Unified Communications Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Product (Hosted, On-premise), By Solution, By Organization Size, By Application, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2023 - 2030

Report Overview

The global unified communications market was valued at USD 113.48 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4% from 2023 to 2030. Organizations have started transitioning to Unified Communications (UC) solutions to increase revenues; lower operating expenses, and maintain customer relationships. UC improves decision-making by incorporating various communication instruments such as multimodal communication into a single platform. Thus, unified communications solutions promote cross-functional communication activities and generate positive results. The rising trends of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) coupled with an upsurge in the mobile workforce and the provision of a hybrid workplace model are foreseen to thoroughly affect the global market growth during the forecast period. Smart appliances replace the traditional work culture using desktops, PC, and computers as primary means of business communications. Mobile devices that support UC allow employees to stay connected from anywhere at any time. Hence, employees must expand beyond a single desktop workstation and work remotely, assuring high productivity.

Unified communication is a domain that has been developing for over a decade. The technology introduces integrated communications devices that enable institutions to achieve multiple benefits, such as streamlining business processes, lowering communications' overall cost, and enabling room for collaboration. Organizations specializing in UC services accentuate simplifying their solutions, which makes the services easier to manage, deploy and purchase. There has been an improved focus on utilizing past user experience as a crucial tool for designing new solutions and improving existing ones, which would lead to the overall growth of the market in the forecast period.

Furthermore, business communications are increasing, and organizations are looking for methods to manage complexity, control costs, and improve overall productivity. This has led to the increasing adoption of UC solutions, primarily delivered in a cloud-based or hosted Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) model. Organizations are redefining their business models to gain flexibility, productivity, and agility.

Additionally, incorporating real-time data, video communications, and telephony systems become critical to business activities in the ever-changing business environment. Thus, associations adopt these UC solutions to enhance communications and collaborations internally with remote staff and externally with clients and suppliers.

The highly infectious nature of COVID-19 and the increasing number of cases has led enterprises to temporarily stop their on-premise operations and suggest work-from-home facilities to their employees. This has enabled SMEs and large enterprises to leverage unified communications technology and assure seamless communication among team members and co-working teams.

The COVID-19 outbreak has also encouraged associations such as healthcare providers, educational institutes, and government agencies to adopt vital business communications tools, which is anticipated to cause a paradigm shift in communication processes in the future.

Product Insights

The on-premise segment dominated the market in 2022 with approximately 47.0% of the global share. Although, the sales of the latest on-premise unified communications licenses and systems are expected to plunge due to the deployment challenges and complexities in operating a contemporary full-stack UC platform. Similarly, session border controllers and firewalls must be set up to access remote users. Therefore, the demand for on-premise UC solutions will decline during the forecast period.

The hosted UC segment is predicted to register the highest CAGR of more than 20.0% in the forecast period due to lower total ownership costs, capital expenditure, and operating expenses. Businesses are moving toward hosted UC solutions to upscale their storage capacity due to the predictable and simple operating cost model. The hosted solution delivers a single UC platform to provide communication and collaboration solutions across numerous channels.

Hybrid unified communications is another solution that integrates on-premises and cloud communication services. The hybrid solution permits sharing of parts of the communication on the premise or cloud platforms which makes it adaptable to multiple systems and business types. Therefore, the use of hosted UC solutions will rise in the forecast period.

Solution Insights

The instant &  unified messaging segment accounted for the highest market share of more than  32.0% due to a rise in the need among enterprises to engage in prompt communications among peers and gain real-time notifications of the strategies in critical mission situations. Unified Messaging helps manage regular voice, fax, and text messages, all uniting in a single platform that users can access via PC or telephone. UM is majorly suitable for mobile business users as it enables them to reach co-workers and clients easily.

The others segment includes speech recognition, desktop sharing, and other communication solutions. The segment is expected to expand at the highest CAGR of approximately 23.0% during the forecast period from 2023 to 2030 following the trend of remote work during COVID-19 leading to an increase in desktop sharing apps.

The audio and video conferencing is expected to rise at a significant CAGR from 2023 to 2030. The segment growth is attributed to the rising demand and trend of video conferencing owing to its simple and hassle-free experience. Enterprises rely on video and audio conferencing to make meetings more interactive, efficient, and collaborative. For instance, in 2020 to cope with the demand for audio, video, and web conferencing in India, Bharti Airtel Limited, a telecom company, partnered with Zoom Video Communications, Inc. to launch a unified communications solution for businesses.

Organization Size Insights

Large enterprises accounted for the highest market share in 2022. Large enterprises focus on corporate network performance, keeping tight integration with emerging technologies such as SD-WAN. Moreover, catering to the need of multi-regional and multinational enterprises, the service providers focus on improving the unified services as a service solution with enhanced offerings such as business process integration and centralized provisioning and service management.

