The Market Research Challenge
Ten years ago Synergy Research Group (Synergy) was founded based on the company's initiative to quantify the then nascent voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market. The recent identification of an even more challenging task has focused the company's resources on another difficult undertaking: quantifying and segmenting the worldwide Unified Communications (UC) market.

Although several attempts had been made by others to grasp the magnitude of the UC market and to identify and rank order market participants, the disparity of the results left many uncomfortable and skeptical of the underlying methodologies used in these earlier market analyses. After spending six months analyzing the marketplace, identifying the essential building blocks of a UC environment and creating and defining terms, Synergy believes we have "cracked the code" and established a significant milestone in the quantification of not only the UC sub-marketplace, but also the larger and more broad-based market for collaborative applications.

Early in the analysis cycle, Synergy realized that looking at UC as a detached element of the larger collaborative applications marketplace would not optimize our market sizing efforts and would ultimately lead to complications as the rapidly-changing UC marketplace naturally evolved. It could also overlook potential market participants and not treat all current and future vendors in the UC marketplace impartially. So we decided to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, which included understanding and sizing the market for collaboration applications in general. This would allow us to not only home in on the traditional voice telephony market participants that are driving the UC market today, but also include newer entrants in the enterprise UC market that are quickly seizing the growing opportunity for the merger of voice, video, messaging and conferencing applications at the desktop for the purposes of optimizing the synergies of collaborative productivity.

Synergy Research Group's Definitions and Methodology
In order to view the marketplace in the proper perspective, Synergy believed it was important to view UC technologies in context with the many other related technologies that make up and complement enterprise telephony and IT solutions. Many of these related products have been sold for years as standalone solutions, e.g. unified messaging, desktop audio, video and web conferencing. Others are relatively new—e.g., presence management and instant messaging. It was the integrated convergence of these technologies at the knowledge worker desktop that gave birth to the concept of UC. Yes, UC is not a product but a concept that we believe will morph and evolve substantially as new technologies are developed and introduced.

Before going further, it is important to define a few terms that are critical to understanding Synergy's approach to the quantification of the collaborative applications and UC industries. The following are terms that are instrumental to the market sizing rationale:

* Collaborative Applications refers to a collection of network-based applications that facilitate the working together, or collaboration, of two or more individuals regardless of physical location. In general, teams working collaboratively can achieve better results, quicker, and more consistently with network-based applications designed to increase the success of work-group tasks. This becomes critical to organizations wishing to remain competitive in a highly interconnected world, where many minds can be brought together to achieve the highest level of human synergy. For current quantitative measurements, Synergy defines Collaborative Applications as UC Desktop, Presence Management, Instant Messaging, Desktop Web/Video/Audio Conferencing, Unified Messaging, Mobile 2.0, and Email 2.0.

* UC Desktop is defined as a user workspace having the minimum requirements of access to voice telephony (PBX/KTS/dial tone) and integrated presence management and instant messaging capabilities. A UC Desktop can be made up of a tightly integrated, single vendor solution combining voice telephony and presence/IM, or a multivendor telephony and presence/IM solution integrated into a unified worker's desktop. UC Desktops can be stratified into three levels of functionality.

--Basic UC: User workspace utilizing 1 or 2 UC sub- applications (instant messaging, unified messaging, conferencing, desktop video, etc.)

--Standard UC: Workspaces with between 3-5 sub-applications

--Advanced UC: Workspaces with 6 or more UC sub-applications

* Presence/Instant Messaging (IM) in a telecommunications/computer environment is the combination of a status indicator that conveys the ability and/or willingness of a potential communication partner or "buddy" to communicate. A user's client provides presence information (availability) via a network connection to a presence service, which is stored in what constitutes a personal availability record and can be made available for distribution to other users on a network to convey they are offline or online, and whether they are available for communication and collaborative interaction, such as instant messaging.

Figure 1 is a pictorial representation of the building blocks that make up the collaborative applications and unified communications industry as defined by Synergy.

FIGURE 1

Source: Synergy Research

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