APAC Unified Communications as a Service market prospers: IDC

• Driven by imminent cost benefits, flexibility and agility of technology
• Strong adoption interest in ANZ, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore

IDC expects the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market to surge to US$659 million in 2018, at a five-year CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 89% as UCaaS service providers intensify their sales and marketing campaigns.
 
IDC believes Australia will be the largest market, followed by China, India and South Korea respectively, the market research and analyst firm said in a statement.
 
There has been an enormous interest from a wide range of businesses in adopting UCaaS because of the imminent cost benefits, flexibility and agility that the technology provides, it said.
 
In fact, UCaaS has become a mainstream solution in APeJ with many global service providers (GSPs) and regional service providers (RSPs) offering full-fledged UCaaS as part of their core collaboration portfolio.
 
Beside the big telco service providers, which control a significant portion of the market, there are also large system integrators (SIs), IT consulting firms and distributors offering UCaaS directly to businesses, IDC said.
 
The growing attraction of an agile and opex-friendly (operating expenditure) collaboration tool model to support business expansion will continue to be compelling to many organisations, it added.
 
On the other hand, many of the factors holding back adoption such as security, bandwidth demands, reliability, regulation compliance and consistency will be partially solved as the technology matures, SLAs (service-level agreements) develop, bandwidth cost drops, Internet speed increases and more local data centres start to offer UCaaS, which will help to enhance user experience.
 
Hence IDC believes that there will be very strong interest in UCaaS solutions among mid-large enterprises, as well as small businesses.
 
In particular, IDC has observed strong adoption interest in markets such as in Australia/ New Zealand (ANZ), India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore.
 
Both enterprise customers and IT providers are rapidly looking to UCaaS as a way to transform their business and become more efficient, flexible and agile, said Ryan Tay, senior research manager for Telecoms and Unified Communications at IDC Asia/Pacific.
 
“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,” he said.
 
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