A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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Unified Communications seems to be a real market. There are conferences and trade pubs, newsletters like this one and websites (like www.ucstrategies.com) devoted to the topic. But any market also needs to be measured-identifying how many systems have been shipped and which vendor has the leading market share-and forecasts need to be developed-five-year revenue projections, etc. But the fact is, it’s still much easier to talk and write about the UC market than to measure it.

One reason for this difficulty is the “dueling definitions” problem that I discussed back in August (see “Issue 33: UC’s Dueling Definitions a Disservice to All“). The way in which a market is measured depends in large part on how it’s defined. While there’s widespread agreement on major elements of UC-call control (generally the IP-PBX), messaging, conferencing, presence, mobility, and a consistent user interface-there’s widespread disagreement on just about everything else.

Some analysts try to measure the UC market by adding up the market sizes of these various components, but that doesn’t provide much useful information to anyone who wants to understand how big the UC market is today or how it will grow over the next few years.

Other analysts have focused on the number of unified messaging systems and the number of unified clients to size the UC market. But UM, which has been around for years, is not in and of itself UC. Along the same lines, other analysts have looked at the enterprise IM and presence shipments and revenues to calculate UC data. Companies have been implementing Lotus Sametime, Microsoft LCS and other enterprise-grade IM solutions for several years, but again, this is not UC.

And what about business process integration? How is it to be measured? How do you know when an organization implements UC as a standalone product or has truly integrated it with a business process?

So, when does something become UC rather than an element or component of UC? And how many elements must be implemented in order for something to be considered UC? If UM in and of itself is not UC, when does it in fact become UC?

Don’t be fooled by grandiose market forecasts for the UC market-make sure you understand what the numbers represent, and what assumptions the analyst is making. Does the number include the entire unified messaging or enterprise IM market? Does it include all the IP-PBXs shipped? These are all enablers or elements of UC, but unless they are integrated together, and tied in with voice capabilities providing functions such as click to call or click to conference, I don’t believe they represent true UC.

As Eric Krapf mentioned in last week’s VoiceCon eNews, “There is no unified communications ‘market’ to speak of, yet.” Over the next couple months, I will be talking to vendors, resellers and users about how to measure and analyze the UC market, and will provide market data and forecasts in early 2008. I expect to have many sleepless nights as I try to justify how to measure the market.

I would love to get your feedback and input as to how you believe the market should and can be measured. Contact me at bpleasant@commfusion.com

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

Posted in Blair Pleasant, Implementation, Market Trends, Unified Communications |

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