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Unified Communications Featured Article
April 23, 2009
Is "Unified Communications" a Discrete Market?
By Gary Kim"The total global market for unified communication technologies is forecast to grow at a cumulative average growth rate of 12 percent from $21.5 billion in 2008 to $37.3 billion by 2013," say researchers at Business Insights. Of course, in some sense, a "unified communications" industry does not strictly exist.
Since UC is a cross-silo, cross-device, cross-network, cross-application capability, "UC" necessarily represents the cumulative sales volume of a wide range of products and services. Those business segments include conferencing (Web, audio, video and multi-media); voice, fax and email messaging; instant messaging; mobility; presence; phone systems; communications-enabled business processes and hosted collaboration or voice services.
The business phone system market represents something on the order of $15 billion annually, so as a rough estimate, business phone systems represent 70 percent of the global "unfiied communications" business.
The other difficulty is that most estimates of what the "unified communications" market represents count the annual value of software and hardware, plus some services (audio-conferencing services, for example), but not all services that arguably play a role in "unified" communications. If VoIP services include "find me, follow me," is the whole value of the service considered to be "unified communications" or just some portion? And if so, what methodology does one use to attribute the retail value to "UC."
For this reason, one has to approach any estimates of the unified communications market size with caution and skepticism. For starters, it is inherently hard to measure, is quite subjective, and primarily lumps together the existing output of other existing business categories.
Some people consider VoIP a distinct business from "voice." Others consider it a substitute product for voice. Unified communications poses the same sort of problem. If VoIP is the next iteration of voice communications, then unified communications is simply the next iteration of communications.
In some important ways, UC is a sort of phantom or proxy market. It is a phantom because it simply represents the sum total of all other existing businesses that arguably have some connection to UC. It is a proxy market because UC is a bit of a proxy for IP telephony, one way or the other.
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Jessica Kostek
