Adoption of unified communications, merging IP telephony, conferencing and collaboration, messaging and other forms of integrated information exchange are on a rising curve in the enterprise, according to a study by ABI Research.
The study shows that the unified communications’ market size, which was $302m in 2008, will rise to nearly $4.2 billion in 2014.
Stan Schatt, practice director of ABI Research, said: “Companies have been buying only those component technologies that they think will deliver immediate value. It’s only later that they start tying it all together as true unified communications.”
According to the study, big corporate with multiple locations will benefit most immediately from unified communications, but many vendors’ systems are not interoperable as the gaps still remain where no standards exist.
The research firm said that only few vendors try to sell end-to-end offerings, but most others try to integrate their offerings with the legacy components, which opens up huge opportunity in replacing older equipment.
Mr Schatt, said: “We foresee a booming market for managed services, simply because unified communications are tricky and many companies won’t want to spend the time and effort to do it themselves. That applies to the market as a whole, but particularly to smaller businesses.”
However, it won’t be a smooth sailing for vendors as they are up against internal corporate ‘turf wars’, lack of understanding of benefits of unified communications and high initial cost, the research firm said.
