The Green IT agenda will drive the adoption of unified communications technologies over the next few years
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?
Table of Contents
Trends in Unified Communications
Executive summary 10
Market trends 10
Technology evolution 11
The business case for unified communications 12
UC market opportunity and forecast 13
The competitive landscape 14
Chapter 1 Unified Communications market trends 18
Summary 18
Introduction 19
Definitions 21
Market trends 23
Mobility 23
Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) 24
Environmental concerns 24
Video conferencing 25
Flexible working 25
Consumer IT activity 26
Competitive landscape 26
Economic slowdown 27
UC in the enterprise 28
Market challenges 30
Business issues 30
Technology Issues 32
Market Issues 34
Chapter 2 Technology evolution 38
Summary 38
Introduction 39
Key technologies and applications 41
Presence 44
Technology evolution 45
Unified communications and voice/data convergence 45
IP telephony as the foundation of UC 47
The role of mobility in UC 49
Mobility growth within enterprises 51
Mobile enterprise challenges 53
Presence and mobility 56
Public–private convergence 58
Mobile handsets and the desktop 59
Conclusions 60
Chapter 3 The business case for unified Communications 62
Summary 62
Introduction 63
Single infrastructure 64
Communication services 66
VoIP 68
Unified messaging 69
Conferencing 69
Voice and speech recognition 70
Collaborative business processes 71
Business benefits 73
IP telephony 73
Enterprise messaging 74
Enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) 75
Mobility 77
Business processes 79
Presence 80
Conclusions 82
Chapter 4 Market opportunity and forecast 86
Summary 86
Market analysis 87
Market opportunity 89
UC market opportunity by technology 89
UC market opportunity by geography 91
UC market opportunity by vertical 93
Go-to-market messages 96
The cost of implementation is the biggest inhibitor of investments in UC 96
Instant messaging and enterprise mobility are judged the largest security threats 96
Unified communications have not made a significant impact on flexible working 97
Partnerships and mergers are defining the competitive landscape for UC solutions 97
The majority of enterprises prefer to purchase through a reseller and deploy on-site 97
Chapter 5 The competitive landscape 100
Summary 100
Market context 101
Vendor consolidation 103
IBM and Microsoft 104
Market developments 107
Market positioning 109
Mindshare 109
Technology 110
Vendor analysis 111
Software vendors 111
Microsoft 111
IBM 113
Google 115
Interactive Intelligence 115
TeleWare 117
IP telephony vendors 119
Cisco 119
Avaya 121
Nortel 123
Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) 125
ShoreTel 127
Collaboration suite vendors 128
Alcatel-Lucent 128
IMS vendors 129
Telecoms operators 130
Conclusions 131
Appendix 134
Index 136
List of Figures
Figure 1.1: Five key trends influencing the Unified Communications market in the next 18 months 19
Figure 2.2: The converged environment 39
Figure 2.3: Key technologies and applications 41
Figure 2.4: Voice/data convergence and UC 46
Figure 2.5: Presence and mobility 57
Figure 3.6: Voice interfaces 70
Figure 3.7: Collaboration tools 83
Figure 4.8: Unified communications market opportunity by technology, 2008-2013 ($m) 90
Figure 4.9: Unified communications market opportunity by vertical, 2008-2013 ($m) 95
List of Tables
Table 4.1: Unified communications market opportunity by technology, 2008-2013 ($m) 90
Table 4.2: Unified communications market opportunity by geography, 2008-2013 ($m) 92
Table 4.3: Unified communications market opportunity by vertical, 2008-2013 ($m) 94
Table 5.4: The main UC players 102