Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is the coming together of all of a worker’s collaboration tools. This includes voice, video, data, mobile integration, presence, conferencing, video and other real-time collaborative applications. Its value proposition is multidimensional. UCC empowers workers to streamline the collaborative process, raising productivity to new heights, enables real-time collaboration (Exhibit 1) with coworkers, partners, customers and suppliers across the globe, and can significantly reduce communications costs.
The global market for audio conferencing will hit $5.5bn in 2015, up from $5.0bn in 2010. Much of that growth will come from emerging markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and Central and South America, each of which is projected to rise at a minimum compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4%, while certain regions will hit a torrid 8% growth rate. Some of that emerging market growth will come from organic, domestic usage, but much of it will come from multinational corporations extending their conferencing reach into the various regions in which they operate.
Enterprise IT has seen several major transitions. The strategic IT platform evolved from the mainframe to client/server to Internet-based computing, and is now at the precipice of the biggest transition ever — the evolution to cloud computing. Each transition saw costs fall dramatically as computing became a pervasive resource. These transitions also continually raised the value of the network (see Exhibit 1).
