IDC says Unified Communications as a service worth US$659 million in APeJ

IDC expects the market for unified communications as a service (UCaaS) in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) to surge to US$659 million in 2018, at a five-year CAGR of 89% as UCaaS service providers (SPs) intensify their sales and marketing campaigns around this mode of offering UC services.

In fact, UCaaS has become mainstream in APeJ with many global service providers (GSPs) and regional service providers (RSPs) offering full-fledged UCaaS as part of their core collaboration portfolio. Beside the big telco SPs, which control a significant portion of the market, there are also large system integrators (SIs), IT consulting firms and distributors offering UCaaS directly to businesses.

The market researcher says there has been enormous interest from a wide range of verticals in adopting UCaaS because of the immediate cost benefits, flexibility and agility that the technology provides for business expansion. On the other hand, many of the factors holding back adoption such as security, bandwidth demands, reliability, regulation compliance and consistency will be partially solved as the technology matures, SLAs develop, bandwidth costs drop, Internet speeds increase and more local data centres start to offer UCaaS.

IDC believes that there will be very strong interest in UCaaS solutions among small businesses and mid to large enterprises. In particular, IDC has observed strong adoption interest in markets such as in Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore. However, it says Australia will be the largest market, followed by China, India and Korea.

"UCaaS can offer both providers and customers very different choices about resource dedication, tenancy, cost and control over their computing assets, giving them much greater confidence about deploying collaborative applications on the cloud," says Ryan Tay, Senior Research Manager for Telecoms and Unified Communications, IDC Asia/Pacific.