The Trend Towards Unified Communications Continues

David Byrd : Raven Call
David Byrd
David Byrd is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Raven Guru Marketing. Previously, he was the CMO and EVP of Sales for CloudRoute. Prior to CloudRoute, He was CMO at ANPI, CMO & EVP of Sales at Broadvox, VP of channels and Alliances for Telcordia and Director of eBusiness development with i2 Technologies.He has also held executive positions with Planet Hollywood Online, Hewlett-Packard, Tandem Computers, Sprint and Ericsson.
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The Trend Towards Unified Communications Continues

This week, Infonetics released their latest growth tracking numbers for Unified Communications. According to their press release, the growth in the enterprise segment was up 27% for 1Q14 over 1Q13. For a business or service provider such as ANPI, this is very good news. But several other findings are also worth noting.

PBX sales were down for the same period by 8% and, when measured against 4Q13, they were down 8%, as well. This downward growth contradicts Eastern Management Group’s assessment that the overall PBX market is north of $40 billion and expected to continue growing through 2018. Diane Meyers, Infonetics analyst, explains the declining trend by commenting, “Businesses hold off new PBX purchases and invest, instead, in Unified Communications (UC) applications.”

I do not necessarily disagree that some enterprise customers may be delaying PBX purchases, and I don’t have any data that disputes the Eastern Management Group’s assertions of growth in future PBX sales and upgrades. However, I believe that most PBX forecasts are more optimistic than what the market seems to be indicating, including those examining enterprise purchases. Cloud computing and stronger UC offerings – with improved availability, features, ease of integration, security, mobility and more – continue to influence buyer’s decisions. Cloud solutions are supplanting PBX purchases at SMBs and, even, enterprises. Whereas an enterprise may maintain PBXs to support its larger offices, increasingly cloud-based services support satellite offices and remote workers.

However, I do concede that an enterprise will have very different criteria for the augmentation of their telephony and collaboration systems than SMBs. So, it is good that, even with the potential for delayed CAPEX spending, OPEX spending for applications that can improve productivity or save money continues. Overall, the Unified Communications market was valued at $22.8 billion in 2011, and is expected to reach $61.9 billion in 2018, growing at a CAGR of 15.7% from 2012 to 2018 (Transparency Market Research).

According to Infonetics, there was a 13% year-over-year gain in UC and hosted PBX service revenue in 2013, with total of $68 billion in revenue for both business and residential VoIP and UC services. According to a Point Topic report, in 1Q13, the US had 34 million VoIP subscribers. This is important because, as business owners gain experience using VoIP at home, Hosted UC gains credibility as a replacement for premise-based solutions.

 



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