Unified communications market set to grow

The Unified Communications (UC) market, which includes IP telephony solutions, will expand to be worth £18 million by 2015, Wainhouse Research has said.

Providers of UC services such as VoIP solutions are expected to grow quickly due to the sophistication of premises-based UC solutions, according to the independent market research firm.

While UC services returns are much smaller than those of products at present, they will surpass those of traditional conferencing by 2013 or 2014, the firm claims.

Premise-based vendors like VoIP providers will see the telephony market rebound, according to the two market studies recently published by Wainhouse Research

Brent Kelly, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, said: "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."

He identified presence/IM (Instant Messaging) servers, web conferencing servers, team workspaces, and video endpoints and infrastructure as the main revenue drivers in the UC market.

Writing for The Reporter recently, George Bardissi described UC as allowing a business of any size to "streamline information delivery and ensure ease of use relative to all of the information technology, both hardware and software, that is being utilised on a daily basis."