Forrester Research recently came out with a report, "Market Overview: Sizing Unified Communications," which I wrote a newsletter/blog about this week, touching on the issue of communications-enabled business process. But there were a bunch of other things in the report worth discussing, so I'll tackle those here.I had a chance to talk with Henry Dewing, who wrote the report, about some of his expectations regarding how this market will develop. Forrester divides UC into two variations: Basic and Enhanced. The figure below spells out the distinction:
This breakdown makes a lot of sense to me, and as helpful as all the detailed descriptions are, I almost think that the really useful part is the high-level view you get with each of the categories, characterizing Traditional, Basic and Enhanced, according to how you use each category: "Reach for a unique device;" "Select a path from a unified client;" and "Click to communicate." The interesting thing is that Forrester sees various implementation scenarios in different enterprises, including situations where rollout of enhanced UC--to a focused subset of end users--precedes rollout of basic UC to the wider enterprise. The report estimates that Basic UC--which excludes infrastructure fundamentals like the IP-PBX--will cost $350 per seat, while Enhanced UC will run $600 per seat.
Financial rewards may often be higher with Enhanced UC, according to Henry, and basic UC "is going to be the normal way to communicate in the future." If you go back to those characterizations of Traditional, Basic, and Enhanced, I think that makes sense. Basic UC will eventually be more cost-effective than giving multiple discrete devices, some of which (desk phones) may not get used very much. For $350, if you get all of the functionality shown in the middle column in place of an IP phone (which would probably cost more anyway), that's not a bad tradeoff.
Overall, Henry's projecting that the UC market for North America, Europe and Asia-Pac will grow at a compound annual rate of almost 36% between 2008 and 2015. That would mean a market growing from $1.2 billion last year to $14.5 billion in 2015. Basic UC will represent 2/3 of this 2015 total, according to Forrester.
Clearly, Henry's not projecting this growth to take off real soon; his report notes that the UC marketplace today is dominated by trials rather than deployments, and that "investment dollars are hard to come by" in 2009.
One final note: Kudos to Henry for digging up maybe the only Yogi Berra quote that hasn't been beaten to death; in fact, it's one I'd never heard before: "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."
