How the Pandemic Has Shaped the Unified Communication and Collaboration Market
Unified communications are the platform through which all communication devices and protocols communicate through a single service. Through unified communications, you can facilitate faxing, emailing, instant messaging, voice and video calling over a single easy-to-use platform.
Remote work and the COVID-19 pandemic have sparked a massive surge of unified communication solutions and platforms available for the masses. Therefore, these solutions function to meet the demand of employees to work remotely and with zero contact.
Today, we will look at how the pandemic has shaped the unified communication and collaboration market and its projected growth in the coming years.
What Unified Communications Can Do for Your Business
Unified communications is a blanket term that covers both the tools used to facilitate unified communications and the culture surrounding unified communications. Therefore, you’ll often find that unified communications are also known as unified communication and collaboration. All stakeholders connect and stay in touch through a set of devices and protocols. In addition to serving communication needs, UC provides a standard for secure communication overall associated devices. Therefore, for businesses with remote employees, a unified communication system helps carry through with business without interruptions – even during a pandemic.
- The services you can avail from a unified communications solution includes –
- Secure messaging
- Secure voice and video chatting
- Team collaboration tools and services
- Seamless video conferencing with a large number of employees or users
- File sharing over a secure network
With a single, secure unified communications system, you can change how your business’s teams communicate and collaborate. Moreover, with the right unified communication and collaboration system in place and proper training, you will see a substantial rise in productivity across the board.
How the Pandemic Has Shaped the Unified Communications and Collaboration Industry Around the World
Experts estimate that as more and more businesses rely on unified communication tools to conduct day-to-day business, by 2025, the market will grow to a 167.1 billion US dollar industry – and this projection is before the pandemic. Consequently, due to the pandemic and a large portion of the workforce working from home, the demand and the supply of extensive, unified communication and collaboration tools are rising rapidly. As a result, the leading providers of unified communication and collaboration platforms reported an increase in review by about 25.1% and 12.4%, respectively, in consecutive quarters. Although the numbers vary from continent to continent, the results are straightforward and simple. Throughout the world, the unified communication and collaboration industry has seen significant increases in its quarterly revenues. Furthermore, companies project that market demand and revenue will increase as time goes on as we step into 2021.
The biggest success stories within the unified communications and collaboration industry have been existing solutions that grew in popularity and user numbers once the pandemic started. These include –
- Microsoft: They currently hold the largest market share, clocking in at about 35.2%. Furthermore, they’ve reported growth of 49.1% over the year, with 19.5% coming from the first quarter alone.
- Zoom: Zoom grew rapidly throughout the pandemic as many businesses, educational institutes, and organizations switched over to its video conferencing platform to facilitate remote meetings and work. As a result, Zoom has reported an impressive 363.3% in revenue growth from the past year. Moreover, it currently holds 5.6% of the market.
Honourable mentions include –
- Cisco
- RingCentral
- Avaya
Across the board, companies that provide unified communication and collaboration have seen a substantial increase in revenue and dependency on their services throughout the pandemic months. Moving forward, as businesses are now reliant on these tools to facilitate daily business communication and collaboration, we can only expect 2021 to be an even better year for the UC&C industry at large.
The Benefits of Unified Communication and Collaboration
With unified communication and collaboration facilities, businesses around the globe are now empowered by –
Increased Productivity
Teams across all verticals can connect and communicate to get things done faster and more efficiently from a communication perspective.
Reduced Running Costs
Companies can rely on Capex packages offered by the unified communication service providers to make a long-term investment into these reliable tools and save money instead of an Opex strategy.
Increased Employee Performance
With easier communication and simple interfacing, unified communication solutions allow your employees to collaborate faster and solve customer problems quicker.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, the pandemic has brought on a new surge of unified communication and collaboration technologies, but it also has paved the way for existing solutions to thrive. Furthermore, more competition and growing needs it has allowed these companies to innovate, add extensive features, and provide more satisfying support, in the long run, to catch up with market demands. Therefore, it’s safe to say that the pandemic has shaped the way for the future of remote work and collaboration through unified communication and collaboration platforms, tools, and services as a whole.