Market Overview: Sizing Unified Communications

Forrester forecasts that the market for unified communications within enterprises in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific will reach $14.5 billion in 2015. Unified communications (UC) is an important, innovative capability that IT buyers and business executives believe will deliver financial and operational advantages. But the UC market's long-awaited takeoff hinges on detailed business cases that lay out the return on investment (ROI), as well as more interoperability between UC solutions and business applications. While all firms are demanding measurable business benefits to support UC business cases and deployment plans, the voyage to UC will be unique at each firm. IT strategists will progress from trials to near ubiquitous deployment of basic UC capabilities to improve collaboration and increase the velocity of business processes. On top of that, we forecast that companies will deploy enhanced UC capabilities to about 60% of employees in functions that will benefit most from embedding communications features like mobility and video directly into their business applications.