Asia Pacific Region Driving UCaaS Market Growth

By Michael Guta
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The availability of cloud-based solutions has made it possible for businesses of any size to afford a wide range of IT products and services. With Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are now readily available almost everywhere, organizations are able to access multiple IT solutions without the capital expenditure of on premises infrastructure.

Communications solutions have also migrated to the cloud with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), which means businesses can now operate completely in the cloud without having to deal with an IT department, traditional communication solutions or rigid contracts that limited growth and flexibility.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)), the growth in the UCaaS market is being driven by the Asia-Pacific region leading the company to forecast a five-year CAGR of 89 percent by 2018 to $659 million.

The researchers see interest in UCaaS solutions by mid-large enterprises, as well as small businesses with strong adoption rates in Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore. However, the market will be led by Australian, China, India, and Korea respectively during the forecast period in hosted services for audio conferencing, managed video conferencing, software video conferencing, Web conferencing, call center, email, and voice.

As the report reveals many SMBs are opting to migrate to UCaaS from on premises infrastructure because the technology delivers more options and better price points. This includes pay as you go plans UCaaS service providers offer to their customers, eliminating the need to enter inflexible long-term contracts. Additionally, the multiple solutions UCaaS provides allows organizations to be more effective by synchronizing everyone in the organization no matter where they are while reducing travel expenses with conferencing solutions.

Currently the market is dominated by the largest telecom companies, but system integrators, IT consulting firms and distributors are also offering UCaaS directly to businesses. The report sees a growing opportunity in the industry as more organizations continue to adopt this agile and opex-friendly collaboration tool model as some of the factors holding it back continue to develop with the maturation of the technology.

The factors holding back the adoption of this technology include security, bandwidth demands, reliability, regulation compliance and consistency, which IDC believes will be resolved as SLAs develop, bandwidth cost drop, Internet speed increase and more local datacenters start to offer UCaaS.

"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," said Ryan Tay, senior research manager for Telecoms and Unified Communications (News - Alert), IDC Asia/Pacific.