Report: UC Market Growing, Cisco Leading Charge

The unified communications market is showing healthy growth and Cisco Systems is wearing the crown, according to recent research from Infonetics Research.

In Infonetics' biannual report, "Unified Communications and IP Contact Center Market Share and Forecasts," the firm found that the global unified communications market -- a combination of unified messaging platforms and communicator software clients -- was $523.4 million in 2008. Shipments of unified communications communicator clients grew 47 percent to 1.4 million worldwide last year.

Meanwhile, Cisco became the No. 1 vendor in the communicator market, besting rivals Siemens and Avaya, which placed second and third, respectively. Cisco reached number one after placing fifth just a year before.

According to Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics' directing analyst for enterprise voice and data, the unified communications market's 16 percent sequential growth is "a respectable performance given the deterioration in the economy worldwide and its effect on enterprise spending."

In a statement, Machowinski said the economic slowdown will do little to derail sales and shipments of communicator clients, the most important segment of the unified communications client. Instead, he said, that market will nearly double this year, after nearly tripling in 2007 on the heels of Nortel Networks' and Microsoft's unified communications alliance.

"Unified communication enables workers to communicate more effectively with mobile and geographically dispersed colleagues, and to integrate multi-modal communication services to help increase productivity," Machowinski said in a statement. "These drivers, combined with aggressive bundling by PBX vendors to increase the competitiveness of their offerings (and to fend off the threat to the PBX business from Microsoft) will push the UC market to relatively good growth in 2009."

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