Additionally, large enterprises are present in international locations and are constantly expanding, which adds to the demand for secure and instantaneous unified communication solutions.

The SMEs (small & medium enterprises) organization size segment is anticipated to expand at the highest CAGR of above  20.0% from 2023 to 2030. SMEs use unified communications services to reduce the capital and operational expenses required to deploy a unified communications solution independently. Furthermore, multiple vendors had redirected their focus to Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs), which before did not incorporate the primary market because of the need for awareness about UC's potential benefits and the high cost of on-premise equipment.

The latest subscription-based cloud UC services are favorably suitable for SMEs, giving them a key to the newest technology with a lesser charge of ownership. As a result, cloud-based services such as hosted CRM solutions, Skype for Business, and Office 365 are widely used in SMEs.

Application Insights

The enterprises sector accounted for the largest market share of more than 46.0% in 2022. The growth can be attributed to the rising adoption of IT in enterprise business operations to enhance the overall organizational performance of an enterprise. Unified communication provides various services critical to increasing remote workers' productivity using available mobile devices.

Additionally, factors such as a higher number of cross-functional teams, remote workers, and improved business operations have enabled corporations to deploy unified communication solutions at the business level to ensure seamless communication techniques.

The government sector is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth can be attributed to the increasing deployment of this technology among governments worldwide to meet budgetary pressures and the growing demands from citizens for enhanced communication. A collaborative approach is presumed to increase interaction and engagement between various government divisions and their stakeholders.

Regional Insights

Europe accounted for the largest market share of more than  35.0% in 2022. This is attributed due to the increased use of BYOD services coupled with the need to achieve operation and performance efficiency has contributed substantially towards the implementation of unified communication systems across enterprise applications. The increasing UC demand in the region has allowed numerous vendors to establish their businesses.

For instance, In October 2022, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and Avaya announced at GITEX Global their next phase of a strategic partnership that will enable enterprises to innovate without the requirement of operationally disruptive technology replacement initiative. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and Talk soon formed a distribution collaboration in Germany, with Talk soon acting as a master broker under the broker model.

Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit the highest CAGR of around 20.0% from 2023 to 2030. The growing trend toward mobilization of the enterprises is expected to drive regional growth. Growing investment and the presence of a large customer base are expected to boost high-speed data networks in economies such as India and China. Sectors such as Banking & Financial Services (BFS), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), government, telecom, logistics, and hospitality have turned to unified communications to enable efficient services. As a result, the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) have started MyGovUC services, solely focusing on unified communications and collaboration services for the public sector.

Key Companies & Market Share Insights

Companies such as Cisco System Inc. and Microsoft Corporation have vast flagship offerings in the market, providing constant application experience across diverse sectors. Moreover, the market has noticed several merger & acquisition and product launch activities in the last few years. For instance, In October 2022, Cisco Systems, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced a new partnership to provide customers with more choices. Microsoft and Cisco are also focusing on offering the capability to run Microsoft Teams on Cisco Desk and Room Devices Certified for Microsoft Teams.

The partnership is focused on improving Microsoft teams' compatibility with other solutions. The collaboration is expected to enhance interoperability and enable Cisco to build compatible and certified devices for the Microsoft teams. The partnership has helped companies offer ease in integration and provides an array of services in one software. Some of the prominent players  in the global unified communications market include:

• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

• Avaya Inc.

• Cisco Systems Inc.

• Microsoft Corporation

• Mitel Network Corporation

• NEC Corporation

• Poly (Platonics Inc.)

• Unify (Atos SE)

• Verizon Communications Inc.

• Tata Communications

• IBM Corporation

Unified Communications Market Report Scope

Global Unified Communications Market Segmentation

This report forecasts and estimates revenue growth at the global, regional, and country levels along with analyzes the latest market trends and opportunities in each one of the sub-segments from 2018 to 2030. For this study, Grand View Research has further segmented the global unified communications market report based on  product, solution, organization size, application, and region:

• Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

  • Hosted

  • On-premise

• Solution Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

  • Instant & Unified Messaging

  • Audio & Video Conferencing

  • IP Telephony

  • Others

• Organization-size Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

  • SMEs

  • Large Enterprises

• Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

  • Enterprises

  • Education

  • Government

  • Healthcare

  • Others

• Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2018 - 2030)

  • North America

    • U.S.

    • Canada

    • Mexico

  • Europe

    • Germany

    • U.K.

  • Asia Pacific

    • China

    • India

    • Japan

    • South Korea

    • Australia

    • New Zealand

  • South America

    • Brazil

  • Middle East and Africa