Managed services drive Australian UC market: Frost & Sullivan

Demand for managed services is helping the Unified Communications (UC) market in Australia grow as organisations strive to avoid service and maintenance overheads while controlling UC hardware and applications, according to Frost Sullivan.

The analyst firm’s Australia and New Zealand ICT head of research, Audrey William, said that managed services is “particularly strong” for videoconferencing endpoints where a third party provides maintenance, support, troubleshooting and scheduling.

“Managed services accounted for about 35 per cent of overall UC services revenues in 2012 and is expected to experience strong growth as organisations prefer to use managed services for their audio and collaboration infrastructure”, she said in a statement.

The study ,entitled Australian UC Services Market 2013, forecast that the UC services market in Australia is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.9 per cent from 2012 to 2019.

According to the report, voice based and conferencing offerings accounted for the majority of UC services revenues last year.

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Turning to on-premise UC deployment, William said this remained the predominant model within Australia, with cloud-based alternatives still in the early stages of growth.

“Many organisations remain concerned about the reliability and security aspects of hosted and cloud-based offerings,” she said.

“Although such factors are expected to limit adoption of cloud-based solutions in the short term, the lack of flexibility and scalability of an on-premise model will cause organisations to consider alternatives.”

According to William, the hosted and cloud-based UC segment is poised for strong growth over the next five to seven years because of this need for an alternative UC model.

In addition, mobility could help growth in the UC market because enterprises are looking at the benefits that may be offered by smart devices to enhance collaboration and communication amongst employees.

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