Unified Communications Featured Article

Surge in Mobile Workforce and Proliferation of Smartphones Fueling Growth in Global UC Market

By Madhubanti Rudra
TMCnet Contributor

Connected devices such as smartphones and tablets have changed the way work is done today - in the office and beyond. An ever-expanding mobile workforce has prompted enterprises to come up with friendly BOYD policies, boosting enterprise-wide collaboration and ultimately leading to better efficiency and improved bottom line. This has also contributed to the growth of unified communications market worldwide.

Unified Communications (News - Alert) solutions are designed to unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications for collaboration.  One recent report looking at recent market research by Grand View Research on the sector notes it is poised for enormous growth in the next few years.

According to the study, Unified Communications will be a $75.81 billion market in 2020. This new study on Global UC Market offers an analysis of the two segments of the market-products and applications. Products are divided into two categories On Premise, and Cloud-Bases/Hosted, while applications are divided into the categories of education, enterprises, government and healthcare.

The application segment will account for the largest share in the global UC market, the report predicted. The early adopters that have implemented UC solutions, have now come to reap benefits from their investments. UC solutions not only enable enterprises to improve operational efficiency, they also enable the companies to create better customer engagement. These are expected to encourage more and more organizations in healthcare, education and government to integrate their data, voice, video and other communication applications.

Organizations in the government sector in particular will increase their investments in UC implementation to support operational continuity, emergency response, as well as situational awareness. This in turn will necessitate the deployment of necessary IP infrastructure in support of unified communication.

Bring-your- own-device (BYOD) initiatives by large enterprises as well as SMB are going to be one of the major deciding factors in UC growth. The implementation of BYOD involves costly investments. Then interoperability across various unified communication platforms must be established for the successful implementation of BYOD.  These two factors may impede market growth, the study pointed out.

Interestingly, hosted unified communications solutions are likely to overtake their on premise siblings in popularity. The reasons are obvious: the installation and maintenance costs associated with hosted solutions are lot cheaper than the premise-based UC solutions.

The global UC market involves a few major challenges, relating to investment and interoperability and exposure to security risk. The study predicts that these are not going to stop key vendors from battling against the challenges.  With the UC space becoming increasingly competitive, vendors are likely to come up with new, innovative solutions to gain a competitive edge. For the companies that survive the obstacles and challenges, there awaits a strong payoff, the study concluded.