UC in the Middle East

When Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) looks at the future of unified communications, it doesn’t look at just a single location, it looks at all of them. When it examined the unified communications and collaboration market in the Middle East, it found that the market is currently driven by increased collaboration, as well as a deployment of cloud and remote access technologies.

According to the report from Frost & Sullivan, “UCC Market Predictions for 2013 and Beyond,” the future of growth in the UCC market will be mostly based in mobile technology, videoconferencing, and social networking business solutions. The continuing virtualization of communications platforms and increased usage of cloud-based delivery will help the growth, as will enterprise migration to single-vendor solutions.

In a previous report, Frost & Sullivan predicted that the UC market in the Middle East will reach around $235 million by 2013. As things are now, it looks like that prediction is still on its way; it also found that by then, only around 24 percent of firms in the U.S. will be using a mishmash of awkwardly-integrated applications from vendors for their communications.

"Nearly a third of CIOs in the Middle East have included the private cloud in their IT budgets for 2013,” says Shaheen Haque, Regional Manager of the Middle East and Turkey for Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert). “These private cloud deployments will be driven by continued adoption of IP communications and collaboration applications and the need to consolidate and centralize the management of UCC infrastructure. There is also a clear shift toward mobile and remote workers. As they account for a growing portion of the total workforce, businesses will need to provide them with communications and collaboration tools that help them stay connected and productive regardless of physical location. Businesses need to invest in UCC and other technologies that enable the use of personalized services, devices, and applications."

We’ll be seeing plenty of growth and change in the UCC market in the years to come, but it’s all in a general upwards direction. From this report, it seems as though its growth will be connected to a few key areas, but those markets are all growing quite nicely (otherwise you’d be reading some bad news in these articles), so we can look forward to some improvements in the market not only in the Middle East, but everywhere UCC reaches.