Latest Unified Communications & Collaboration Market Study Shows A Bright Future
Latest Unified Communications & Collaboration Market Study Shows A Bright Future by Blair Pleasant
The need for unified communications and collaboration (UCC) has never been greater, and the technologies continue to evolve to meet changing user needs. The growing mobile workforce has led to the need for workers to communicate regardless of their location or device, and the rise of video communication and collaborative tools have created new ways for people to interact. As my new study, Unified Communications & Collaboration Market 2011-2016, shows, unified communications isn’t new, but it continues to evolve as workers’ needs change, with new elements such as social software being added to the mix, resulting in “Collaborative Communications.” One thing that remains the same is the importance of tying in UCC solutions with business processes in order to get the greatest value for both the enterprise and the individual workers.
Trends such as worker mobility, the virtual workforce, the consumerization of IT, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and virtualization are helping to propel the UCC market. The next big opportunity for UCC is hosted services, but expect to see the majority of enterprises opting for hybrid solutions, or a mix of premise and hosted. Over the past year or two, we’ve seen most of the premise-based UCC vendors add hosted services to their offerings, while offering more choices for customers and a way to stave off hosted competitors. This will continue, as organizations look to their vendors to provide UCC solutions in a way that best meets their needs, whether premise, hosted, or hybrid.
As Unified Communications & Collaboration Market 2011-2016 shows, the UC market hit a snag in 2010, but bounced back to life at the end of 2011, with the forecast for the next few years looking positive. Quantifying the UC market remains extremely difficult, with no consensus as to how to count UC shipments or clients, especially as vendors promote bundled UC offerings. As in the past, I've developed two models – the Total or “UC-capable” market and the Net or “True” UC market. The Total UC-capable market includes the total end-user revenues attributed to all of the UC components, including IM/presence, unified messaging, conferencing (not including end points), call control/IP PBX, and “other,” including softphones, business process integration software, APIs, etc. The worldwide total or UC-capable market for premise-based UC was $12.2 billion in 2011, up 8% from 2010, growing to $20.8 billion in 2016.
These numbers don’t necessarily represent the true UC market, however. If someone purchases an IP PBX and a conferencing/collaboration product, even if they’re from the same vendor, does this constitute a UC sale? Not necessarily. The vast majority of these products are being used in a stand-alone way, and are not part of a UC solution. A subsegment of the Total or UC-Capable market is the Net or True UC market, which represents the number of UC components that are being deployed as part of a UC or UCC solution. While determining the Net or True UC market is more of an art than science, it is a way of identifying the systems and seats that represent what we consider to be the true UC market
In 2011, the worldwide net or True UC market was $2.7 billion, up 20% from 2010. The component growing at the highest CAGR is conferencing/collaboration, growing at 50% CAGR, while the UC Server/IM/Presence represents the largest portion of revenue each year. Professional services also add on over 27% of revenues for both vendors and resellers in the coming years.
The difference in revenues between the Total UC-capable market and the Net or True UC market means that there is a huge opportunity for UCC vendors and resellers to seize upon. There is a large untapped market for UCC products and services, with many customers that have elements of a UCC solution but not complete solutions.
End user organizations need to understand the differences between the vendors and their product offerings, and the report includes about 50 pages of vendor profiles and analysis, highlighting the leading UCC vendors’ product offerings and approaches to the market, as well as their specific strengths and challenges.
New in this report is “Vendor Leadership Evaluations for UCC,” which looks at the vendors that COMMfusion considers the leaders in various categories, including market share, openness, product innovation, UC Suites, application development ecosystem, cloud/hosted services, vertical expertise, all-in-one solutions, and CEBP.
The report concludes with a look to the future of the UCC market, with words of wisdom for end users, vendors, and the channel.
The UCC market continues to show significant growth, providing opportunities for:
- End users to improve and optimize their business processes,
- Vendors to increase revenues based on the various individual UCC components as well as UCC solutions, and
- The channel to provide these products to customers, while adding significant value through professional services.
Additional Information and to Purchase Report
If you’d like more information on the report findings or how to purchase the report, please contact me at .
Click here to download the Executive Summary and Table of Contents.
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