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Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft are ranked as the leading unified communications vendors, while Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Google, Huawei, NEC, and Unify and Mitel are “major players” in International Data Corporation (IDC)’s new ratings of the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) market.
In an earlier report, IDC forecast that the UC&C market would grow $48.3 billion by 2023, a 7.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2019-2023 period. UC&C is growing across all business segments now, including enterprise-size organizations, according to IDC, which cited advances in technology, applications and deployment choices for fueling the growth.
“Decisions are past due for many organizations that have not yet migrated their legacy voice platforms (i.e., analog, digital, TDM) to new IP telephony, VoIP, or UC&C solutions. Organizations should have already planned for this fundamental shift in business communications,” said Rich Costello, senior research analyst, Unified Communications & Collaboration/Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC, in a prepared statement. “This IDC MarketScape can assist in the UC&C vendor selection process. Executives, IT staff, and line-of-business personnel can leverage this research to help in developing a shortlist of suppliers for their UC&C deployment projects.”
Telecompetitor reported in January that smartphones were also helping to drive growth. Workers who have ever had an office phone system with unified communications technology may appreciate capabilities such as conferencing, call recording, integration with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and the like. But workers appreciate mobility, too, and increasingly are using mobile phones in connection with their work. Giving workers the ability to have smartphone UC capabilities is a growing area, and some UC technology providers see it as a particularly compelling opportunity for telecom service providers.