How Big is the Unified Communications, Collaboration Market?

In 2011, the worldwide net or "true unified communications market was $2.7 billion, up 20 percent from 2010, according to Blair Pleasant, COMMfusion LLC president. Pleasant is one of the more-careful analysts where it comes to unified communications and collaboration markets. 


The problem is that "UC" includes lots of capabilities that customers might buy simply as "point solutions" or stand-alone systems that are not fully "unified," as the term UC implies. 



The "Total UC-capable market," as Pleasant defines it, includes the total end-user revenues attributed to all of the UC components, including IM/presence, unified messaging, conferencing (not including end points), call control/IP PBX, and “other,” including softphones, business process integration software and APIs, she notes. 


That might add up to about $12.2 billion in 2011, up eight percent from 2010, growing to $20.8 billion in 2016, Pleasant says. 


"These numbers don’t necessarily represent the true UC market, however," says Pleasant. "If someone purchases an IP PBX and a conferencing/collaboration product, even if they’re from the same vendor, does this constitute a UC sale?"


"Not necessarily," she says. 


To be sure, UC is vitally important to service providers and others in some parts of the communications business. But in a global market that generates $2 trillion annually, that is a relatively small segment of the business, really. 


That is not to say it is unimportant to any number of interests in the ecosystem. It is to say the business is fragmented and a specialist niche, from a "total revenue" perspective. 



The component growing at the highest compound annual growth rate is conferencing and collaboration, growing at 50 percent CAGR, she says.