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UC: The Next Big Thing

Source: Worldwide Unified Communications Ecosystem 2007-2011 Forecast: The Road Ahead for UC by IDC, Doc # 208043

Unified communications (UC) will define the next decade of the communications and IT industry. Mark Winther, Group Vice President and General Manager of Worldwide Telecommunications at IDC, discusses the current state of the market, and what's needed for widespread adoption.

IDC predicts that the worldwide UC market, estimated at approximately $4.8 billion in 2007, will grow to nearly $17.5 billion by the year 2011, showing a compound annual growth rate of more than 38 percent. Multiple definitions for unified communications abound, leading to confusion among potential buyers and a lack of understanding about the value of vendor solutions.

What UC is

IDC defines unified communications as a software infrastructure platform that consolidates directory, routing and management of communications across a growing set of applications. These applications can include advanced IP telephony calling and management; Web, audio and videoconferencing; instant messaging; and pervasive presence management and awareness. All applications are accessible through any device and as functions available to business applications developers.

What UC can do

Unified communications represents an enhanced platform for providing call management capabilities to workers in today's mobile enterprise. Call forwarding, simultaneous ring, unified messaging, call controls/call blocking, abbreviated dialing, presence management, policy enforcement, and least-cost routing capabilities are just some of the wired features designed to enhance employee efficiency that can be rolled out to wireless handsets when a unified platform is adopted.

Enterprise voice capabilities are particularly powerful when delivered alongside or within the enterprise data applications (email, CRM, ERP, vertical applications) accessible from converged mobile devices. Adding voice components to this suite of mobile offerings is a valuable application to build on the growing needs of a mobile enterprise deployment.

Today's UC functionality is delivered from three primary sources:

• Integrated collaborative software environments
• Telecommunications services providers
• PBX equipment

A key challenge for businesses looking to adopt UC is the identification of the features most appropriate for their organization that deliver individual and enterprise efficiencies. Since there's no "one size fits all" solution, businesses can choose from a large assortment of features from the three sources. This may require some integration efforts to make the solution run on that customer's existing network infrastructure and within the boundaries of their service contracts.

What's to come with UC

IDC expects that the more savvy and leading-edge businesses will be more adventurous with their UC projects, either because they have recognized a strategic need, or because they experiment with vendor solutions as beta customers to offset the initial costs of deployment.

This highlights the following important issues:

• Though it's well beyond the "proof of concept" phase of technology and product development, UC's overall value proposition and business case in specific vertical markets remain to be fully established.
• Companies are assessing UC's value in the knowledge worker segment, where many of its collaborative aspects should be most readily applied.
• There is a slightly "experimental" quality to UC, due to factors such as its highly personalized nature, the need for certain cultural norms (such as privacy) to successfully predispose usage patterns, countervailing technologies and new market approaches.

The technology integration and possibilities of unified communications are indeed exciting. Many businesses who see the demonstrations of rich presence that go beyond just availability, and extend to availability on a particular set of communications applications, telepresence or an application that cuts the time needed to accomplish a task, will understand the ways UC solutions can improve business processes.

IDC believes that, over the next two years, early adopters will accrue enough incremental business cases to convince later adopters to make significant investments in unified communications.