Is the Unified Communications Business Growing or Shrinking?

One of the "problems" observers have when evaluating the size of the unified communications market is that UC includes so many different legacy products and services, ranging from business phone services to software applications and hosted services.

The other issue is that UC applications overlap with and complement other applications such as mobility and social networking, which can make an accurate estimate of product sales difficult. Analysts at Forrester Research, for example, suggest that sales of legacy products of all sorts are not growing much at all, while sales of business phone systems might drop precipitously in coming years. This forecast represents annual sales volume in billions of dollars, for example.

Whether UC is important or not is not the issue. Lots of other useful, even essential services and applications, such as email and voice, represent indirect revenue streams, or even declining revenue, despite their inherent usefulness.

Something of that sort seems to be underway in many segments of the UC business. This forecast does not cover other product segments that likely will represent parts of the future UC revenue stream, such as telepresence, a direct UC application, or even access services such as SIP trunking that will be used to support unified communications.