provider landscape is greater than the usual suspects. While enterprises are more likely to partner with traditional global leaders in the UC space, such as Microsoft and Cisco, look for other companies to follow less traditional paths and leverage communication and collaboration tools from companies such as Skype and Google.

Here are some highlights from the reports:

• Wainhouse Research is seeing significant interest and some large deployments in the UC services market, and expects managed/hosted UC services to grow tremendously; Wainhouse also sees increasing revenue in presence/IM servers, Web conferencing servers, team workspaces, and video endpoints and infrastructure
• Infonetics anticipates the focus of unified communication to transition to mobility, multimedia, and collaboration, with companies looking to integrate cell phones, IM, video, and conferencing
• Ovum foresees particular interest in telephony presence features, click-to-call from mobile applications, and single voicemail, single number and simultaneous ringing for fixed and mobile
• Additionally, Ovum research shows that in just one year more than 40% (of survey respondents) have a global IPT strategy including a roadmap for implementation throughout the company or group – a big change since last year, when only one in four said they had a group-wide implementation roadmap
• Infonetics reports companies on the UC landscape with the highest vendor recognition: AOL, Apple, AT&T, Avaya, Bell Canada, Charter, Cisco, Comcast, Dell, Google, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Nortel, Rogers, Shoretel, Skype, Sprint, Sun, Telus, Verizon, Vonage, and Yahoo

 With more MNCs integrating a UC strategy, the next likely question is: In-house or hosted? One answer may be both, and a WAN. 

First, consider the needs of your end users. Workers today are more distributed and mobile, conducting business from locations around the globe. These employees surely benefit from UC applications to communicate and to access and share information. With any application and device, employees expect high performance and reliability, and this is true regardless of the time of day or workplace.

To support their needs, a hosted UC solution may be a good complement or alternative to in-house deployment. A hosted solution gives end users the same advantages, while providing the enterprise with additional benefits:

• Lower capital expenditures for equipment and overhead, as the provider owns the equipment and handles the management and performance monitoring
• Simplified management of system updates and enhancements
• Redundancy, backup and disaster recovery services
• And arguably most important, more easily integrated, scalable, quick to deploy, and accessible Web based applications

As enterprises consider their own UC strategies and deployments, the possibilities are wide-open and the benefits abound, even in this economy. No wonder Gartner named Unified Communications as one of the top 10 technologies in 2010.

Heidi Gigler's other blog entries

Email Bookmark Digg Tweet This Subscribe

Tags: Gartner, hosted UC solution, Infonetics Research, Ovum, UC deployment, UC market, Unified communications, Wainhouse Research

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Network Management & Security, Unified communications, collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.