Unified Communications Market to Reach $61.9 Billion in 2018

The unified communications market is expected to reach $61.9 billion in 2018, according to a new report from Transparency Market Research, "Unified Communications (News - Alert) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Trends and Forecast, 2012 – 2018."

The unified communications market was valued at $22.8 billion in 2011 is expected to grow at a CAGR of 15.7 percent from 2012 to 2018 to reach $61.9 billion.

The report noted that worldwide, companies are looking at ways to decrease costs, improve efficiency and increase productivity. With the integration of real-time communication and business processes, companies can actually achieve these targets, the report said.

The report highlights the benefits of unified communications, including support for flexibility and mobility, increases productivity and improves employee response time.

With the benefits associated with unified communications, the increasing mobile workforce and enterprise mobility will have a high impact on the growth of this market. The proliferation of mobile devices that are capable of video communication is an important factor driving the unified communications market.

Transparency Market Research said that this coupled with BYOD (bring your own device) and enterprise mobility will drive corporate IT and operators to provide cost-effective and flexible communication solutions to the owners of such devices. This factor is expected to have a high impact on the global unified communications market.

However, some of the factors restraining the growth of the unified communications market include lack of interoperability between multivendor platforms and high cost of initial investment.

According to the report, there are two main types of unified communications systems: on-premises unified communications and hosted or cloud-based unified communications. The adoption and acceptance of cloud computing coupled with the proliferation of unified communications is resulting in the growth of the hosted or cloud-based unified communications market.

The report found that the main end user segments employing unified communications include governments, healthcare, enterprises, education and others, with enterprises accounting for the largest share.