Report Reveals Asia-Pacific UC Market Will be Driven by UCaaS and Mobility Solutions
March 25, 2015
By Michael Guta
TMCnet Contributing Writer
The potential of the Asia-Pacific region is enormous. According to the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), it has more than 4.2 billion people, making up close to 60 percent of the world’s total population. Even though the vast majority of this population is still developing, it presents great opportunities for industries across all sectors. A report released by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) on the Unified Communications (UC) market in the region for calendar year (CY) 2013 has revealed there was a decline compared to the previous year, but UCaaS and mobility solutions will drive the market in the future as awareness and significance of UC continues to grow.
The decline in 2013 was attributed to: reduced IT budgets, changing enterprise priorities, growth of UC on a hosted model, and political disturbance and/or natural disasters in some countries, according to a summary of the report by ReportLinker. This decline was experienced not only by developed countries such as Australia and Japan, but also emerging markets, with China and India leading the way.
The report provides an analysis of the demand in the Asia-Pacific region across 14 markets with key insights in trends, vendor performance, vertical and horizontal market splits, go-to market strategies, and major public customer wins. This includes tracking segments in IP telephony, traditional telephony, IM/presence, email, unified messaging (UM), conferencing and collaboration, mobility, and contact center applications.
According to report author Harsh Upadhyay, Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, the historical data was for CY 2012, and forecasts are given until CY 2020.
Some of the key finding as summarized by ReportLinker are:
Mobility and IM/presence were the fastest-growing application segments within the UC market. Vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya (News - Alert), and NEC registered growth from their solutions on mobility and IM/presence.
Based on customers' priorities, leading vendors have started positioning their solutions as business-outcome oriented rather than just productivity oriented.
The affinity towards hosted/cloud-based UC puts Microsoft (News - Alert) and Google in an advantageous position.
The UC market is evolving as more organizations deploy hosted solutions to reduce their capital and operational expenditure. This has dramatically cut into traditional UC service providers with on premises platforms. The forecast for the Unified Communication as a service (UCaaS) market is set to grow to $23.34billion in 2019 from $13.10 billion in 2014, which according to MarketsandMarkets, is a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.2 percent.
The Asia-Pacific region, and more specifically, its emerging markets will benefit greatly from UCaaS because the knowledge base and skill level of its population has not caught up to its neighbors in Japan, Australia, South Korea and others. But with seven of the world’s ten most populous countries calling this region home, it is only a matter of time before the market starts delivering dividends.
Edited by Dominick Sorrentino
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