A new study by widely respected international research organisation, Frost & Sullivan, has predicted that the increasing take-up of internet protocol (IP) telephony and business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) among enterprises in Mexico will lead to significant growth in the adoption of unified communications (UC) facilities in the country.
The report – ‘Reality Check on Key Mexican Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions Markets’ – envisages that as a result of these developments, the UC market in Mexico will be worth $478.2 million by 2018 – a significant rise on the 2011 figure of approximately $272.3 million.
UC – whereby a wide range of communications from different sources are efficiently channelled to a single reception point – has, says the report, been made more feasible by the increasing presence of IP telephony – a phenomenon which itself has been encouraged by the growing obsolescence of traditional landline-based business phone systems.
The report also cites the increased adoption of video conferencing via IP telephony as a strong contributing factor towards the growing acceptance of UC among enterprises.
Frost & Sullivan points out that small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) will not be excluded from this trend, given the relative affordability of cloud-based UC services, compared with the high costs of installing on-site equipment.
The company goes somewhat further in asserting that SMEs may well become more successful in adopting UC than larger organisations, owing to the greater technical restrictions inherent in some traditional business phone systems, in contrast to the relative flexibility of accessing UC via the cloud.
The company also warns that the market for UC communications – particularly among larger enterprises – will become increasingly competitive.
This strong link between IP telephony adoption and access to UC has been remarked on elsewhere in a range of other studies looking at communications and IT developments in the US and Europe, including the UK.
