It’s finally completed and published! After months and months of research and writing, I’ve just released my new UC market study, Unified Communications Market 2007-2012. I’ve been writing analyst reports for a long time (ok, a really long time), but this was probably the most challenging report I’ve written. For one thing, forecasting the UC market is no piece of cake - everyone defines UC differently, vendors are not yet providing UC shipment data to analysts, and there’s no simple way of counting and measuring the market. How I yearn for the old days when it was simple to count voice mail shipments - a voice mailbox was a voice mailbox and it was easy to count how many voice mail ports were shipped (yes, we counted in ports). With UC, there’s no easy way to count shipments or revenues. Some vendors (I’m not naming names) include all of their IP PBX shipments in their UC data. But there’s no way of knowing if those IP PBXs are being used as part of a UC solution or not. I’ve seen analyst and vendor forecasts for UC that include all the IP PBX revenue, plus all the revenues associated with unified messaging, conferencing, instant messaging, etc., all added together. This is fine for getting an understanding of the total potential UC opportunity, but it doesn’t provide a realistic picture of where the real UC market is or will be. Since there’s no agreed-upon way of defining the “UC market” and counting UC shipments, I did what any good analyst would do - I made one up. Actually, I made up several ways to define and count the market - the total or “UC Capable” market, the net or “true” UC market, the sub-segment of UC that is requisite for a UC solution, and more.

Another reason this report was so hard to complete is that the market is so dynamic and constantly changing. The vendor profile chapter, which covers the leading UC vendors’ products, direction, etc., had to be continually updated, as the vendors added new products, packaging and bundling, on what seemed to be a daily basis. Just when I thought I completed one vendor’s profile, they made a new announcement about a new UC offering, or a new strategic partner, or something else. By the time you read this, some of the vendor profiles may already be out of date.

I’ll be posting some of the key findings on here on www.ucstrategies.com, but if you want all the detailed information (all 150 pages!) about UC in general, trends, challenges, market adoption, forecasts, etc., then you need to buy the report. If you’re interested in purchasing the report, or if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at bpleasant@commfusion.com.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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There is a new conferencing player in town, and this one has a twist or two. At the Spring VON show in San Jose, I met up with Wyde Voice, winner of the 2008 VON Innovator award, for producing the industry’s first wideband audio conferencing appliances with 16 kHz voice quality. Wyde voice is a start up company that is backed by Free Conferencing Corporations’ founder and CEO, David Erickson. It’s the result of one of their engineers getting the idea at the VON show two years ago, that they could create a voice conferencing appliance that would support 16-bit, 16 kHz voice quality for conferencing calls, an industry first, at an affordable price. Two years later they had their coming out party at this VON conference.

The new Wyde voice appliances utilize the Asterisk platform, and bridge the gap between PSTN and VoIP environments providing a conference bridge for up to 7000 concurrent users over PSTN networks and up to 3000 on VoIP. Pricing for their VM1000 model is $160 a port and $140 for their VM3000, which provides conference for a great price. In addition to providing high voice quality to begin with, they designed their codec to compensate for current network conditions, such as heavy network traffic, so that quality of the conference doesn’t deteriorate.

The first twists were 16 kHz voice quality and the price. The most interesting twist to me, however, was the addition of voice verification along with conferencing. Wyde will be offering Porticus Technology, Inc’s voice verification as a server plug in alongside their audio conferencing application, which opens up a different aspect of security in conferencing. Granted if you are doing conferencing with large variable groups of people, as in one-time conferences, briefings, etc., punching in the access code for the conference will remain the status quo. But think of the possibilities that being able to create voiceprints for employees in companies that regularly use audio conferencing, or special groups such as classes, network marketing entrepreneurs, committees, etc. The groups that could use verification instead of access codes to quickly jump on a conference call can improve speed and reduce frustration, particularly if someone is calling in on a mobile phone. Add to this the security of knowing someone else can’t enter the conference unknown, sounds pretty cool to me.

Wyde is marketing their products to both service provider and enterprise customers. They see, and I agree, a market opportunity in targeting different groups for conferencing, such as distance learning and social networking sites. The VM3000 and VM1000 are offered as turnkey appliances, but allow customers to customize features such as call flow.

Tags: UC Information by Nancy Jamison
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