Frost & Sullivan: Australian Unified Communications Market to Generate Revenues exceeding $1b by 2016

Frost & Sullivan: Australian Unified Communications Market to Generate Revenues exceeding $1b by 2016 PR Newswire SYDNEY, September 4, 2012 - Videoconferencing and Cloud Based UC the growth engines SYDNEY, September 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Australian organisations spent fairly 'liberally' on Unified Communications (UC) from 2008 and into 2009. However, organisations have since employed greater scrutiny with UC investments; reconsidering large scale deployments and opting for a piecemeal approach. This has lengthened the sales cycles for channel partners, which are forced to reduce their dependency on a few major deals in favour of greater number of small- medium deals. Cloud based UC or UC as a Service (UCaaS) will be one of the key enabling factors that will drive widespread uptake of UC. Traditional on-premise applications, while adequate for the demands of previous decades, often struggle to meet the real time communication and collaboration needs of current users. Cloud based access is already having the effect of making UC available to a wider range of organisations and end users. As the model matures, security and privacy issues, which are currently the biggest concerns, will be mitigated. This shift from an on-premise to a cloud based or hosted model will be the vehicle for growth in the medium to long term.