Unified Communications Market Expected to Reach $75.81 Billion by 2020

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

A recent study from Grand View Research reveals that the unified communications (UC) market is expected to continue rapid growth through at least the end of the decade.

The study, “Unified Communication Market Analysis By Product (On Premise, Cloud-Bases/Hosted), By Application (Education, Enterprises, Government, Healthcare) And Segment Forecasts To 2020,” predicts that the market will grow to $75.81 billion by 2020. It provides an overview of the key players in the market and the segments of the market that are expected to drive that growth.

Two of those growth indicators are corporate bring-your-own-device initiatives (BYOD) and the global demand for smartphones. BYOD, the practice wherein enterprises allow individual employees to use their personal mobile devices for company work, will be essential to this projected future because it encourages smartphone usage across the board. It is a matter of allowing use of mobile devices both inside and outside the office, and that will lead to more use of communications frameworks that support voice, video, and data transfer.

The global demand for smartphones will bring more businesses into the fold of UC because it will be easier to get company employees to complete work on their own devices. A global rise in smartphone use should make for a growing use of BYOD; combined, those two factors will make UC platforms possible at smaller firms which may previously have been hesitant to adopt UC.

Grand View reports that small, medium-size, and large businesses are all constructing infrastructure to support their need for such communications. However, private businesses are not the only organizations getting a piece of action; there is also significant investment on the part of government-based groups and emergency response organizations. In 2013, the overall market more readily accepted on-premise UC deployments, but the predicted future should see businesses adopt more hosted platforms.

North America was the biggest regional market in 2013 with more than 35 percent market share. In the coming five years, though, both Europe and Asia Pacific are expected to drive growth and expand the fastest. Companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, NEC Corporation, and Verizon (News - Alert) should be key service providers that offer connections to broadband and data or platforms that make use of those connections.