IT research and analysis firm Frost & Sullivan said Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Skype for Business to disrupt unified communications (UC) market this year.
The report said Microsoft will be more aggressive with Office 365 and Skype for Business and increase its penetration in large and mid-sized enterprises. Google’s Apps for Work has entered enterprises in Asia Pacific, especially in the education sector and will break into mid-sized and small enterprises.
While sharing the latest trends to watch out in the UC industry in 2015, Frost & Sullivan today said UC on-premises customers, especially large enterprises, will migrate to UCaaS. The flexibility of deployment from on-premises to hybrid to cloud will put UCaaS solutions ahead of UC on-premises solutions.
As the UC industry is expected to move to the cloud, third party vendors will provide solutions that will help to enable integration and enable growth for the UCaaS market.
UC investment on Research and Development is expected to decrease, forcing UC vendors to select specific segments within UC for R&D investment. This might also be the start of outsourcing R&D to 3rd parties to save on money.
Vendors will strengthen their GTM for the mid-market leading to higher growth in this segment. Vendors’ focus will move from recruiting to recruiting and sustaining channel partners.
Video conferencing will continue to move from the conference rooms to desks and from hardware powered to software solution. WebRTC will start to see growth in SMBs and the education sector.
Contact centers, BPOs and KPOs may use smart watches to track their employee’s activity, push timeline notifications and meeting alerts as well as other push communications. Executives are expected to use wearables to stay on schedule as per their to-do list and keep track of time. Wearables are also expected to popularize the usage of speech to text.
Asia Pacific is catching up with the trend of working from remote locations. Many more offices will migrate away from fixed desks to hot desks; as such the need for hard endpoints will reduce, giving way to softphones, UC clients and mobile clients. IP phones and digital phone sales will decline in near future.
The UC clients, softphone and mobile clients will see adoption. Growing acceptance of Skype for Business translates to a very good business proposition for the enterprise headset market. Plantronics and Jabra will experience high growth for their enterprise headset products. Wireless headsets will have faster growth than wired as employee usage moves from one device to many devices.
Service providers will be aggressive in the hosted telephony market with new offerings as telecom infrastructure across the Asia Pacific region. Enterprises will adopt hosted telephony as a part of UCaaS solution or as a part of their future roadmap in UCaaS adoption.
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
