Top UC trends

Here are some of the trends identified by the New Zealand Unified Communications Market Report 2011 from Frost - Sullivan: Enterprise telephony: Despite being one of the biggest contributors to overall UC revenues in 2010, enterprise telephony is nearing market saturation and future growth will largely rely on refresh cycles and migrations to IP telephony. The rise of BYOD (Bring your own device): Employees are increasingly using their own mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to connect to the enterprise network and this in turn is driving uptake in UC applications such as email and IM. Mobility: About 55% of organisations are convinced of the role of tablets as an enterprise device with a further 29% planning a trial or deployment. The main business requirements of mobile devices are integration with instant messaging platforms to enable a single contact number, particularly to empower remote or mobile workers. Conferencing and collaboration: This area will experience strong growth (approximately 15.6% CAGR) through to 2017 due to demand for video conferencing solutions as a means of reducing travel costs and increasing productivity. In addition, video conferencing will shift away from being viewed as a stand-alone solution and will increasingly be integrated with chat, email, presence and collaboration applications on the one platform. SIP trunking and virtualisation: These are the technology enablers that will drive further uptake of UC solutions, with SIP offering fixed mobile convergence and better interoperability between multi vendor platforms, and virtualisation helping to maximise utilisation of existing computer power.