Phoenix-based master agency Concierge Communications has been selling hosted IP services since 2004 – which means it’s got four or five years on a majority of its competitors. The 8-year-old agency offers the full complement of communications services, but attributes about 30 percent of its revenues to hosted unified communications services, which it sources from Telesphere.
While Concierge is a veritable pioneer in hosted UC sales, its trailblazing is about to get a little easier as companies — small and large — become sold on the merits of cloud-based services.
Market projections show significant adoption over the next five years. In its worldwide forecast published in June, Wainhouse Research found hosted UC will grow from $200 million today to $1 billion in 2011 and more than $5 billion in 2014. A competitive report, released by Radicati Group Inc. in May, similarly projected the market would reach nearly $5 billion by 2013 while its 2009 estimates are at $2.9 billion.
One of the problems with measuring — and selling — hosted UC is there’s no agreement on its definition. No standards body has swooped in to untangle the spaghetti of features, acronyms, jargon and marketing labels that now obfuscates UC.
Dave Gilbert, founder and president of hosted UC provider SimpleSignal Inc. said his company drew up its version on a napkin. “If it’s too complex to put it on a napkin, it’s too complex to sell,” Gilbert said. “That’s one of the major problems people have with UC is they don’t know where to start. They don’t know how to define the product.”
Defining Hosted UC
Based on interviews with analysts and service providers, UC at a base level must include three elements — telephony, messaging and presence — integrated into a single interface. Beyond those core capabilities, consensus breaks down. The most common add-ons mentioned are mobility (i.e., fixed mobile convergence or FMC), collaboration and conferencing, and integration with business software applications, such as CRM. But these extras are not requirements to deliver UC, despite fitting in nicely with a unified experience, noted analyst Diane Myers, directing analyst – service provider VoIP and IMS for Infonetics Research.
Myers added that for Infonetics’ segment forecast, which calls for North America hosted UC revenue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 400 percent between 2009 and 2013, she measured service deployments that included all three core UC elements in a hosted delivery model. That, she said, is a very small number since most true hosted UC deployments started only last fall; thus the incredible revenue growth rate projection. Hosted UC seat growth for North America has a similar trajectory, climbing 273 percent over the forecast period.