Over the past few years, Mexico has been growing as one of the top destinations for doing businesses. In fact, Mexico improved six positions in the last two years in “Doing Business Report” released for 2013 by the World Bank.
A key driver promoting the business environment in Mexico has been the shelter programs that encouraged a large number of multinational companies to invest in Mexican business. Call center business and manufacturing were the most popular businesses segments under shelter programs.
A recent research from Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) establishes the fact that Mexico has been one of the most favorable destinations for businesses focusing on call center and related businesses. The growth of the call center business in the region has boosted related businesses like unified communications, collaboration, IP telephony, videoconferencing and the like.
According to the research agency, the unified communications (UC) and collaboration solutions market in Mexico grew in 2011 compared to the previous year. Among the technologies segments that contributed for this growth, Internet protocol (IP) telephony segment was the largest revenue contributor.
The research agency also says that UC clients and videoconferencing are expected to have the highest CAGR (from 2011 to 2018) of all of the segments including traditional and IP telephony, unified messaging, videoconferencing endpoints solutions, on-premises e-mail server licenses, and unified clients.
Companies that lead unified communications and collaboration market in Mexico include Avaya, Cisco (News - Alert), and Microsoft.
While Mexico has the potential to become of one of the most mature in terms of IP and UC, the country needs to address the knowledge gap that exists in the market to augment sales. Frost & Sullivan says the market remains largely untapped as many small and medium (SMB) businesses are not aware of the existence of IP and UC solutions.
One of the potential growth areas in UC, according to Frost & Sullivan, is hosted UC as it provides SMBs with the tools to deliver sophisticated communications technologies now available only in large enterprises. Hosted UC solutions are cost effective as they don’t require costly hardware installation and maintenance. Customers pay only a monthly fee. Most hosted UC services are also offered as pay-as-you-grow model, so companies can scale them as per their growing needs.
Edited by Brooke Neuman