Increasing Prevalence of Virtual Workplaces Boosts Prospects for the World Unified Communications Markets

Publ. by www.redviking.se

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 14, 2009 -

With large, small, and medium enterprises expanding their field of operations, united communications (UC) will assume an increasingly significant role in the future. The technology enables deeper levels of interaction among vast and disparate groups of remote workers, partners, suppliers, and customers. The complete UC user installed base is likely to grow from about 520,000 users in 2008 to about 43 million users in 2014.That market earned revenues of over $71.0 million in 2008 and estimates this to reach $1.8 billion in 2014.

“UC streamlines business processes and helps reduce costs, grow revenues, and improve customer satisfaction by providing users with a unified access and presence across various communications applications,” says Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst Melanie Turek. “However, the investment in both the software and the services required to unify all the components may be substantial, posing a major challenge to vendors to provide strong return on investment (ROI) evidence to their customers in order to drive adoption in tough economic times.”

In the light of the economic circumstances, UC offers the ability to achieve cost cutting by providing an advanced conferencing platform integrated through presence with other communication methods. When businesses invest in various communication applications three to four years down the line, integration with business process applications will provide the key ROI incentive for the continued growth of the UC market. However, it is difficult to justify UC deployments by employing traditional ROI methods.

“Soft benefits are hard to sell in a tough economy and hard-dollar benefits are dependent on a number of factors such as installed infrastructure and ability to invest in additional applications,” explains Turek. “Also, vendors are not yet delivering products that are interoperable out of the box and universal presence federation is years away.” Extensive efforts are required for UC solutions upon deployment. The host of platforms, applications, and services that need to be integrated come from different vendors, and interoperability, even when officially guaranteed, is rarely seamless and plug-and-play. Trends indicate that companies will continue to follow a “stepped” approach to implementation, which will involve the deployment of elements of a complete UC suite one or two at a time over several years.

“Prominent participants in this arena are investing heavily on UC development and marketing, providing strong market momentum,” explains Frost & Sullivan Global Program Director Elka Popova. “Vendor’s success will depend heavily on their capacity to pursue open standards-based solutions that facilitate interoperability out of the box, paving the way for best-of-breed deployments and investment protection.”

It is imperative for vendors to be articulate when defining products in their portfolios and go all out to meet customer criteria for UC. Forging partnerships with competitors and ancillary participants will help to firmly establish and defend market foothold. Essentially, vendors must offer a complete range of reliable and scalable solutions to help customers deploy solutions ideally suited to their particular business needs and generate new high-margin services.

Worls Unified Communication Markets