FREMONT, CA: Technavio, a market research company, in its recent report states that the global unified communication and collaboration market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% during the forecast period to reach USD 48.61 billion by the year 2020.

The Technavio research report titled ‘Global Unified Communication and Collaboration Market 2016-2020’ provides an in-depth analysis of the market in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. This market research report also includes up to date analysis and forecasts for various market segments and all geographical regions.

The report also states that enterprise collaboration is the largest segment holder of the global unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) market in the year 2015 by occupying more than 51% of the share.

Unified communication and collaboration solutions are in high demand by enterprises as they help to facilitate cost optimization and enhance efficiency. The widespread implementation of unified communication has made business communication faster and has improved business productivity as companies are implementing real-time communication tools like text messaging, video conferencing, and voice messaging to improve collaboration.

Geographical segmentation of the UC&C market

The UC&C market is geographically segmented in to the Americas, EMEA and APAC regions. The Americas dominates the market presently and is expected to lead during the forecast period due to increase in mobility and the explosion of smart mobile devices due to the consumerization of IT.

Based on application, the report categorizes the global unified communication and collaboration market into three segments. They are: enterprise collaboration, enterprise telephony and contact center.

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Enterprise Collaboration

This segment occupied the largest share of the global unified communication and collaboration market in 2015 according to the report. The growing adoption of mobility and increase of BYOD adoption in UC&C are the contributors for growth of this segment.

The report further divides enterprise collaboration UC&C services into four major components: conferencing services (audio, video, and web conferencing services), email and messaging, wireless collaboration application, and CEBP.

Conferencing services accounted for the largest market share in 2015. The use of audio and web conferencing solutions are replacing the front-to-front mode of communication and enabling growth.

Enterprise Telephony

Enterprise telephony segment occupied approximately 39% of the UC&C market in 2015 and holds the second largest position. This segment is driven by the banking and financial, hospitality, and transportation sector. Small and medium sized enterprises are also showing interest in enterprise telephony in order to cut total cost of ownership (TCO) and telecommunication bills.  However, the Technavio researchers expect enterprise telephony to decline during the forecast period due to the emergence of mobile workforce.

Enterprise telephony vendors facing challenges such financial restraints, long sales cycles and uncertainty in decision making are adopting alternative methods to increase the taking up of Enterprise telephony. By projecting return on investment (ROI) documents to highlight faster ROI and introducing lucrative financial schemes they intend to accelerate the adoption of IP telephony systems.

Contact Center

The contact center segment occupies the remaining 10 percent of the UC&C market in 2015, according to the research article. This segment is driven by the increase of business process automation (BPA) solutions by companies in the APAC. The BPA solutions comprise of video cloud-based contact center support and conferencing solutions.

Contact centers worldwide are anticipating slow growth as they are greatly dependent on the expansion by telecom operators. Cloud-based contact centers are gaining popularity across enterprises due to low initial expenditure.

The contact centers UC services are expected to be driven in the future by emerging verticals such as healthcare, e-commerce, and hospitality besides traditional ones.

“SMEs are increasingly leveraging enterprise and consumer technology solutions to support communications with customers. These solutions enhance collaboration among employees, suppliers, and clients. Also, these technologies are now less expensive, simple to deploy, and more powerful,” says Amit Sharma, a lead analyst at Technavio for research on IT professional services. “Unified communications contact centers have a single voice over Internet protocol network that supports both data and voice. This allows multiple devices to connect with each other, online directories, and voice-to-text conversion. It helps companies to save on telecommunication costs,” Amit adds.