Our friends at Wainhouse Research just came out with a new report that projects some very optimistic numbers for Unified Communications growth, and what's really interesting is where they expect the growth to come from.Wainhouse predicts that the market will grow 50% between now and 2013, and will hit $30 billion in that time. Those are some impressive numbers, and they come from a firm that has never in the past been prone to hyping UC for its own sake.
Wainhouse is actually predicting that UC product revenues will decline during the period of its study, but says that growth in services will more than make up for this. That, as the man said, is a bold statement.
According to Brent Kelly, Wainhouse's UC guru:
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.
This would represent a fundamental shift in the market, and it's something everyone responsible for enterprise communications decision-making should be tuned into. That's why I'm delighted that Brent offered to do a three-hour workshop at VoiceCon Orlando in which he'll delve into the trends in Managed/Hosted UC in lavish detail.
Brent is a VoiceCon veteran and he has done some of our best in-depth programming, on topics ranging from video to a detailed look at the UC offerings from Microsoft and IBM. I'm confident that this new Managed/Hosted session is going to open a lot of eyes, probably including mine, and I'm really looking forward to it.
