Slowdown in Asia’s UC infrastructure market: IDC

• Slump due to shifts to cloud-based models and smaller form factor endpoints
• Video-conferencing and Contact Centre as a Service also gaining traction

IDC said that the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) Unified Communications (UC) On-Premise Infrastructure market grew 1% year-on-year (YoY) in the first half of 2014.
 
The market is expected to grow to US$3.9 billion in 2018, at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.2% based on factory/ vendor revenues, the research and analyst firm said in a statement.
 
China continues to be the largest market, followed by Australia, South Korea and India respectively. While larger markets such as Australia and China have slowed down on a YoY basis in the first half of 2014, absolute revenue continues to be significant, IDC said.
 
From a revenue perspective, there are signs of continued slowdown in on-premise hardware, however, the firm added.
 
This is because enterprises continue to have more confidence in cloud solutions and/ or deploy smaller form factor endpoints to complement their existing communication investments. Both trends are also driving down equipment prices.
 
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From an enterprise perspective, cloud-based UC is proving to be more compelling for many organisations given its flexibility, scale and pay-as-you-go pricing.
 
A number of telecom providers and equipment vendors are capturing this shift through their own offerings, including Cisco-Telstra, Avaya-BT, Avaya-HP offerings.
 
Video-conferencing as a Service (VCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solutions are also gaining traction. Key examples are BlueJeans and Interactive Intelligence respectively.
 
Adoption for cloud-based UC solutions will continue to be the strongest in Australia, South Korea, India and Singapore, IDC said.
 
The firm believes that on-premise UC deployment will coexist with off-premise solutions at least for the next couple of years, creating a hybrid environment both in local and global contexts.
 
There will be greater choice of solutions and flexibility for enterprises as service providers innovate and add capabilities and products that are relevant to the customer’s business requirements rapidly, it added.
 
“There are also adoption shifts happening within major industry verticals,” said Ryan Tay, senior research manager for Telecoms and Unified Communications, IDC Asia/Pacific.
 
“While cloud-based UC adoption continues to grow the fastest in retail, education, healthcare, hospitality and professional services, a number of other large industry verticals continue to prefer premise-based solutions.
 
“These include finance, manufacturing, government and telecoms. It is imperative for service providers to understand where to pick their battles.
 
“On top of that, they will also need to have strong professional services capabilities as most environments will need to integrate into legacy systems,” he added.
 
The IDC Asia/Pacific Semiannual UC, Collaboration and Video Tracker provides the market size and vendor share for enterprise telephony, videoconferencing, contact centre and collaboration application products on a semiannual basis.
 
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