According to TMCnet, Wainhouse Research just released a new report stating that, “the UC (Unified Communications) market is projected to reach $30 billion by 2013.” This is great news for everyone using hosted VoIP PBX as their business VoIP solution. It’s also excellent news for those in the hosted VoIP industry.
Here are some highlights for you business VoIP fans…
- UC services revenue will likely eclipse traditional conferencing services by 2013 or 2014.
- While the market will experience a declining compound annual growth on the UC product side, positive gains in the services sector will offset the decline.
- For premises-based providers, the telephony market is expected to rebound, but growth will be constricted by a reduction in prices per user, as well as uncertainty about the global economy.
- Team workspaces and on-premises Web conferencing servers are projected to grow by double digits.
- Video providers will see a 17 percent growth over the forecast period.
Here is a statement from Brent Kelly, a senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research on the predictions.
“In the premises-based UC solutions market, we expect to see declining revenues for PBXs, audio bridges, and unified messaging solutions. However, these will be offset by increasing revenues in presence/IM servers, Web conferencing servers, team workspaces, and video endpoints and infrastructure. In addition, we are seeing significant interest and now some large deployments in the UC services market, and we expect managed/hosted UC services to grow tremendously.”
In summary this is a very encouraging report. While there will not be as many business VoIP UC products sold, the demand for unified communications and hosted VoIP PBX services will grow.
The report even states that premise-based solutions will bounce back to some degree, however, that rebound may be stifled by pressure to lower the price per seat of the VoIP solution.
Web presence services will grow by double digits! This is not as surprising. We’ve already seen a transition to web conferencing solutions in 2009. 2010 may be the year it really explodes.
Video providers are expected to have similar success. Maybe this year the trickle of video VoIP phones in the market will finally turn into a slow pour. If it does, it will be late 2010, though. I would imagine.
Overall, this is great news for unified communications, hosted VoIP PBX solutions and business VoIP! Those using a hosted VoIP PBX service will be rewarded because the businesses supplying the hosted services should see good profits. This will in turn cause them to reinvest and refine their offerings. It could also lead to more features and better customer service.
What do you think about the growth in the business VoIP and unified communications sectors? Comment below!
