One of the key business priorities for most enterprises is to remove the communication bottle necks; Unified Communication (UC) solutions adoption would help with this. However, there are few adoption challenges like cost, resistance to change, and lack of awareness on the benefits derived by UC adoption.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the overall Unified Communications market in India has seen a marginal decline of 2.3% in 1H13 as compared to 1H12. 10% decline in Enterprise Telephony market has pulled down the overall UC revenues in 1H13, whereas other markets like Enterprise Collaborations and Contact Centre have seen a decent growth of 4-6% as compared to 1H12.
Enterprise Telephony market is suffering due to a combination of market factors: Firstly, IP-PBX solutions are eating into the TDM-PBX solutions revenues as the former gives better ROI for end customers.
Secondly, all the major vendors have started offering Software-based IP-PBX solutions, which is cutting their hardware revenues. On top of these, IP-PBX solutions are no longer considered as business transformational tools. All these are driving the Enterprise telephony market down and pushing customers to adopt alternative solutions like Web Conferencing.
IDC has seen a huge traction in Video Conferencing market as this generates a clear ROI by reducing the travel cost for organizations. However, economic downturn is limiting this market to grow further as organizations are taking a cautious approach towards overall IT spending. But IDC believes this impact is just cyclical and desktop-based VC solutions will witness a growing demand in the future.
Web & Voice Conferencing, Team Collaboration and Enterprise Social Networking are the next high growth areas, as these solutions will help reduce the number of emails and lower the bandwidth requirement which in turn will reduce the cost and improve productivity.
Contact Centre market is undergoing modernization and transformation with Multi-channel/platform solutions which integrates voice, IVR, social media, email, web chat, SMS, fax etc. It helped the India Contact Centre market to achieve a 4% Year-on-Year (YoY) growth in 1H13, despite the continued threat from the Philippines which is famous for their low cost of resources as compared to India.
In India, Outcome-based model, though still being nascent, is garnering interest. Some key vendors are proposing for a solution where they will only charge customers based on the outcomes achieved but not on the applications/technology deployed.
IDC India Forecasts:
Dileep Nadimpalli, Senior Market Analyst, Unified Communications, IDC India said, “IDC expects a recovery for India’s Unified Communications market in 2H13 and it will close 2013 with a marginal growth. Growth will be majorly driven by Enterprise Collaboration applications like Team Collaboration, Social Networking, Unified Messaging, Video Conferencing, and Web & Voice Conferencing solutions. However, we expect Enterprise Telephony market to continue to go through a declining journey.”
Further, “Most organizations are using Unified Communication offerings stand-alone, without considering the whole picture of UC solutions. UC vendors need to go through the challenges,” added Nadimpalli.
