Unified comms sector could benefit, despite downturn: Report

Peter Dinham
Monday, 04 May 2009 14:51

IT Industry - Strategy

While  Australia’s IT industry is taking a real hammering from the effects of the economic crisis, there’s some blue sky in the technology market with a new report out today forecasting that the unified communications (UC) sector is set to benefit as businesses look for new ways to cut costs.

According to analysts, Frost & Sullivan, although IT expenditure in 2009-2010 will be significantly impacted by the global financial crisis, the firm says UC sales will benefit as organisations seek to achieve cost savings, and as mergers and acquisitions continue to drive the need for integration and homogenous solutions.

“The economic impact will undeniably affect IT expenditure in Australia this year,” says Audrey William, ANZ research director for Frost & Sullivan, adding, however, that “this doesn't have to be negative for the Australian UC industry.”

“The need to achieve cost savings is going to be a strong driver for conferencing and collaboration tools and we anticipate interest from all sectors of the market. The key to capitalising on this interest will be the vendors' ability to quantify and demonstrate real life benefits from local UC deployments.”

William says that interest in UC solutions is strongest within the government, banking, healthcare, professional services and education sectors, and the study identifies telephony, e-mail, conferencing and collaboration, and instant messaging as the key UC applications to deliver value in the eyes of CIOs and IT managers.

“The need for cost savings in the current market is expected to drive higher rates of adoption of videoconferencing, especially within the government and healthcare markets, with almost 50 percent of all respondents planning to deploy videoconferencing or telepresence technologies in the 2009-2010 timeframe.”

According to William, applications that support, automate and create efficiencies in customer service will also remain in strong demand, including technologies such as interactive voice response (IVR), voice portals, speech recognition and performance optimisation.
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