Unified Communications Featured Article

Q2 2014 Tech Reports Show Rise in Cloud VoIP, UC and IoT Applications

By Matt Paulson
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The numbers from the second quarter (Q2) of 2014 are starting to arrive from analyst firms, including the Dell'Oro Group, Infonetics (News - Alert) Research, Information Week, Gartner and CollabTel/CXO Reports. These groups, who all conduct research on emerging technology markets and how they are growing have all released sales figures to show which markets are expanding and by how much.

According to TelecomReseller, who compiled information from the various companies within fields including unified communications and other cloud-based services, Q2 2014 saw significant growth in the fields of cloud-based VoIP, Internet of Things (IoT) Applications, and unified communications in general.
 

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market has been growing steadily over the years, but there has always been some competition between cloud-based solutions and on-premise VoIP offerings, even though many service providers offer both. However, it appears that over the second quarter the VoIP market leaned heavily towards hosted solutions. Data collected from Infonetics Research (News - Alert) based on this information expects that cloud VoIP and unified communication services will grow to be worth $12 billion sometime in 2018.

Meanwhile, unified communications have shot up significantly as well, and are being deployed in more businesses. While only around 38 percent of businesses last year reported having deployed any kind of unified communications system within the workplace, that number has now shot up to 44 percent, with another 13 percent planning on completing their own deployments within 12 months.

Finally, it appears that the Internet of Things is starting to finally take off, as IoT solutions also rapidly grew in the last quarter. However, the diversity of the IoT market means that many research groups have very different definitions on what qualifies as an IoT solution. As such it is difficult for the firms to agree on exactly how much the industry has grown, but what is clear is that the industry has gathered enough attention for firms to rank it highly on their watch lists, even if their definitions don't agree.