Trends in Unified Communications - Vendor strategies, competitor landscape and market forecasts

Unified Communications (UC) is an opportunity for enterprises to revolutionize their work processes, increase efficiency and reduce human latency. In an environment where communications are fully unified, every method of communicating is just a click away. UC technologies also promise cost reductions and productivity benefits across a number of parameters, factors that could be increasingly important competitive differentiators in the current economic climate.

‘Trends in Unified Communications: Vendor strategies, competitor landscape and market forecasts’ is a new report published by Business Insights that examines the implications of UC on vendors and enterprises, by identifying the key market trends, forecasting future growth opportunities, and analyzing the vendor offerings of the main UC technology players. This report provides insight into the current state of the UC market and analyzes how it could evolve over the next five years.


Key Findings

The Green IT agenda will drive the adoption of unified communications technologies over the next few years. The use of conferencing facilities to reduce commuting and long- distance travel is one of the many selling points of using UC technologies.

Presence functionality will play a fundamental part in communication solutions going forward. Today, most of the workforce has a number of touch points, such as multiple phones, e-mail, Short Messaging Service (SMS), and increasingly, instant messaging.

The total global market for unified communications technologies is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 12% from $21.5bn in 2008 to $37.3bn by 2013. Despite the current economic conditions, Business Insights forecasts strong growth of UC due to the intrinsic importance of communication infrastructure and solutions across horizontal markets.

Use this report to...

• Understand the drivers and inhibitors that are shaping the unified communications market with this report’s analysis of the technology evolution path for unified communications technologies.

• Explore how enterprises are implementing UC technologies, and understand their investment decision plans, illustrated by the comprehensive vendor analysis of the main players in the unified communications market.

• Assess the implications of adopting UC technologies within your organization by using this report’s analysis of the benefits and challenges associated with UC implementations.

• Evaluate the competitive landscape for UC solutions by measuring the impact of recent market developments and assessing the positioning and mobility of leading vendors.

Explore issues including...

Enterprise mobility is becoming a significant factor in unified communications from a productivity and cost savings point of view and is likely to help drive investments.

IP telephony. Traditional communication vendors have all embraced IP telephony as the future standard for enterprise communications. Along with the advantage of flexibility given to end unsers, IP telephony allows them to reduce costs by combining their voice and data networks and has additional managerial benefits.

Vendor ecosystem. Currently no single vendor offers a complete end-to-end UC solutions in the market. Yet, enterprises expect that vendor offerings will integrate well, and CIOs want to be able to choose the best of breed and not worry about inter-operation.

Discover...

• What is the business case for adoption of UC technologies?

• Which geographical region represents the biggest opportunity for UC technology providers between now and 2013?

• What impact will consumer IT activities have on enterprise adoption of UC technologies?

• How does the role of mobility in UC affect enterprises?

• How important are ‘presence’ technologies likely to be?

• Which vertical industry offers the largest market opportunity for UC technology vendors?

• How does the current economic climate drive the adoption of UC technologies?

• Which vendors are likely to become leaders in the UC market?