European unified comms market to double by 2014

The market for unified communications (UC) products and services will more than double to $16.6bn (£10.5bn) by 2014, according to the latest research from IDC.

The analyst firm said that hosted services will become increasingly popular, especially among small and medium sized companies as they try to reduce the cost of network management and maintenance.

IDC predicted that organisations will turn to managed services to help cope with the growing complexity of converged networks, while more mergers and acquisitions will result from competition among legacy vendors to improve interoperability and compatibility.

"IDC predicts moderate year-over-year growth in the next five years, and believes that the impact of the credit crunch across EMEA will continue to make enterprises more cautious when deciding whether or not to invest in new IT equipment," said Isabel Montero, senior research analyst for UC and collaboration at IDC EMEA.

"Budgets in this region will continue to be more closely monitored, restricted or delayed until recovery in the economy is more notable."

The next five years is also likely to see line-of-business managers increasingly involved in the negotiation of UC deals, given the integration of voice and data with business-critical applications, IDC said.

The findings are good news for the UC industry, according to Alex Donnelly, portfolio manager at IT consultancy Damovo UK.

"What is apparent is that there has been a shift from organisations looking to deploy 'all singing, all dancing' end-to-end solutions, to a more piecemeal approach," he said.

"True UC will bring together multi-model means of communicating from different vendors, whether it be a BlackBerry, Cisco, Microsoft, web browser or iPhone environment."